Parenting in a Tech World

Holiday tech gifts can turn a magical morning into months of screen addiction, especially when the gift is a first phone, a gaming console, or a surprise iPad from Grandma. School breaks also bring looser rules, unsupervised time with cousins, and travel that quietly opens new safety gaps.

Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, opens up about the PlayStation 5 Christmas gift she still regrets and what she would do differently.

Titania and Sam get candid about why an iPhone usually isn’t th...

Worried about how much screen time your kids get at school? In some Utah classrooms, iPads were coming out on the first day of kindergarten, and kids on school devices kept sneaking off to Roblox, Minecraft, and YouTube.

Representative Ariel Defay, a mom of three and Vice Chair of the Utah House Education Committee, sponsored HB 273, the Balance Act, after years of parents asking her for help, and her earlier work took on AI-generated explicit images of kids.

She breaks down what will actually change at your child’s school, why ev...

Social media apps like Snapchat and Instagram are designed to keep kids scrolling, and for some families the cost of that design has been devastating. Carson Bride was just 16 when he was cyberbullied through anonymous apps built into Snapchat, and he died by suicide in 2020.

Kristin Bride, Carson’s mom, founded the Carson J. Bride Effect and has testified before Congress, while Trisha Prabhu built the anti-cyberbullying tool ReThink at age 13 and now runs ReThink Citizens, a nonprofit helping young people build a safer internet.

Host Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Pare...

Screen time battles have become a nightly fight in many homes, and pediatricians are seeing the fallout in the exam room: kids who aren’t sleeping, struggle to hold a conversation, and melt down the moment a device is taken away.

Dr. Lisa Petit is a board-certified pediatrician with nearly 20 years in practice, a background in psychology, and three teens of her own.

She joins Titania Jordan, Bark’s Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, to walk through her FIRST Down Framework (Focus, Intention, Resilience, Supp...

For teens in foster care, smartphone safety cuts both ways. No phone leaves them cut off from peers who live on Snapchat and Instagram, while an unmonitored one exposes already vulnerable kids to unsafe adults online.

Jordyn Braun, MSW, has spent over three years as a Team Lead and Case Manager in Oregon Community Programs’ treatment foster care, and Jami Teran is a first-time foster parent who just guided her youth through senior year and the move toward college.

Host Adam Brooks hears from both sides of the table: how case ma...

For years, one Oregon foster care program kept kids and smartphones completely separate, until the kids themselves said a no-phone rule was reason enough to pick a different program. What that team learned about screen time, supervision, and teen mental health applies to every family, not just kids in foster care.

Ana Day is a licensed marital and family therapist who has spent 21 years at Oregon Community Programs, working her way from therapist to Executive Director of an agency serving foster youth and their families.

She walks host Adam Brooks through...

If you've ever felt like you need permission to take away your child's iPad or delete Snapchat from your 12-year-old's phone, you're not alone, and that hesitation is one of the biggest reasons screen time limits fall apart at home. The good news: you have far more power here than you think.

Katherine Martinko, author of Childhood Unplugged and the upcoming Hold the Phone, spent over a decade as a digital media editor and has delivered more than 70 keynotes and workshops on kids and screens across North America.

She and Titania...

Kids in foster care are among the most targeted groups for online predators and grooming, and taking their phones away often makes them less safe, not more. Adam Rodakowski is the Director of Foster Care at Greater Oregon Behavioral Health, where he leads a treatment foster care program serving 40 to 50 youth after nearly a decade in Oregon's child welfare system.

He shares the two warning signs that forced his team to act. One was a teen who kept showing up with brand-new phones within days of losing one. The other was a known adult trying...

Sleepover safety today means more than sleeping bags and flashlights. It means knowing what happens to unsupervised phones, cameras, and internet access once the lights go out at someone else's house.

Titania Jordan, Bark's Chief Parent Officer and bestselling author of two books on digital parenting, breaks down the framework she calls the “sleep under.”

You'll learn how to protect your home Wi-Fi with tools like the Bark Home, why a device basket at the door removes temptation instead of relying on willpower, and how features like the Bark Phone's camera lock...

Discord is rated 17+ in the App Store, but kids can sign up at 13, a gap that leaves most parents feeling a step behind the moment their kid asks to join. This year Discord rolled out teen-by-default settings, a new age verification system, and a parental controls tool called Family Center, and today we break down what actually changed, what didn't, and the one gap no setting can fix.

You'll learn what "teen by default" actually restricts day to day, how Discord's age verification works (and why the global rollout was delayed), and exactly what Family...

Standardized test scores among American kids have been dropping for years, and one neuroscientist says classroom technology is a direct cause, not a coincidence. Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist and educator who has studied learning at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and his latest book, "The Digital Delusion," has led him to testify before the U.S. Senate.

In this conversation, Jared breaks down what happens in a child's brain when they learn from a screen versus paper or discussion, and why he believes EdTech is fundamentally mismatched...

Every month, 430 students at one Texas high school watched two of their own classmates lead an assembly on cyberbullying, online predators, and the gap between who teens are online and who they really are.

McKenzey Roach and Malayna Mitchell are graduating seniors who built and ran their school's monthly digital citizenship program, called CHAT, reaching every student at Lubbock-Cooper High School as part of a DECA project.

In this conversation, they walk through how a mandatory video segment nobody wanted to watch became something students actually engaged with, why they sent...

Cyberbullying, drug conversations, sextortion risk, and violent threats aren't just happening on your kid's phone, they're showing up on school-issued laptops too. New Bark for Schools data breaks down exactly how often, by category and by state.

Titania Jordan, Chief Parent Officer at Bark Technologies, shares data from Bark's work protecting students across more than 3,700 school districts nationwide since the program launched free in response to the Parkland shooting.

In this episode, you'll hear the real alert breakdown from school-issued devices: violence-related content topped the list at almost 40%, with drug-related conversations...

The teachers walking into classrooms right now grew up glued to screens too, and that's reshaping how teacher prep programs handle screen addiction, shortened attention spans, and phone distraction in the classroom.



Melanie Lay and Amy Hickman train future educators at Texas Tech University, and both also evaluate teacher preparation programs nationwide, Melanie through US PREP and Amy as a TPI-US inspector.

In this conversation, they break down what's actually being taught to future teachers about managing devices, social media, and mental health in the classroom, and what's still a gap. Yo...

Behind every Bark Phone, Watch, Home, or Sync that arrives on your doorstep, there's a team of real people, not robots, who packed it by hand. In this episode, you'll meet the humans responsible for making sure your child's safety device gets to your family the right way.

Shari manages Bark's distribution center in Utah, and Crystal is the operations support specialist who keeps daily operations running.

You'll hear what it was like to build the distribution center from an empty warehouse into a fully operational hub, including the mistakes, the...

Online predators are actively targeting your kids right now, and two Michigan men decided they couldn't wait for the system to act. Jake Hockey and C.J. of Pred Task Force built a team that runs undercover stings, with decoys posing as minors on dating apps, confronting suspects on camera, and calling law enforcement when the time is right.

Jake and C.J. are citizen investigators who have grown Pred Task Force from a local Michigan operation into a nationwide mission, with hundreds of thousands of followers watching their work unfold in real time. In...

The invisible mental load of early parenthood — tracking feeds, monitoring sleep, anticipating every need — is one of the most exhausting and least-talked-about realities of having a baby. Nanit's latest parent report pulls back the curtain on what's actually happening in homes across the country during those first overwhelming years.

Victoria Vaynberg is the Chief Customer and Marketing Officer at Nanit, the smart baby monitor and parenting platform used by millions of families — and she's spent her career at the intersection of technology, health data, and the moments that matter most to parents.

In t...

Financial sextortion is targeting teenage boys at an alarming rate — and most families have never heard of it until it's too late. In 2022, 17-year-old Gavin Guffey fell victim to an online blackmail scam and died by suicide. His father, South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey, refused to let Gavin's death be the end of the story.

Rep. Guffey is one of the driving forces behind Gavin's Law, one of the nation's first pieces of legislation specifically targeting financial sextortion — and he's now working to build momentum for similar protections at the national level.

Diane Tarantini is a survivor, author, and body safety educator whose work is bringing one of the most underreported forms of child sexual abuse into the open. In this episode, she shares the story behind her children's book The Brave Knight — which teaches kids to recognize grooming and speak up — her memoir Everyone Was Silent, and why child-on-child sexual abuse is being called America's silent epidemic. If you've ever wondered how to talk to your kids about body safety or what warning signs parents often miss, this conversation is a must-listen.

Resources discussed in this epis...

Jen Davidson spent years raising two kids with a simple but powerful ritual — intentional conversations she called Life Lesson Lunches — and her grown children loved it so much they asked her to write it all down so they could use it someday as parents themselves. In her book Keep Talking, Jen offers a warm, practical roadmap for staying connected with kids even when they're doing everything to push you away. We get into the book, the unconventional origin story behind it, and what Jen has learned navigating social media as a first-time author who never wanted to be on it i...

What does it actually feel like to be the kid on the other side of all that well-intentioned parenting technology? Audra and Savanna grew up navigating learning challenges with tools, apps, and monitoring software shaping their daily lives — and they're here to tell the truth about what helped, what felt like a leash, and what they wish the adults in their lives had done differently. If you've ever wondered whether the tech you're using is building your child's independence or quietly undermining it, this one's for you.

Heisman Trophy winner and Tim Tebow Foundation founder Tim Tebow has spent years on the front lines of fighting child sexual exploitation — and what he's seen should be on every parent's radar. In this episode, Tim breaks down the online predators hiding in the apps and platforms your kids use every day, what it took to pass landmark federal legislation protecting children online, and the real link between social media and the mental health crisis facing today's kids. If you've ever wondered whether the internet is really as dangerous as people say — Tim's work makes clear that it is, and...

Catherine Price is an award-winning health and science journalist, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and founder of Screen/Life Balance — and she's here to cut through the overwhelm parents feel around phones and screens. In this episode, Catherine shares what actually works for families trying to reclaim balance, including insights from her newly revised How to Break Up With Your Phone and her latest book, The Amazing Generation, co-authored with Jonathan Haidt and written directly for kids and teens. Whether you've already handed your kid a phone and are wondering what's next, or you're still trying to figure out yo...

Nicole Guysi is a Family Transition Navigator at Encircle Families — Arizona's federally funded Parent Training and Information Center — but she's also a parent who has lived the reality of raising a child with a rare diagnosis and figuring out the role technology needs to play in their life. In this episode, Nicole shares what that journey actually looked like: the searching, the gaps, the wins, and the ripple effects on the whole family. If you're a parent trying to find the right tools for your child with disabilities — or you just want to feel less alone in the process — this one...

Dr. Alison Yeung is a family physician and mom of two who built a community of 125,000+ followers after spending a decade watching adolescent mental health visits climb in her practice — and connecting the dots back to smartphones and social media. In this episode, she breaks down what the research actually shows about screens and kids' developing brains, why Big Tech deserves more scrutiny than parents do, and practical steps families can take today — including her Six R's framework for navigating the digital world.

Don't forget to subscribe to Allison's Substack and follow her on Instagram:

Laura Marquez-Garrett left a two-decade Big Law career to become one of the most powerful legal voices fighting for kids harmed by social media — and in March 2026, they helped make history. As counsel of record in the first-ever trial to hold Meta and YouTube liable for harming a child through addictive platform design, Laura joins us to break down what the $6 million verdict actually means, what the companies' own internal documents revealed about what they knew, and why they call this case "a vehicle, not an outcome." If you've been watching the headlines and wondering what it all means fo...

Chris Tiffany brings a rare dual perspective to his role as Executive Director of Encircle Families — he's both a former special education teacher and a parent of a child with autism. In this episode, Chris shares what his statewide Arizona organization is seeing on the ground when it comes to students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their access to technology. You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where the gaps are, how families are finding (and missing) critical resources, and what practical steps you can take if you feel like you're navigating this alone.

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James Billig is Chief Compliance Officer at U-ACT (United Against Child Trafficking), a nonprofit equipping law enforcement and communities to fight online exploitation. He shares what officers are seeing on the front lines, how U-ACT's Blue Taskforce is training retired law enforcement to combat child trafficking, and the red flags parents need to watch for as predators evolve their tactics online.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

- https://u-act.org/

- https://u-act.org/donate/

- https://www.facebook.com/uact1

- https://www.instagram.com/floridafaithalliance<...

Dr. Carrie Mackensen is a clinical psychologist, parent coach, and founder of Successful Parent. With 25 years of experience and two boys of her own, she blends neuroscience and attachment theory to help families set healthy tech boundaries. She shares why screens flood kids' brains with dopamine, what happened when her own son secretly played video games during class, and the first step overwhelmed parents should take today.

Ways to stay connected with Dr. Carrie:

Juliette Blake, founder and CEO of Moxies, has been building for girls since she was 16. Now, as a millennial mom of three, she's created a safe-by-design social platform exclusively for tween girls ages 8 to 12. She shares why 60% of teen girls experience persistent sadness, what happens when girls use platforms not built for them, and how Moxies is offering a healthier entry point into digital life with no public profiles, no strangers, and built-in screen time boundaries.

Learn more about Moxies and follow Juliette on Instagram:

- https://www.instagram.com/julietteblake_/

...

Large gatherings of hundreds of teens are popping up in cities across the country — organized almost entirely through social media — and they're raising serious concerns for parents and communities alike. In this episode, we break down what teen takeovers actually are, what's drawing kids to them, and how quickly they can turn dangerous. If your teen is on social media, this is one trend you can't afford to miss.

Kelly Stonelake spent nearly 15 years at Meta — rising to Director of Product Marketing and a senior role on Horizon Worlds — before becoming one of the most prominent whistleblowers in the fight for kids' online safety. She walked away from millions in unvested stock rather than sign an agreement protecting Meta from accountability, and has since testified before the FTC, the Washington State Senate, and been a key voice throughout the civil trials where Meta and YouTube were just found guilty of knowingly harming children. In this episode, Kelly breaks down what she witnessed from the inside, why the current wave...

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has made child safety a cornerstone of his work—from creating the state's first Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, which has rescued over 200 children, to launching investigations into platforms like Roblox for child exploitation. He shares what prompted the Roblox investigation, details from a recent conviction involving grooming on Snapchat, and what parents need to know about how predators are using online platforms to target kids.

Stories, resources, and other links discussed in this episode: 

- Learn more about AG Chris Carr: https://law.georgia.gov/biography-attorney-general

- R...

Bark's 2025 Annual Report analyzed a record 11.1 billion online activities—and the findings reveal a troubling paradox. While predator alerts in monitored spaces dropped 60%, national sextortion cases are surging. The danger hasn't disappeared; it's just moved where parents can't see it. We break down the biggest risks facing kids today, from the 650% spike in disordered eating content among tweens to why predators are migrating to shadow spaces—and what parents can do about it.

Check our Bark's 2025 Annual Report: https://www.bark.us/annual-report-2025/

Dr. Jean Twenge, psychologist and author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, has spent decades studying how technology is reshaping childhood. Her research provided some of the earliest evidence linking smartphones and social media to rising rates of teen depression and anxiety. She shares the 'aha' moments from her work, what the data really shows about teens and tech, and the rules every parent should follow in a high-tech world.

Visit Dr. Twenge's website to find her books, discover her research, learn about speaking engagements, and more. 

- https://www.j...

Melissa McKay, president of the Digital Childhood Institute, made headlines when her viral post forced Google to reverse its policy of emailing kids instructions to remove parental controls at age 13. She shares the story behind that win, why Roblox is doing the same thing, and what parents need to know about protecting their kids when tech companies prioritize profit over safety.

Learn more about the Digital Childhood Institute and connect with Melissa: 

- https://www.digitalchildhoodinstitute.org/

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-mckay-766511380/

Don't forget to c...

Selma Blair gets candid about parenting her 14-year-old son in an always-connected world. She shares how she's navigated tech and social media as both a public figure and a mom, the conversations she's had about online safety, and her advice for parents trying to find balance in a digital age.

Paul Raffile is a cybercrime expert and online safety advocate who's been on the front lines of catching sextortion scammers and exposing platform failures. He shares what parents need to know about sextortion, which apps pose the biggest risks, and the shocking reality of what social media companies allow to happen on their platforms.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raffile/

Resources, stories, and other things mentioned in this episode:

- Paul's experience with Meta: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/16/meta-rescinds-job-offer-human-trafficking-expert

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Dr. Nidhi Gupta — physician, author of Calm the Noise, and founder of the Phreedom Foundation — breaks down how tech is impacting our health and what families can do to take back control. She shares the science behind constant notifications, her 'aha' moment that led to writing the book, and the three rules every family should start with tonight.

Learn more about Dr. Gupta and the Phreedom Foundation on her website, and order your copy of Calm the Noise:

https://reconnect.expert/

https://info.bark.us/calm-the-noise

Ben Gillenwater — aka The Family IT Guy — brings 30 years of cybersecurity expertise to the parenting table. He shares how his background shaped the way he protects his own kid online, what parents can expect from his online community, and the one change that can make the biggest difference in your family's digital safety.

Connect with Ben:

- On his website: https://www.familyitguy.com/

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/family_it_guy/

- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@family.it.guy

Resources mentioned in this...