#child-safety

#child-safety

Nobody who has ever met a teenager, or read the news, will be completely at ease with the role of social media in young lives. There are horrific effects, which have been well documented and inadequately addressed ever since the death of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing suicide and self-harm content online. Many platforms, even those that seem anodyne, are purpose-built to spur anxiety, self-doubt, self-harm, anything that delivers attention.

After I had a kid, dogs became so scary,

They are taught no emotional reaction is bad and to speak up about anything that makes them uncomfortable, including hugs. As a result, St Saviour's doesn't have any permanent exclusions and a lower rate of suspensions. Over 9,000 London schoolchildren are receiving lessons up to three times a week on respect, kindness and how their actions make others feel. The project is designed by the global education specialists, Think Equal.

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber on Tuesday responded to social media videos of straphangers either getting their limbs or belongings stuck in prototype fare gates the agency is testing at several subway stations. Lieber, during a Jan. 6 Pix11 interview, addressed clips of subway riders getting ensnared in the new gates most notably a 5-year-old girl who wound up in the hospital after her head got caught in one of them.

Yukai Engineering has taken an unexpected turn with its latest robotics innovation. The Tokyo-based startup unveiled Baby FuFu at CES 2026, a portable fan robot designed specifically for babies and toddlers. This isn't just another tech gadget-it's a thoughtful response to parent feedback and a clever evolution of the company's existing product line. Baby FuFu is essentially a supersized version of Yukai's popular Nékojita FuFu, the drink-cooling robot that captured attention at previous tech shows.

Elon Musk's Grok has sparked backlash after the AI image generator was used to generate nonconsensual sexualized images of real people, including minors. Over the past week, some X users have used Grok to digitally undress people in photos, with the AI model generating fake images of the subject showing more skin, wearing a bikini, or altering the position of their body.

A 28-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment after authorities accused him of causing a crash on the 5 Freeway in Lebec, near Pyramid Lake, killing two children in his SUV on Christmas Day. Jorge Preciado was behind the wheel of a Nissan Rogue traveling northbound near Vista Del Lago Road when he allegedly lost control and slammed into the back of a Toyota Rav4, which was stopped in the median, California Highway Patrol spokesman Officer Carlos Burgos-Lopez said.

YouTube cofounder Steve Chen is one of the latest tech trailblazers to warn against social media's impact on kids. Chen warned in a talk short-form video "equates to shorter attention spans" and said he wouldn't want his own kids to exclusively consume this type of content. Companies that distribute short-form video (which includes the company he cofounded, YouTube) should add safeguards for younger users, he added.

If you're noticing that the children are behaving dangerously or if you're finding that the neighbors' cars are taking up more than their share of spaces, you should alert the parents, through a calm, civil conversation. If I'm reading this correctly, you have a few cars on the street and the neighbors have a few cars on the street, but you don't want them to park on the street.

The poll from FabrizioWard found the national general Congressional ballot currently favors Democrats by a seven-point margin. FabrizioWard is the strategy and consulting firm led by Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward; Fabrizio is a veteran Republican strategist who served as Trump's chief pollster in 2016, 2020, and 2024. The firm's latest figures were released last week on December 18. It was based on 1,000 registered voters across the U.S.

Most parents have been in a situation where a great aunt holds out her arms expectantly for a young child to dutifully provide a hug, and our child doesn't go rushing forward. The dynamics in this situation can be tricky for a lot of people, particularly in families where parents feel likely to be judged and criticized. Nobody wants their relatives to be offended and certainly nobody wants relatives huffing to others that our children are unfriendly or rude or ungrateful.

Amazon has apologised after an error meant it showed a child a 15-rated film by mistake when they had tried to watch a PG movie. The child's parent had paid to rent Diary of a Wimpy Kid from the firm's Prime Video service, but they soon realised it was incorrectly streaming Love & Other Drugs - which the British Board of Film Classification says contains "strong sex and sex references".

My boomer mother thought it was hilarious to mock anything I liked mercilessly, no matter how harmless, not just to me but to anybody around. She embarrassed me out of liking so many things until I finally developed a screw you; I won't let you spoil this for me attitude about it. And no, she wasn't doing me any favors. To this day, I'm reticent about telling people about things I like because I'm half-expecting to be mocked.

As far as I was concerned, Australia's world-first social media law aimed at preventing children under 16 from accessing social media apps was already a success. But this week, as the ban took effect, my son wasn't so sure. Access to his accounts remained largely unchanged. Many of his friends were in the same position. Across the country, the rollout has been uneven, as social media companies try to work out how to verify kids' ages.

According to California law, an electric bicycle is a bicycle equipped with fully operable pedals and an electric motor of less than 750 watts of power. California has established three classes of e-bikes, which the DMV describes as follows: Class 1: A low speed pedal-assisted electric bicycle equipped with a motor which provides assistance only when the rider is pedaling and ceases to provide assistance when a speed of 20 mph is reached.

AI preemption would not apply to local infrastructure. That's a separate issue," Sacks wrote. "In short, preemption would not force communities to host data centers they don't want.