Blogs on Parental Involvement

The video series A Year at Mission Hill has continued to encourage discussion, gather support, and inspire offshoots of wonderful new content, like "Line One, Page One," a compelling and poetic video produced by UK Filmmakers Veez Nixon and Christian Britten for Ashoka's Start Empathy Initiative, as part of a video series to complement Mission Hill. And if you haven't seen it yet, it's also worth a visit to the excellent Prezi on Mission Hill, which continues to expand as more chapters are released.

In the introduction to her new book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, author Emily Bazelon shares the story of when her friends "fired" her in middle school. She was devastated and went home from school disconsolate and in despair. But, she explains, at least she could go home to find solace and separation from the incident at school. It was a different time and place. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat or texting could not trail her home and make the pain inescapable.

For many educators, spring conferences are coming up soon -- if they haven’t already -- and it can be a stressful time of the school year. With summer on the horizon, spring conferences sometimes get squeezed into the end-of-year schedule. To help parents and educators prepare for parent-teacher conferences, we've rounded up a variety of Web resources.

One of the best and most important approaches to take in handling media use among children is for families to sit down together and create a family media agreement.

The virtue of this approach is that it enlists all stakeholders in a conversation and empowers and invites kids and parents to think about what they do with media, when they are on media, how they engage with media and how often they use media at home.