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GreatDad.com just listed among 100 Best Health Blogs for Soon-to-be Moms
GreatDad.com is one of nine daddy sites mentioned at 100 Best Health Blogs for Soon-to-be Moms.
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Stop Twittering and play with your kids!
Today’s Twitters are often tomorrow’s quitters, according to data that questions the long-term success of the latest social networking sensation used by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Britney Spears.
Data from Nielsen Online, which measures Internet traffic, found that more than 60 percent of Twitter users stopped using the free social networking site a month after joining.
[From Many Twitters are quick quitters: study | U.S. | Reuters]
I tried it, found it interesting, but ultimately frustrating. I found lots of people doing kid stuff, writing blogs, selling gear. However, whenever I reached out to them with specific questions, I think they were overwhelmed with tallying their followers or lost in a pile of 140 letter haikus, because almost no one responded! And, these were legitimate business inquiries from people who said they wanted to hear from any time in their “thanks for following me” messages.
Has your experience been different? I’d love to know. I’ve read other articles on this now, and I’m a short-seller on Twitter, though our blog does post to it. Let me know your thoughts in comments.
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SImple internet safety tip for dads
Set up a Google alert for your child’s name. You can get a daily digest. You won’t see everything but might get advance warning of any problems. Adults should do this as well, by the way.
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From our friends at Grandparents.com – favorite scenes of all the best Christmas movies
Just in time to help you maximize the few minutes left before Christmas, here are the top 16 holiday movies captured in their most famous scenes.
This is just enough of a dose of some of them to make you fondly remember your first viewing and save you from a trip to the video store. Many of them, in my opinion, are a bit too cloying for re-viewing again now. And for cynics, read today’s excellent article in the New York Times on the sad dismal life of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. The writer, Wendell Jamieson, opines that the world would have actually been a better more prosperous place without George, citing his felony theft, upstate New York economic trends, and the dismal conformist life that George in which George is forced to find meaning. If you’re mumbling “bah” around this time of year, this is a fun article to read.
As I mentioned in a previous post, our family enjoyed the short 22 minutes Shrek the Halls for its brevity, slapstick and adult humor, and insight on the real meaning of Christmas (as Donkey says, “It’s not Christmas until somebody cries.”).
But back to the video. You may want to send this one from Grandparents.com on to friends and family.
Merry Merry.
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Parenting your kids internet activities
Here’s good food for thought on the whole dangerous playground that the internet has become. This dad just turned off his Net Nanny software, in favor of more active parenting.
Despite my wife’s initial disapproval, I have removed all forms of net nanny software from the kid’s computer. They now surf unhindered by the arbitrary limits of the ambiguous cyber-morality-police. The experience has been great for all of us because they do not need my approval to visit every new variant of Disney.com or Cartoon Network.
We started out with a few basic rules and have expanded slightly on them. First and probably most important, was the speech about “bad things” on the internet. I explained that just like on TV, there are things on the Internet that children shouldn’t be watching. If they find something they don’t understand, or think is inappropriate they should click Home and go back to Webkinz.
This is good advice, in the main. Nothing takes the place of more involved parents who actually are watching, talking, listening, communicating. However, you have to be free and omnipresent to make this work. And, I think there are several caveats that the author, Anton Olsen, does not mention.
First, if your kids are little, little, all this talking and communication isn’t going to help them if they see something that is really way beyond their comprehension. I don’t want my eight year old (or my four year old son for that matter) to be exposed to graphic sex just because she went searching for “doll toys” on the internet. That’s why we use a separate account for her on our home computer. She can only visit and add sites (in her Safari browser) as we see fit, and then can switch easily between Webkinz, Club Penguin or SeaPals to her hearts content.
Second, place the family computer, or the child’s computer, in a place where everyone can see and the community becomes the monitor. If your child strays, there is a good chance that nanny, brother, mom or dad might see.
That said, this is a good discussion on an approach for allowing 12+ kids to use the internet for free browsing, school research, and fun, without using software that takes the place of good old-fashioned parenting.
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