Jarrod Partridge

An ordinary family photo, posted to a birthday album or a school website, can now be pulled by a stranger and turned into exploitative content in minutes using freely available AI tools. Child safety organizations say this shift has happened fast enough that most parents have no idea their family photos carry this new risk,

A toddler who tries to follow a parent into the bathroom. A 7-year-old who refuses to play in the next room alone. A middle schooler who still wants a parent within sight at a birthday party. Parents online have started calling this pattern the “velcro kid,” and the term has spread fast enough that psychologists

“Can you please put your shoes on?” sounds polite. It also isn’t a real question, and most kids know it. A child development specialist who has worked with more than 5,000 families says that gap, between what a parent asks and what a parent actually means, is behind more bedtime standoffs and morning meltdowns than

Researchers tracked children’s phones minute by minute instead of asking them to remember their own screen time, and the real numbers landed harder than any survey ever could. Kids in the study watched an average of 708 TikTok videos a day. Half of those videos lasted five seconds or less. Three in four children logged

On July 5, a two year old in Hallandale Beach, Florida, became at least the tenth child to die in a hot car in the United States this year. Four of those deaths have come in a single stretch of weeks as summer heat settled in. For the safety group Kids and Car Safety, which

You flipped on the parental controls. You set the account to private, turned on the screen time reminders, and trusted the “teen safety” settings the app promised. New research from Northeastern University suggests a lot of that effort does far less than parents assume. When researchers set out to test 86 child safety features across

Jillian Orr went to a Nashville playground with her three boys and came home with a viral video. The 35-year-old preschool teacher had spent the outing juggling a Capri Sun, crackers, and diapers while watching two moms nearby split the parenting work without a word: one pushed the baby on the swings and handed out

The House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act on June 29 by a vote of 267 to 117, the biggest step Congress has taken on children’s online safety in nearly three decades. The package would rewrite the rules for how platforms treat users under 18: new parental controls, restrictions on the

The number moved in the wrong direction. Child drowning deaths in the United States climbed from 756 in 2019 to 865 in 2024, a reversal of two decades of progress, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has answered with its first updated drowning prevention guidance in seven years. The timing lands mid-summer for a reason.

The holiday weekend came with a side of recall notices this year. On July 2, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a wave of recalls aimed squarely at the baby aisle: loungers and swings that violate federal safe sleep standards, nursing pillows that can block an infant’s breathing, and tens of thousands of light-up toys