Oh My Tech!

Sarah told parents BeReal was safe. She had good reasons: no filters, no likes, no followers, no ads, and critically, no direct messages. No inbox meant there was no door for a stranger to knock on. That was a real structural protection, not a promise or a policy.

Then BeReal added messaging in 2023. Then ads in 2025. Then a creator program. Then it got acquired by a mobile games company for roughly half a billion dollars.

The advi...

There are videos on my channel that will never exist. Not because they were bad ideas, but because one of my kids said no. When the word "family" is in your brand name, that is not a small thing to give up. I killed them anyway.

This week I am walking through what about 10 years of asking my own kids for permission before publishing actually taught me, and almost none of it is what the internet will tell you.

We get into why "is th...

Your fitness tracker is collecting dust and your habit app is buried in a folder. You are not alone, and it is not your fault. Most health technology assumes that access to data will change your behavior, and humans simply do not work that way. What does work is turning it into a game.

This episode is a practical tour of the gamification of health: the points, badges, streaks, and leaderboards that get people moving, and how to use...

I know how to check my son's browsing history. I have shown thousands of people exactly how to do it. And I have let months go by without checking it once.

This episode is not a tutorial. It is the honest version. Six tech parenting decisions I would make differently, from the parental controls I loosened for a trip and never fixed, to the Discord promise I kept when my gut said not to, to the consequence I announced and never enfo...

I've been finding my people online since 1994, and I've never once gone looking for a community on purpose. Once I was looking for a boy. Once I was looking for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This episode is what actually works instead: how to tell what a room is really for before you invest six months in it, why you only ever need four usernames, and why lurking counts — for months, for years, however long you need.

Plus the two ...

Twenty-six states now require schools to ban or limit phones, and no two are
doing it the same way. What your state actually requires, what happens in an
emergency, and how to talk to your kid before day one.

Covered: the three tiers of state law and where yours sits, why enforcement
varies school to school, the emergency plan most families skip (a family code
word and a pre-chosen meeting spot), what kids are alrea...

So, your kid is officially a teenager now.

You know exactly what that means: the parental controls that used to work flawlessly are suddenly useless. Your teen is fighting you on every single restriction; they’ve probably discovered at least three workarounds you didn’t know existed, and phone time has turned into a daily household battle.

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