Kia Ora lovelies,
How wonderful to have tipped over into shortening nights and lengthening days.  It still may be flipping freezing, but I’m grateful for the reminder that all is impermanent.

First link of the day: “Your Undivided Attention” … it’s an excellent new podcast from the Center for Humane Tech.  It has me all a-flutter thinking about design solutions to support us mere humans in undoing the manipulation of our poor li’l vulnerable minds as we attempt to take control of our device use.

Which we’d better get serious about: lifetime users are changing their skeletons.  Horn-like growths on our spines?  Yeah, all this tech is not a benign habit. Especially for kids.  Oh, and  here’s what the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute reckon … Meanwhile, closer to (my!) home, I was privileged to see a powerful talk about digital addiction by a wise professor at the UC Child Wellbeing Symposium a couple of weeks back.  Koia kei a koe!

Just quietly, I’d  have liked other speakers to have considered the concepts of this essay … now, I’m a fool for some neuroscience, but let’s never forget that we are more than our brains… we are also sensory beings, feeling creatures: with bodies and bellies and reciprocal relationships.

ANYWAY … More locals doing important work can be found HERE, at the website of the Sensible Screen Use group… they are all about shaking up the new normal that exists in so many classrooms in NZ.  I wonder if they’ve read Screen Schooled?  Other useful thoughts about shaking up the norm in classrooms can be found here, in this write up of the work of a neurologist turned classroom teacher.  

Here is a lil’ something about the myth of the perfect mother (something I’ve written about elsewhere …) and this is from Rick Hansen (LOVE!), it’s about taking care of dads.

This is an interesting finding about the link between adverse childhood experiences and the onset of puberty, and I end with a glorious bit of counsel about having conversations about positive parenting, it’s from the most excellent Canadian Paediatric Society.  Merci!