LA MOM MAGAZINE interviews Sam Pemberton on keeping our kids safe online
By Sam Pemberton
Q: What are some of the best ways for parents to keep their kids safe online at home?
A: Talking to young people often and openly is the best way to help keep them safe online. Engage with them about what they do online and how they use digital resources – are they active on online forums, social media, or gaming sites? Take an interest in what sites and applications they enjoy using, and explore these sites and apps together. It’s important to be positive about this process and try not to overreact about any concerns you have so that you can open up a dialog with them. (more…)
Right now, thousands of people are talking about the show 13 Reasons Why. We’ve heard stories of people asking for help for the first time, and stories of people who had to stop watching because the show was too triggering for them. We’ve heard from parents asking if we think the show is appropriate for their son or daughter. We’ve heard from people who loved the show, and we’ve heard from people who hated it.
Although schools consider various factors when reviewing applications, none seem to cause parents more undue stress than the ISEE. Parents always want to deflect attention away from ISEE scores and ask me: Don’t the child’s grades and extracurricular activities count? What about the interview? How about legacy and sibling status? Schools do look at each applicant as a whole, but ISEE scores are the best indictor if a student will be able to succeed academically at their school and they are often the first measure considered when evaluating candidates. This doesn’t mean that students with lower scores will not be accepted to an academically rigorous school, it just means that they will have more hurdles to overcome. ISEE scores cause parents anxiety because they are hard, cold numbers and the rest of the application is subjective. 
“You can be anything you want when you grow up!”
Today’s Kindergarten curriculum has advanced. Whether you attend public or private school, children are expected to be reading and writing stories by the end of Kindergarten. They have a certain number of sight words to be memorized. They take written tests and get graded. The transition from a play-based preschool, to an entirely academic day has challenged our children in new ways. The curriculum has changed, however, children’s developmental needs have not. Children today still require the same social, emotional, and cognitive foundational skills that were once offered over the course of Preschool and Kindergarten.
In the United States, 1:20 children experience the death of a parent by age 15. Other children face the death of siblings,friends, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. With such a high occurrence of this major life cycle event it behooved parents, therapists and educators to learn how to support grieving children. Children experience a range of intense emotions including sadness, anger, fear and guilt. They feel isolated and ill equipped to talk about the death of a loved one with peers, and often are reluctant to share their grief with surviving family members for fear of upsetting them. 
An estimated 2.3 million children are homeschooled in the U.S. right now and the number continues to rise. Many parents consider homeschooling, but they fear that their children will be isolated or worry that they themselves will not be adequate as teachers. Yet they know that the schools available to their children are not giving them a positive experience. If this sounds familiar and you’re considering homeschooling, here are some things you should know. 
“The greatest things we can give our children are roots and wings.” – W. Hodding Carter II. 
The anxiety of traveling without the kids for a week is overwhelmingly stressful and all consuming. A mother’s first instinct is to stay home and plan to get away when it’s more convenient, but it’s never convenient. One of your kids will undoubtably have a game, performance or life altering crisis while you’re gone. There is no “perfect” time to travel without the kids except for now. Now is the time to do everything we want to do because tomorrow will be filled with even more responsibility. 
The American Academy of Pediatrics has just updated their recommendations around screen time (again), easing slightly their caution around use of screens for children younger than eighteen months as a way of keeping up with the reality of parenting in the digital age — reiterating their focus on the importance of quality content and parent supervision.