Weekly Reader: Keeping kids safe in heat; TikTok security concerns; ?s to ask before your child gets a phone; parenting through subtraction; helping teens choose friends who are good for them & more!
Happy Saturday!
I hope you are well.
Summer is my favorite time because I can spend many uninterrupted hours and hours out in my yard, tending my flowers, doing various landscaping or other various DIY projects. The pond I put in last summer has become a sort of delivery location for the local frogs, and is now teeming with tadpoles. And, despite the extreme heat, my plants and flowers are more than holding their own, and it has been wonderful.
On the topic of extreme heat, this graphic1 showing the symptoms and treatment for heat stroke and heat exhaustion seems like a good thing to share and spread.
Happy Saturday!
I hope you are well.
Summer is my favorite time because I can spend many uninterrupted hours and hours out in my yard, tending my flowers, doing various landscaping or other various DIY projects. The pond I put in last summer has become a sort of delivery location for the local frogs, and is now teeming with tadpoles. And, despite the extreme heat, my plants and flowers are more than holding their own, and it has been wonderful.
But I digress. Without further ado, here is what we have in today’s Weekly Reader:
Keeping your child safe in this heat
TikTok: A security risk?
Questions to ask before your child gets (or keeps) a phone
Exercise and diet, in isolation, are not sufficient to prevent disease.
Parenting through subtraction not addition
“Kids Lost Invaluable Skills During COVID — Here Are 4 Ways To Get Them Back.”
“How can I help my teen son choose friends who are good for him?”
Keeping your child safe in this heat
First, on the topic of extreme heat, this graphic showing the symptoms and treatment for heat stroke and heat exhaustion seems like a good thing to share and spread.
On that note, here is a helpful piece from The Washington Post, “How to keep kids safe in this heat.”
Here’s some encouraging news:
You can get outside and have as much fun as possible,” says Grant Lipman, an emergency medicine physician and the founder of GOES Health, an app that provides health advice for emergencies. “But be aware that especially with these outrageous heat domes we’re having and extreme weather patterns, think about, ‘How do you prepare for them? And how do you recognize symptoms and signs when the fun stops and people might actually be in harm’s way?’
The rest of the article gives age-specific things to watch for. Read the entire thing here.
TikTok: A security risk?
This article about TikTok is worth a look, and, more to the point, some thought. A member of the FCC is asking Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores. This same member made some pretty strong statements at a Congressional hearing: “Carr on Wednesday said TikTok “functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
Read the whole thing here.
N.B. Whether you love TikTok or hate it, it would be wise to make sure you understand and are comfortable with the amount of data it collects and the weigh the likelihood of that data being available for the Chinese government.
Questions to ask before your child gets (or keeps) a phone
Sort of continuing with the theme of overseeing your child’s tech use, this is a good piece from Today.com. Admittedly, it is for the parents of younger kids, but there are some good things to think about previous to letting your child get a phone. These could be adapted, however, in terms of deciding whether to let an older child keep their phone.
There are also some digital safety tips as well as some red-flags/warning signs to watch out for when considering your child’s use of a device.
Read the whole thing here.
Exercise and diet, in isolation, are not sufficient to prevent disease.
To some extent, this article from The New York Times is fairly intuitive, but it makes an important point:
Health food or exercise alone isn’t enough to prevent chronic disease, new research shows. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t outrun the toll of a poor diet — and healthy eating, on its own, won’t ward off disease.
Most people know that working out and eating well are critical components of overall health. But a sweeping study published this week in the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that hitting the gym won’t counteract the consequences of consuming fat-laden foods, and mainlining kale can’t cancel out sedentary habits.
“Sensationalized headlines and misleading advertisement for exercise regimens to lure consumers into the idea of ‘working out to eat whatever they want’ have fueled circulation of the myth about ‘exercise outrunning a bad diet,’” the study authors wrote.
Read the whole thing here.
Parenting through subtraction not addition
If that phrase sounds familiar, I have shared work based on this research before. But besides being a good reminder, I felt this gives better details than a piece I shared a while back.
Parenting is an exhausting marathon, from the early, sleep-deprived days, to the nonstop grind of elementary school extracurricular activities, to the stress of college admissions. These pressures are very real, and not to be underestimated.
Paradoxically, our reactions to parenting stress can often pile on more of it. (The kid is constantly bored or underfoot? More extracurriculars!) Instead, you should think of ways to solve parenting problems by subtraction, rather than addition, which will often yield solutions that are equally effective.
Why we tend to solve problems by adding, not subtracting
When we encounter problems, “our brains are more wired to think about an additive solution,” said Yael Schonbrun, a psychology professor at Brown University, and the author of Work, Parent, Thrive. As Schonbrun notes, for most of human history, the main problem of raising kids was dealing with scarcity, which required additive solutions: more food, more shelter.
In a world where typically we have enough to meet our basic needs, problems can look quite different. “That kind of solution doesn’t work as well in modern life, so we have a mismatch of our brain biology to our culture,” Schonbrun said.