NEWS - WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MOM 'UNPLUGS' TEENS FOR 6 MONTHS?

 i find the timing of this article amusing..lol, just last night i posted on my FaceBook status, that my son had deleted me, and blocked me from his connections. took me off! changed the email and the password, so i couldnt go back in and reset it so id have any ability to do anything within it.

he had forgotten i OWN him, for the time being, anyway. until hes 18, and/or on his own. 

so, naturally several moms, chimed in (appreciated every comment) about how they would handle the situation themselves, and what do ya know? i find an article the very next morning saying almost the same stuff they did. 

amazing! 

oh, dont worry, last night i was back IN the sons account, i even swapped the alternate email to my alternate email, so ill be notified when he does anything to his account again, AND i added myself, then made sure everything id say would be hidden...lol

i havnt checked this am, to see if i can gain access to his account since hes adjusted everything...i just checked, and so far so good, sorry mr hacker-wanna be, yo momz aint so dumb after all...LOL

looks like your passswords exactly the same, as well as your email..all you did was disconnect from me, and i secretly went back in and reconnected myself, without your knowledge, because..lets not forget? IM YOUR MOTHER! and I DESERVE to know WHO, and WHAT, and WHERE you do things...PC *ISNT* YOURS, the house you live in your living in for..FREE! the food you eat? BOUGHT WITH YOUR DADS MONEY, yeah, thats right you HAVNT paid for very much yourself!

cut off? yup..sounds good to me!

Jan. 18, 2011

What happens when mom unplugs teens for 6 months?

By BETH J. HARPAZ - Associated Press

 

NEW YORK — Susan Maushart lived out every parent's fantasy: She unplugged her teenagers.
For six months, she took away the Internet, TV, iPods, cell phones and video games. The eerie glow of screens stopped lighting up the family room. Electronic devices no longer chirped through the night like "evil crickets." And she stopped carrying her iPhone into the bathroom.


The result of what she grandly calls "The Experiment" was more OMG than LOL - and nothing less than an immersion in RL (real life).

As Maushart explains in a book released in the U.S. this week called "The Winter of Our Disconnect" (Penguin, $16.95), she and her kids rediscovered small pleasures - like board games, books, lazy Sundays, old photos, family meals and listening to music together instead of everyone plugging into their own iPods.
Her son Bill, a videogame and TV addict, filled his newfound spare time playing saxophone. "He swapped Grand Theft Auto for the Charlie Parker songbook," Maushart wrote. Bill says The Experiment was merely a "trigger" and he would have found his way back to music eventually. Either way, he got so serious playing sax that when the gadget ban ended, he sold his game console and is now studying music in college.


Maushart's eldest, Anni, was less wired and more bookish than the others, so her transition in and out of The Experiment was the least dramatic. Her friends thought the ban was "cool." If she needed computers for schoolwork, she went to the library. Even now, she swears off Facebook from time to time, just for the heck of it.


Maushart's youngest daughter, Sussy, had the hardest time going off the grid. Maushart had decided to allow use of the Internet, TV and other electronics outside the home, and Sussy immediately took that option, taking her laptop and moving in with her dad - Maushart's ex-husband - for six weeks. Even after she returned to Maushart's home, she spent hours on a landline phone as a substitute for texts and Facebook.


But the electronic deprivation had an impact anyway: Sussy's grades improved substantially. Maushart wrote that her kids "awoke slowly from the state of cognitus interruptus that had characterized many of their waking hours to become more focused logical thinkers."


Maushart decided to unplug the family because the kids - ages 14, 15 and 18 when she started The Experiment - didn't just "use media," as she put it. They "inhabited" media. "They don't remember a time before e-mail, or instant messaging, or Google," she wrote.


Like so many teens, they couldn't do their homework without simultaneously listening to music, updating Facebook and trading instant messages. If they were amused, instead of laughing, they actually said "LOL" aloud. Her girls had become mere "accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update."


Maushart admits to being as addicted as the kids. A native New Yorker, she was living in Perth, Australia, near her ex-husband, while medicating her homesickness with podcasts from National Public Radio and The New York Times online. Her biggest challenge during The Experiment was "relinquishing the ostrichlike delusion that burying my head in information and entertainment from home was just as good as actually being there."


Maushart began The Experiment with a drastic measure: She turned off the electricity completely for a few weeks - candles instead of electric lights, no hot showers, food stored in a cooler of ice. When blackout boot camp ended, Maushart hoped the "electricity is awesome!" reaction would soften the kids' transition to life without Google and cell phones.


It was a strategy that would have made Maushart's muse, Henry David Thoreau, proud. She is a lifelong devotee of Thoreau's classic book "Walden," which chronicled Thoreau's sojourn in solitude and self-sufficiency in a small cabin on a pond in the mid-1800s. "Simplify, simplify!" Thoreau admonished himself and his readers, a sentiment Maushart echoes throughout the book.


As a result of The Experiment, Maushart made a major change in her own life. In December, she moved from Australia to Long Island in New York, with Sussy. Of course, the move merely perpetuated Maushart's need to live in two places at once: She kept her job as a columnist for an Australian newspaper and is "living on Skype" because her older children stayed Down Under to attend university. Ironically, the Internet eased the transition to America for Sussy, who used Facebook to befriend kids in her new high school before arriving.
Another change for Maushart: She's no longer reluctant to impose blackouts on Sussy's screentime. "Instead of angsting, 'Don't you think you're spending too much time on the computer? Don't you think you should do something else like reading?' I now just take the computer away when I think she's had enough," Maushart said in a phone interview. "And now that she's been on the other side and remembers what it's like, it's less of an issue."


Maushart realizes that living off the grid for six months is unrealistic for most people. (She also admits getting her kids to go along with it partly by bribing them with a cut of proceeds from the book, which she planned to write all along.)


But she encourages families to unplug periodically. "One way to do it is just to have that one screen-free day a week. Not as a punishment - not by saying, 'I've had enough!' - but by instituting it as a special thing," she said. "There isn't a kid on the planet who wouldn't really rather be playing a board game than sitting at the computer."

NEWS - TWEENS GAME TOPS ITUNES LIST , UNSEATS ANGRY BIRDS

 omg...if i only knew CODING and PROGRAMMING! 
ive had the idea to create an app, for a while, i see the trend...i just dont know how to make what i see into anything anyone else would want...ARGH!
 Daniel, this is like what i tell you! find YOUR niche, and go for it! whats stopping you? you have the sky as your limit! you can do ANYTHING!  Mamma

Tween's Game Tops iTunes List, Unseats Angry Birds
Robert Nay, 14, Creates Hottest Free Game in App Store



Watch out, Mark Zuckerberg. A new programming prodigy is hot on your heels. 
But he isn't based in Silicon Valley or any of the country's other high-tech corridors. He lives in Spanish Fork, Utah. Oh, and one more thing: he's just 14 years old. 

Robert Nay is only in the 8th grade, but over the past couple of weeks, an iPhone application created by the young computer whiz has become one of the hottest smartphone applications around.

During the past two weeks, his free game "Bubble Ball" has been downloaded more than 2 million times. Last week, it nabbed the #1 spot on the list of free games in Apple's iTunes store, knocking the ever-popular "Angry Birds" game to #2. 

"I was pretty astonished," Nay said about the game's success. "When I released it, I didn't think it would do so well." 

Nay's mother, Kari Nay, said that like most young teenagers, Robert and his friends enjoy playing games on their iPods. But Robert started building a game of his own after a few friends suggested he give it a try.



"Since they know Robert's good with computers, they suggested he make one," she said. 
 
Robert, who built his first website in the 3rd grade, said, "why not?" 

He did some research in the public library and found a program, Ansca Mobile's Corona SDK (software developer's kit), that would help simplify the task. 

For more than a month, Robert spent a couple of hours each day on the game, ultimately writing more than 4,000 lines of computer code, his mother said. 

Kari Nay said she helped him design some of the puzzles in the game, but he came up with the concept and did everything else on his own. 

According to its App store description "Bubble Ball" is a "fun, new physics puzzle game, where you will test your ingenuity and thinking skills to get the bubble to the goal." 

Robert said he enjoyed creating the game, which was somewhat inspired by features of his own favorite iPod games, but it wasn't always smooth sailing. 

"There were some times when I felt like, 'can people seriously do this?' It seemed impossible," he said. "But then there were times when things just worked and I'd be like 'maybe I can actually do this.'"