Screen-Smart Parenting: How to Find Balance and Benefit in Your Child's Use of Social Media, Apps, and Digital Devices

This was a useful, balanced and thorough book overall. I would have two quibbles: 1)there is nothing the author can do about this, but supervising a 2 year old's screen use is nothing like figuring out what to do with a 16 year-old. It was a good idea to have three sections relating to ages, but then there was a lot to skip over. 2)I personally would have liked more on specific strategies on how to limit screen use for tweens and teens. Everyone agrees it should be limited, but not many people tell you HOW. This book did have a useful "digital contract" at the end, but there wasn't much on exactly how to prise them off their PS4, or some approaches that have worked. There was a lot of the usual statements such as "it is important to limit your teens' screen use" and "discourage gaming in the evening" and "talk to your teen about their technology use". In my experience those talks don't go very well, and I am not alone.

Very helpful. I'm going to keep this for a reference as my son grows and becomes more and more involved with technology. We are apparently WAY more strict about the time he has with digital media, but it changes his behavior and ability to focus so much that we have to help him monitor it. He is 8 and can really hyper focus on games, so we set the boundaries for him now and hopefully later he will learn how to balance it himself. This book has great ideas about how to monitor devices, sites and how to talk with kids about the privilege of being online.

This was a well researched book, and I appreciated Dr. Gold's insight and compilation of research regarding the appropriate use of technology at different age milestones. I would highly recommend this book to any parent who questions what amount and type of exposure is appropriate for their children, and how and when to have family conversations about screen time.

Amazing Book.... Thanks!

Useful info about how to navigate media with children. Used it in parenting book club and was great.

Awesome book, haven't finished it yet but will definitely want to get in touch with the author who is just brilliant

Screen Smart Parenting is fairly comprehensive and very up-to-date, with authors who do know the different aps, games, social media, etc. But there are a LOT of studies to troll through and quite a bit to skip due to the book being broken down by age group. For me, the noise to useful ratio needed a bit more tweaking to make this less of a cumbersome read.The book breaks down as follows: Introduction (which includes family digital habitat, digital milestones, digital landscape, the good, bad, and the ugly of digital debates); Growing up digital (which includes ages 0-2, ages 3-5, ages 6-8, ages 8-10, ages 11-13, and then ages 15-18); One size does not fit all (which includes aDhD, anxiety, or kids with depression, and agreements for the digital family). Resources, notes, index at the end.Because our technology moves so fast, this isn't a book you can keep as your child ages and you move to a different age group. So yes, there is a LOT to skip through in order to get to the section on your child (or children's) age(s). Frustrating for me, is that although I have an 11 year old, I found a lot of useful information in the older kids section and some in the younger kids sections. But I felt like I had to muddle through a lot of information that wasn't applicable in those sections in order to find nuggets that I could use for my child. But the section on my child's age was very useful.The book feels very up to date with the technology and I feel that the author did an excellent job of keeping up with emerging new aps/technology. I give high marks on that since most books I read on the subject are still going on about facebook when most kids have moved on to e.g., Instagram or Snap Chat.There are checklists to go over with kids as well as discussion areas about topics from bullying to sexting. Porn to plagiary (homework assignments). But at the same time, there is a lot of psychobabble - lots of 'how do you feel about this' type of leading questions in the beginning backed up with as many honestly unnecessary discussions on research studios. I'd have rather had the research in the index instead rather than discussed individually in the meat of the book. I could find a study that says the moon is really made of cheese if I wanted so I'm less concerned about studies.So yes, there is a lot of plow through but some good nuggets to be found there. I would have just preferred to see the information presented in a more coherent and less 'pyschologist's couch' type of presentation. I don't need the information dumbed down - just presented in a more accessible manner.Reviewed from an ARC.