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"Holiday shoppers will mob the malls this weekend. Some of them are shopping for children. Some of them are children. This time of year reminds us of a question facing parents year-round: When and how should children learn to be consumers?"

"A change in the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) means that children under the age of 13 can be shown ads targeted toward them when they're online. This could lead to Facebook lowering its age of admission. Drafted in 1998, well before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks burst onto the scene, the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday updated COPPA. The amendments work to protect children online, noting that certain information cannot be collected without parental consent, such as geolocation information and photos. However, the act also notes that it's now OK to advertise to children under the age of 13 (which is Facebook's minimum age requirement):"

"In the summer of 2013, three women fanned out into metropolitan Boston and, for two months, spent their weekdays dining alone at fast food restaurants. They ordered meals and slipped into seats as discreetly as possible, so as not to arouse suspicion. Then they began to spy. They were looking for groups of diners that included an adult and at least one child under the age of 10. The three women, academic researchers from the fields of pediatrics, child development, and anthropology, needed to get close enough to their subjects to notice changes in facial expressions and tones of voice. They took copious notes. Their assignment was to observe, in the minutest detail, how children and their caregivers interacted with their personal mobile devices and also with each other. The resulting study was groundbreaking; it was the first to explore how parents were using personal devices around children. And its headline discovery was disturbing: The more caregivers were absorbed by their smartphones, the more harshly they treated the children they were with."

"Last week, a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology found that helicopter parents - those who hover over their children - can diminish their children's ability to regulate emotions and behavior. Concerns like these have spurred a backlash against overprotective parenting, with some parents, psychology experts and lawmakers calling for a return to a more laid-back style of child-rearing, with less parental involvement and more autonomy for kids. (This is, of course, a choice of privilege; in impoverished neighborhoods where children regularly encounter unwanted danger and adversity, few parents would actively choose more risk.) The movement to give children more independence got a boost last month when Utah became the first state to put into effect a "free-range parenting" law."

"Kids like weird things: Yellow sponge-boys, talking doe-eyed ponies, ruddy-cheeked rodents that say only "pika pika," and, especially in the past few years, unboxing videos. Kids' unboxing videos are YouTube series in which children, or in some cases just disembodied hands, take toys out of their packaging and play with them as uplifting music plays in the background. One particularly popular video shows a small boy unwrapping and then assembling a child-size electric car, using plastic tools that would surely fall apart in less practiced hands. He then drives the car down the sidewalk through an eerily empty neighborhood to a playground that is also completely empty, where he plays by himself, presumably because all the other neighborhood children are busy watching YouTube. The video has 267 million views."

"There is no iPhone equivalent for children, and there never has been. For the most part, kids are stuck with their parents' hand-me-down smartphones, and the onus is on the parent to install the necessary parental controls. So, why hasn't Silicon Valley successfully made a phone for children? And if it did, what would such a device actually look like?"

"The Federal Trade Commission revealed today that only 20% of 400 mobile apps aimed at children included any privacy disclosures before or after downloads. The agency said it is investigating whether certain companies have violated laws protecting children online by failing to disclose the types of data gathered through apps and how those data are used. As the year draws to a close, regulators and lawmakers seem increasingly motivated to impose some clarity on the murky world of mobile apps. The FTC is expected to unveil an update to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act to require more transparency on data collection by mobile-industry players soon. In addition, the Department of Commerce will discuss a code of conduct for mobile privacy notifications next week."

Disney's Magic Kingdom. Billed as the Happiest Place on Earth. But how safe are you -- and more importantly, your children -- at Disney's empire in Florida? All theme parks are magnets for pedophiles. But our four -- month investigation found that Disney's hiring practices actually allowed the employment of convicted pedophiles at its parks and resorts. And law-enforcement sources we talked to say Disney is less willing to cooperate with authorities battling the problem than are other parks. Is Disney placing its youngest and most exploitable customers -- your children -- at unnecessary risk? Stay tuned for our ace investigative reporter's troubling report.... Though this isn't a real promo, this was a real story. But it never ran. It didn't because this was an ABC News story, and since 1996, ABC has been a relatively small, financially struggling division of the mammoth Walt Disney Company. David Westin, president of ABC News, killed the story after a bitter clash with the journalists who had nearly completed work on it -- igniting suspicions that the story would have been told, but for Disney's ownership of the network. Especially troublesome is how ABC went about evaluating and killing the story. The whole mess validates the viewing public's worst fears about conglomerate ownership of major news outlets. In this case, an otherwise powerful, prestigious news operation has shown itself incapable of covering -- or unwilling to cover -- a major cultural and economic force in American life.

"The rise of the internet means advertisers have a new set of channels to reach children such as through 'advergames' and social media, but regulation is lacking"

"In the tests carried out by Ofcom earlier this year, children were shown screenshots of Google search results for the term "trainers" and asked whether the results at the top of the page were either a) ads, b) the most relevant results, or c) the most popular results. Despite the fact that these topmost search results were outlined in an orange box and labelled with the word "Ad," they were only recognized as such by 31 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds and 16 percent of 8- to 11-year-olds. Other tests showed that one in five 12- to 15-year-olds (19 percent) believed that if a search engine listed particular information then it must be true, while just under half of children (46 percent) could say for sure that Google itself was funded by ads."

"Back when I was in university, a friend of mine called his parents every single night. That's sweet, you might think. But no, it was a ritualistic, mandatory process that he was required to complete. Before the dawn of the mobile phone, the university send-off would be the start of some semblance of independence for parents' children. That's not so true any more, with our technologically connected world. Arkangel is a Black Mirror episode that conveys the cold, hard reality of helicopter parenting: a term describing over-involved parents that make decisions for their children, solving their problems and shielding them from making mistakes."

"Michael Brennan, who founded the award-winning safeguarding platform tootoot, was himself a victim of cyberbullying at school. "There were too many barriers for me to speak up, especially in high school. It was all happening on places like Bebo and MySpace, where there was no way to tackle it. So, I vowed to find a solution to the problem." Since Michael launched tootoot in 2014, the reporting app has worked with more than 1,000 British schools, with over 400,000 children registered on the platform. Children can log in and report problematic messages to their school or local council, and are assigned a unique number when they log in to report bullying. Schools can keep track of how many times an individual child has experienced bullying, build a chronology, and identify patterns on a dashboard. If they feel it's necessary, they can click to reveal the identity of a child reporting bullying."

"FOR ALL THE FEAR they inspire, school shootings of any kind are technically still quite rare. Less than 1 percent of all fatal shootings that involve children age 5 to 18 occur in school, and a significant majority of those do not involve indiscriminate rampages or mass casualties. It has been two decades since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ushered in the era of modern, high-profile, high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. According to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, just 10 of the nation's 135,000 or so schools have experienced a similar calamity - a school shooting with four or more victims and at least two deaths - since then. But those 10 shootings have had an outsize effect on our collective psyche, and it's not difficult to understand why: We are left with the specter of children being gunned down en masse, in their own schools. One such event would be enough to terrify and enrage us. This year, we had three. Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students' needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete. [Watch educators as they tell us in their own words about what it's like to to teach in an era of school shootings.]"

"Can your child identify a cardinal? A holly tree? Queen Anne's lace? If not, "nature-deficit disorder" might be the diagnosis. It's not life-threatening, by any means. But it can be quality-of-life threatening. Research showing the mental and physical health benefits of being out in nature is mounting. One of the gurus of an international movement to get children back outside - away from their couches and screens   - is Richard Louv.  In 2006, he co-founded the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit aimed at reconnecting families and nature."

"How can parents get children the support they might need while keeping in mind that adolescence is, by definition, a time of identity exploration?"

" Nestlé, Epic Games and other major brands said on Wednesday that they had stopped buying advertisements on YouTube after their ads appeared on children's videos where pedophiles had infiltrated the comment sections. The companies acted after a YouTube user posted a video this week to point out this behavior. For the most part, the videos targeted by pedophiles did not violate YouTube's rules and were innocent enough - young girls doing gymnastics, playing Twister or stretching - but the videos became overrun with suggestive remarks directed at the children."

"An analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the first week of 2019 finds that children's content - as well as content featuring children - received more views than other videos"

"Smartphones and social media may be, in fact, transforming the experience of childhood and adolescence in some ways. But the hard (for many adults to hear) truth is that many of technology's effects on kids have less to do with screen time per se than they do with the decisions grown-ups are making - many of which place children's privacy at great risk. First, there's surveillance. Children are now under intense scrutiny from a young age, from platforms and advertisers, but also parents and other authority figures. Many public schools use online gradebooks, and sometimes app-based communication systems like Class Dojo. Depending on their settings, these systems allow parents to instantly see the score on every quiz, and a record of every time their child is disciplined or praised. Family dynamics vary; these updates may be the catalyst to an important conversation, an invitation to hover or get overly involved in a child's progress, or a prelude to harsh punishment."

"The FTC is taking a hard look at mobile apps targeted at children that may be collecting information without a parent's consent. In this week's Mini Law Lesson, Winston & Strawn's Brian Heidelberger breaks down what you need to know to keep your mobile apps on the right side of the law."

"There was plenty of media-bashing following the tragedy, much of it reflexive and evergreen, from the suggestion that reporters shouldn't name the killer to criticism of reporters for interviewing children. Oddly, there was less of an outcry about the fuzzy facts, many of which were investigators' words, reported accurately. Is that because the news-consuming public now expects a few "i"s to be crossed and a few "t"s to be dotted at first?"