Blog Posts by Common Sense Media

Kids, Games, and Money: This Holiday's Hot Combo

When my son first got into Club Penguin, I liked that the game was based on collecting and spending virtual coins. When he accumulated enough money, he'd splurge on cool outfits for his penguin and furnishings for his igloo -- and I thought he was getting a solid lesson in the law of supply and demand. Now he's moved on to games that offer in-game purchase options -- for real money -- and he's left those quaint virtual coins in the dust.

From Smurfs' Village to Farmville, games are giving kids a crash course in economics, but I want my kid's money lessons to come from me -- not a blue Smurf. I've discovered what the game companies already know: It's a slippery slope from virtual money to real.

This holiday, developers are seriously ramping up efforts to turn virtual cash into real profits. Just look Facebook's pre-paid credit card, which lets users "buy" cyber items within its games. For sale at Target, Walmart, and other

Save Like Scrooge, Give Like Santa

I'm the first to admit I'm frugal. This year, I'll have to pinch pennies like the Grinch to make it through the holidays with my bank balance in the respectable zone (and my kid in his happy place). The must-get items on my son's wish list -- from the Kinect to Super Mario Galaxy 2 -- are severely cramping my style.

Time to get my Scrooge on. After scouring the Web, chatting up my most thrift-minded friends, and compiling all of Common Sense Media's recommended lists of free stuff, I think I've hit on a plan that will reduce my outlay on gifts and entertainment -- and still deck out our holidays with the latest media.

You too can have a low-cost, high-tech holiday, complete with games, movies, creative activities, and educational enrichment. Steals and deals that are both kid and wallet friendly, including free activities to do over the break.

Watch now. Take advantage of the

The Secret to Choosing Holiday Gifts for Kids

Who among us hasn't spent hours online, trying to pick the perfect gift for the kids in our lives? More often than not, our efforts find their way into the giveaway bin.

My biggest misfire came in the form of an anthropomorphic robot, at the Christmas I like to refer to as "RoboSapien's Revenge." For those of you unfamiliar with RoboSapien, he's a black and white robot whose movements -- dancing, grunting, and throwing his hat -- are determined through a series of remote control commands. The ideal thing -- I thought at the time -- for a precocious 6-year-old.

But RoboSapien was a colossal flop. His remote controls were too complicated, and his robotic antics were no match for my son's obsession at the time: Bionicles. These build-your-own toys offered the kind of imaginative play that RoboSapien lacked -- and that 6-year-old boys love: a mysterious backstory, secret codes, "good guys" and "bad guys," and the ability to

Harry Potter Books, Movies, and Games and When to Try Them

Like so many families, we waited impatiently in line for every new release and fell asleep many nights with a dog-eared volume on our chests. My son once convinced me that a Hogwarts-style English trifle was what would complete our Christmas dinner. We've discussed, at length, the flavors of Earwax, Sausage, and Rotten Egg when we discovered Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans -- before trying them just once more. We laughed at Ron, we cried with Harry, and, dare I admit it, we even pretended to speak Parseltongue.

And then a new spell was cast. I'll never forget the look of disappointment and sadness on my husband's face when our son proudly boasted that he could read the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, all by himself. It was the end of an era. My son was maturing, but would he be able to handle the decidedly mature themes of the final book?

Thank goodness for the two-part movie finale,

Social Networking Gets Really Personal

Social networks connect kids online. But a new technology takes connecting a step further -- to face-to-face meet-ups. New programs called location-sharing use geographic information from your smart phone to connect people to specific places, as well as to each other. You may have heard of some of the most popular ones: Loopt, foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. Most of these programs are designed for smart phones, but they can also be accessed on the Web. Once you join, you can post your actual physical location.

And that's what makes location sharing a no-go for kids and teens. These programs bring up two big issues: safety and privacy. Since they let you post your location, they can expose your kid's whereabouts to anyone they "friend" -- or, in some cases, to any other user of the program. Also, advertisers are already using social mapping to target users with ads and incentives to visit their businesses (most of which are

Looking for the best scary movies for your kids? Our picks include some good "starter" scares for younger kids, as well as truly chilling classics for older tweens and preteens. Get ready, get set, boo!

Monsters, Inc. The monsters in Pixar's MONSTERS, INC. are more afraid of kids than kids are of monsters. But monsters need to collect kids' screams to fuel their world, and children are getting so hard to scare that the monsters' world is suffering from rolling blackouts. Top scarer John "Sully" Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) and rival Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi) work as hard as they can to break the scream-collection record. But when Randall inadvertently lets a human child into the monster world, the monsters find out what being scared is really like. This is a cute, kid-friendly monster movie; but may give sensitive kids a bit of a scare.

The Nightmare Before Christmas Made in stop-motion animation, Tim Burton's holiday fantasy centers around Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King

Standing in line at the drugstore, I overheard a mother and her preteen daughter talking about the now-infamous racy GQ photos of the Glee stars. "Where did you see those?" asked the mom, her voice straining to stay calm. "Jamie showed me them. They're online, Mom." Her daughter responded with that note of irritation reserved especially for mothers. "They were kind of gross."

The mother looked a bit stumped about what to say next, and then they moved forward to the cash register to pay for the Halloween costumes she had in hand: some sort of superhero costume for her son and what looked like -- wait, it was! -- a Snooki costume for her daughter.

It took everything I had not to butt in. I wanted to ask the girl whether she'd noticed that the boy from Glee was photographed fully clothed, playing the drums, while the girls looked like Playboy bunny wannabes. I wanted to ask the mom whether there just might be some message her kids were getting about boys having super powers and girls

A new report says that teens are averaging more than 3,000 texts per month. That's six an hour -- even in school. How can you make sure your kids are on their best texting behavior?

Texting is becoming the #1 form of communication

When a Florida teen was arrested for savagely beating an eighth-grade girl, he said that rude text messages she'd sent him sparked his rage. This tragic incident mirrors similar stories in which teens' texting becomes hostile.

Cruelty is nothing new. But the anonymity of texting (in fact, the two teens involved in the Florida incident didn't know each other) fosters an environment where kids can say anything. Kids' actions seem detached from the consequences. And let's face it, teens' judgement and impulse control are not yet fully developed. The hostile exchanges, combined with instantaneous communication, can be very destructive.

Billions of text messages are sent every year from our kids' mobile phones. While most kids use