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My iPhone Addiction -Recognizing Unhealthy Cell Phone Habits

By Noah Boonov I’ll be the first to admit that I’m addicted to my phone. I’ve always been addicted to technology. I’m embarrassed when my phone gives me a “Weekly Screen Report” and it says that I’ve been on for almost 8 hours a day. I know you can turn off the report, but perhaps…

The Commodification of Pregnancy

By Noah Boonov A video of a family revealing the sex of their baby goes viral online. Each month, a young mother captures the journey through pregnancy on TikTok. A YouTuber hits one million views on their baby’s name reveal video. These posts are not uncommon for those who use social media daily. What was…

New Collection on Feminist Mothering

Congratulations to Ta[l]king Care: Family Blog Lines co-author Fiona Green for her co-edited collection Coming into Being: Mothers on Finding and Realizing Feminism with Demeter Press. The collection explores how becoming and being a mother can be shaped by – and interconnected with – how mothers realize feminism and/or become feminists. Becoming a mother may also…

Reformed Mommy Vloggers – Finding Privacy Post-Popularity

By Noah Boonov Previously on this blog, I’ve been open about what it was like growing up online. One of the reasons I spent many hours on Twitter and Tumblr as a kid and teenager was perpetuated by my love for YouTube. I’ve consumed hours upon hours of videos. I used to stay up until…

Reconnecting With Digital Theatre in a Recovering Theatre Community

By Noah Boonov On a whim, I applied to be part of a Digital Theatre Creation program this past winter through a company in Barrie, Ontario called Talk Is Free Theatre. I was lucky enough to be chosen as a participant and the program finished in March. Over the course of this four-week program, I…

Congratulations! Fiona Joy Green Honoured by CBC Manitoba for International Women’s Day

One of our blog authors, Fiona Joy Green, has been honoured by being chosen to join a group of eight REMARKABLE MANITOBA WOMEN honoured for International Women’s Day by CBC Manitoba. Catch her interview with Laurie Hoogstraten during the drive home program, “Up to Speed”. Fiona talks about writing and mothering, and also defines intersectional…

 Growing Up Online – How a “Zillenial” Learned to Navigate Social Media

By Noah Boonov When I was a little kid, it was hammered into my head that under any circumstances “Do not talk to strangers online” and “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. I will never forget watching ‘The North American House Hippo’ commercial (I choose to believe that they ARE real). These phrases…

Mothering and Motherhood on the Home/Front

By Fiona Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers We’re excited to be presenting at this year’s IAMAS conference, Mothering and Motherhood on the Home/Front, which aims to “examine the importance of home, mothering, and motherhood in its multiple meanings.” Our presentation “Parenting and technology in blog and book: contextualizing familybloglines.com and Parenting/Internet/Kids in current scholarship and online” explores…

On the rise of youth surveillance via digital tracking: 2 perspectives

By Toni De Guzman and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers TONI: With the advances of technology, privacy is being compromised to a greater extent through tracking-based applications such as Find My, Life360, and others. How does this affect parental relationships with children? Some parents may think they are protecting their children by tracking their activity, but in…

Playing Games With The Truth

By Noah Boonov Have you ever played the game “Two Truths and a Lie”? You state two true statements and one lie about yourself. I might say: “I’ve been to Disney World, I’ve eaten moose, and I own a car.” Now you guess which one is the lie (Leave your guess in the comments)! Okay,…

Thoughts On Setting Social Media Boundaries

By Noah Boonov Like many young people, I have had my fair share of embarrassing photos posted online by a parent or family member. I begged and pleaded with my parents to remove certain photos, but despite my best efforts they remain public. Not too long ago, I was hit with a reverse scenario. I…

Another argument for the need to do more…

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Maria Ressa, Filipino journalist and Nobel Prize laurete, argues we can all intervene in the moment and demand participation and truth. She describes the current culture as driven by social media lies and without recourse to truth or ethical corrections. Oddly, there is an element of optimism…

A scan of parenting tech blog posts

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Scanning parenting tech blog posts….what came up first? So many monitized blogs promoting new products made it into top 10 lists directing readers to online blogs about parenting and technology. When we visited some of these sites, we were awed by the time and money devoted to…

Online vs In-person School: Reflections from a Pandemic Graduate

by Toni De Guzman Two years ago, we experienced a major shift from attending school in person to trying to graduate online. I was in my last years of high school, hoping to graduate in the summer of 2021.  The pandemic worsened, and reality sunk in; will I still be able to see my friends…

The Future of this Blog…

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers and Fiona Joy Green With changing knowledge circulation, we need to think about new next steps for reaching out to readers and online users to flag our book, Parenting/Internet/Kids: Domesticating Technologies. Working with social media platforms to drive traffic to a site is labour intensive. What we want to do is…

Parenting/Internet/Kids Hybrid Book Launch

Join us for hybrid Book Launch: Friday, Oct 7, 2022. 2:00-3:00 pm CT In person: University of Winnipeg 2M70 or Online: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81653924307 2:00 Welcome, Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers 2:10 Andrea O’Reilly, Demeter Press 2:15 Robyn Flisfeder and Matthew Flisfeder, “Bionic Parenting: On the Enabling Possibilities and Practices for Parenting with Digital New Media”…

News Flash

by Jaqueline McLeod and Fiona Joy Green We recently witnessed, full on, in media reports the wonder and the horror of shrinking space and time. In Canada all September long weekend, the media was saturated with stories of the mass murder tragedy in rural Saskatchewan. First we heard about the multiple victims and then about…

Now Available: Parenting/Internet/Kids: Domesticating Technologies

Our co-edited collection, focusing on families and homes, takes up the longstanding question of whether technologies help or harm us—are they opening possibilities or taking away initiatives and agency? Are they delivering us to utopian shores or pulling us into chaos and dystopia?  This question has a long history. It was contentious in the USA…

Our real world and the worlds of technologies

by Jaqueline McLeod and Fiona Joy Green Canadians have an iconic figure of accomplished prose writing and scientific investigation in URSULA FRANKLIN, and it was wonderful to see her work foregrounded and polished in a recent collection, What Would Ursula Franklin Say? [Reprising The Real World of Technology]. Franklin was properly suspicious of technology as…

Detransition, Baby – 3 Voices

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, Fiona Joy Green, and Dallas Cant Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters was published early in 2021. It has been nominated for an array of literary awards and held a position on the bestseller list. Peters has written several earlier novels and holds both MA and MFA.  When I received Detransition, Baby…

Omicron and Blaming

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers At the start of the pandemic, BC Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, was hailed as a hero for communicating clearly with citizens, being a voice of encouragement and information. Imagine our surprise when recently talking with others and hearing them toss off criticisms of Henry –…

Respecting Trans change and refusing a social climate of despair

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers “Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.” ― bell hooks, Talking About a Revolution: Interviews with Michael Albert, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, bell hooks, Peter Kwong, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, Urvashi Vaid, and Howard Zinn https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10697.bell_hooks?page=3 A number…

Trans Beauty, Grief, and Bodily Autonomy ❀

by Dallas Cant CW: anti-trans violence, trans loss, death.This may be a particularly heavy post. If you are struggling and need to talk to someone, Trans Life Line is a resource that you might find useful. They are a grassroots hotline that is operated by and for trans people. In Canada, call (877) 330-6366 ;…

It’s coming on the festive season

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers How to celebrate? This time last year we couldn’t get together with friends and family because of Covid. This year, so many fellow Canadians are struggling with climate change crisis. In this post we want to ask, what, if anything, makes this still a wonderful life? Yesterday on my walk along…

Back in Class (Masks and Civility)

by Fiona Joy Green, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers and Dallas Cant What happens when you don’t feel relief after getting double vaxx? As Fiona, Jaque and Dallas talk we name a kind of anxiety that washes over as we move back, in micro ways, to in-person outdoor and indoor gatherings. There are reminders to be patient…

Reflections on returning to school in fall 2021?

by Dallas Cant and Fiona Joy Green What a wild time to be living through. This phrase, like many other pandemic ‘taglines’ I’ve picked up over the last year and a half, has been routinely on my tongue. When thinking about the return to school and teaching, it’s the first thing that comes to my…

Back to School in the 4th wave

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Just when we thought it was safe to go out again, hoping for a return to some sense of normalcy in the September school term, we are hitting a red alert about rising Delta variant numbers. For parents of school age children this marks the third school…

Pollinators + Climate Justice

by Dallas Cant In “Fire and Ice,” Jaque asked whether or not there is any Climate Justice of Hope? As I gaze out of my little apartment to the smoke filled skies, I find myself asking the same question, will we see Climate Justice? As communities and reserves across Treaty One are evacuated, I recognize…

Another small cautious step toward reconciliation

by Fiona Joy Green Today, the Senate of Canada in a vote of 61-10, approved a bill C-15 to implement UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It’s been a long time coming. The UN declaration, endorsed by Canada in 2010, affirms the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination and to their language,…

Settlement small step in reconciliation

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers A settlement of $10,000 in a class-action law suit involving hundreds of people left out of residential school compensation is to be paid by the Canadian Federal Government to each “day scholar” who attended residential schools during the day and returning home each night. The Federal Government…

215 lost souls

by Fiona Joy Green Emotions overwhelm me as I grapple with the horrendous news of the undocumented remains of 215 Indigenous children as young as three years of age at a former residential school in Kamloops, BC on the traditional lands of the Secwépemc. The Kamloops school, once the largest in Canada’s Indian Residential School system,…

Under constant surveillance

by Fiona Joy Green Video Doorbell Yikes! Reading The Guardian’s article “Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen” by Lauren Bridges, solidified my long standing suspicion that we are increasingly under surveillance and that law enforcement agencies will be able to use personal video recordings without warrants. It comes…

Why Am I So Tired?!

by Dallas Cant In these weeks? Months? Years? Of Covid isolation and prairie winter blues, tech has kept me *working* *connected* *distracted* *comforted*. It has been my solid constant through all the pandemic feels! With this, I’ve noticed some serious shifts in my relationship to technology, both in how I use it and how I…

Algorithmic culture: music streaming and privacy

by Sophie Ashton Article: New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music “The [Spotify] patent outlines potential uses of technology that involves the extraction of “intonation, stress, rhythm, and the likes of units of speech” from the user’s voice. The tech could also use speech recognition to identify metadata points such as emotional…

On Covid, Privacy, and the Internet: Reflections from a gen z/millennial

by Dallas Cant Just last week I came across Greg Ferenstein’s Medium article about the “Birth and Death of Privacy.” In it, Ferenstein notes that privacy, as it is generally understood today, is a relatively new concept and the desire to keep certain aspects of our lives with ourselves or those very close to us…

Family Zooms and COVID Holidays

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Oh what a year it’s been with COVID-19 raging around the world and in our communities. We’ve been responding and pivoting to the ever changing demands of trying to stay safe for months now. For many of us over the holidays, this has meant keeping to ourselves…

Find Family Blog Lines on Facebook!

By Dallas Cant We’ve recently set up a Facebook page for Ta[l]king Care: Family Blog Lines. Like the page for updates and notifications about new blog posts and info about the upcoming, M/I/K collection! Whether you loathe Facebook (or the folks behind it all), find it a useful platform to keep connected with those you…

Mini-matrix: Controlling and surveilling kids’ online activity

by Sohpie Ashton Kayte Thomas explores setting boundaries with her kids surrounding their internet use and presence online in blog post, Internet safety and your kids Perhaps specific to the times to the generation I was born in, I learned about ‘stranger danger’ on the internet at the same time that I learned about ‘stranger…

Covid Curiosities Pt. 2

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers In the context of Covid, how has your relationship to technology shifted? COVID, STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, and TECH: What happens to Blame in cases of Need  Covid has changed its meaning to me. Back in June, in Winnipeg MB, I thought of it as a global pandemic that seemed to have missed…

Covid Curiosities: How has technology impacted your Covid experience?

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Oh what a question this is! Since the onslaught of COVID-19 and the incessant pivoting of adjusting to the ongoing series of closings, openings, lock downs and shut ins, technology has enabled me to remain safely at home while also connected to others and earning a living.…

Data privacy… laws and our lives online

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers COVID-19 pandemic reveals major gaps in privacy law, says watchdog As previously separate realms merge into the confines of a single screen, how can Canadians ensure their data is being protected? Government response lags behind the rapid digitization of our lives. Complacency reaps consequences.

Probing products : what are we buying? drink flavour enhancers

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers I switched to zero-cal water flavor enhancers a few years ago– surely a nominal change–better for health than soda and coming in a small bottle so not producing mounds of plastic or glass in packaging. The more I have grown to like these things–orange, cherry and grape–the more my resolve to…

SodaStream revisited

by Fiona Joy Green A bit of research shows that SodaStream is not without controversy. First developed in 1903, owned by various UK companies, and solely owned by Cadbury Schweppes in 1985, it was sold in 1998 to Israeli company Soda-Club. In 2012, a line of soda machines was designed emphasizing sustainability and SodaStream was…

On track: Using my media, not theirs

by Fiona Joy Green As a cycling enthusiast, I feel ill-prepared and incomplete without my little computer attached to my handlebars that monitors my distance, speed, cadence and time. Unlike my fellow cyclist friends who have accounts with the cloud to record and share online recording of routes, distance, speed and other stats, I prefer…

SodaStream seems safe (Where’s it made? What does it replace? What niche/need create?)

by Fiona Joy Green While recently hosting a small family get together and observing physical distancing and careful food sharing practices during these COVID-19 days, I realized how much I depend upon and find pleasure in my sodastream fizzy water maker. I love the sparkle it puts into my tap water and the instant refreshing…

Media inventory and critique: What is gained and lost if I use_______?

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers We write this blog committed to working out (the changing/adapting) media values that guide our quotidian practices: not too much browsing or tv, limited or no social media, anti-consumerist activities (not new , but  re-used), following all the sign posts to doing the right thing.  Like many…

Smart appliances be gone: BUT we still lean on other tools & media

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers I don’t have any smart gadgets in my kitchen and discourage acquisition. I’m a competitive person and want to be the smart one—at least in my kitchen!  It is also true the list of available gadgets is not too compelling at this stage. Check this out as a gadget for those…

What’s up when you recognize privilege?

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers When we began writing a decade ago we were interested in joining a dialogue with mothers to share ideas instead of consulting the experts. Over the years, we had stopped blogging except to comment on our status as mothers of older children, to notice there was not…

Thomas Wolfe said You Can’t Go Home Again–and created a character that took to travelling and built a new life. For us? The word is “go home and stay home”

by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers Changing days and roles: what has struck me, as a mother of 2 adult daughters–learning from them and from my young adult students–is how much is changed: so much life is online, so many jobs dissolved. Recently ordered by authorities to “go home and stay home”, many had to define where/…

Starting Over

by Fiona Joy Green and Jaqueline McLeod Rogers As the current social media climate that is given to concerns about Covid-19, anti-racism protests and police violence and reform rages around us, we are returning to our blog to think of how these matters influence families and their online presence and privacy. In the following months…

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