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Parent Anxiety, Screen Time And Learning In The Digital Age

LA Johnson
/
NPR

"If I can get them out the door with pants on, I feel like we've won the day."

A lot of parents can probably relate to those words from a stressed out dad, who's trying to deal with big issues of parenting amid the normal chaos of just getting them to school.

He was one of more than a dozen parents who joined us one night to talk about parenting in the digital age. We wanted to know: How do you make sense of all the latest research on a topic like screen time and somehow fit it into daily family life?

Considering how tough it can be to just get through Monday, that's a tall order.

Who better to help us frame the question than actual parents? So we reached out to Generation Listen, the NPR project that brings listeners together, to start the conversation. On couches and chairs at the headquarters of the Manhattan nonprofit, Data & Society, we talked about screen time limits, privacy and the role of devices and screens in the classroom. And then we brought some experts into the conversation.

Click play at the top of the screen to listen.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anya Kamenetz is an education correspondent at NPR. She joined NPR in 2014, working as part of a new initiative to coordinate on-air and online coverage of learning. Since then the NPR Ed team has won a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for Innovation, and a 2015 National Award for Education Reporting for the multimedia national collaboration, the Grad Rates project.
Elissa Nadworny reports on all things college for NPR, following big stories like unprecedented enrollment declines, college affordability, the student debt crisis and workforce training. During the 2020-2021 academic year, she traveled to dozens of campuses to document what it was like to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has won several awards including a 2020 Gracie Award for a story about student parents in college, a 2018 James Beard Award for a story about the Chinese-American population in the Mississippi Delta and a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in innovation.