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Help, the kids are out of control

Is this the best way to keep kids safe online?

Hey there! This weekend officially marks the first day of fall, and we don’t want to scare you, but that means Halloween is only 41 days away. 🦇 Want to avoid the chaos of going to the costume store at 7pm on October 30 (the scariest part of the holiday, even worse than the sugar crash) to find your kid the perfect costume for trick-or-treating? Start looking, like, yesterday.

A Family’s Fight Against Bullying 💔

In 2019, a 13-year-old boy named Diego Stolz was bullied to death by his classmates at a California middle school. Now, the boy’s family has reached a $27 million settlement with Stolz’s school district.

  • It’s the largest bullying settlement ever reached in the United States.

  • “Although his family’s grief can never be taken away, we believe real change will come, and there will be a renewed focus on anti-bullying programs across the nation,” Stolz’s family’s lawyer said.

Want to talk to your kids about bullying? These pointers and ideas from Unicef are helpful for all kinds of parents, whether you’re worried your child is the victim or the perpetrator.

Kids Out of Control?

Boy, have we been there. At home, your kids are perfect angels (okay…maybe not, but they’re close). The minute you leave the house and head for an airport, restaurant, or some other highly public place? All you-know-what breaks loose.

Slate’s Care and Feeding advice column offers some ideas for reining in your kids when they go bananas in public—hint: boundaries are your best friend.

Enlist AI to Get Your Kids to Clean Their Rooms? We’re Listening

Sometimes technology like artificial intelligence is scary. Other times, like now, it’s our very best friend. Writer and tween parent Ilana Wiles shares her experience enlisting ChatGPT, a generative AI tool, to convince her daughters to clean their rooms—check it out. 🤖

Would you use ChatGPT to solve parenting problems?

Click one to tell us what you think!

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The New Argument for Teen Social Media Safety

Maybe restricting our kids’ every move online isn’t the best strategy. Maybe we should focus less on taking away social media and more on teaching teens and tweens how to be responsible users of social media who understand privacy and decision making. That’s the POV from Devorah Heitner, an expert on children’s relationships with media and technology, in her new book, Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.

What do you think? Could a more empowering approach help our kids to avoid the worst parts of the internet? FYI, we love this episode we made about cyber safety for kids—it covers a lot of these big questions about online safety for teens and tweens.

The perfect recs to help you feel seen as a parent juggling it all. Remember—no matter what your best looks like, your best is what you’re doing.

  • This mom perfectly summed up what it’s like to work a full-time job and have kids in after-school sports (which also feels like a full-time job).

  • It’s not always easy to be intentional about the time you spend with your family—we all wish we could enjoy the moment a little more. Here’s how to get better at it.

  • Your kids are going to make mistakes…and you’re doing them a favor by simply letting them.

  • This headline says it all: Parenting Tweens Is an Emotional Roller Coaster.

This time of year always makes us feel like so much is changing—the seasons, our routines, the kids we love more than anything. Sometimes, all that change feels overwhelming, like our lives are on fast forward and someone hid the remote. But in all that change, there’s something really special happening—your kids are growing into the people they’re meant to become.

So take a minute this week to reflect on how insanely cool it is that the miniature adult living down the hall still wants their crusts cut off.

—Cat & Nat