🌟 Is Your Child Good with Money?
Plus, a new 8-year screen time research report has finally been published!
Jed Baker
August 23, 2026
🌟 SCREEN/LIFE BALANCE
An Eight-Year Study Just Complicated Everything You Think You Know About Screen Time
For the better part of a decade, researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland tracked children from early childhood through adolescence, measuring screen time alongside cognitive development at multiple points. What they found stopped a lot of people in the field cold: kids who spent more time on screens actually tended to show better cognitive processing as teenagers, not worse. The finding runs directly counter to the prevailing narrative that has shaped parenting conversations around technology for years, and the researchers are careful about how they frame it. They are not arguing that more screen time is simply better. What the data suggest is that the type of screen activity matters enormously, and that digital activities involving active problem-solving, creativity, learning, and genuine mental engagement may be doing something fundamentally different to a developing brain than passive consumption does. The distinction the study points toward is less about minutes and more about what is happening in those minutes.
The practical implication for parents is less a green light and more a useful reframe for a conversation that has been stuck in the same place for years. The question worth asking at home is not "how long has my kid been on that device" but "what are they actually doing on it." A child building something in Minecraft, editing a video, learning to code, or working through a puzzle game is having a cognitively different experience than one scrolling short-form video with autoplay running. Both involve a screen, but the research increasingly suggests they do not involve the same brain. The researchers put it plainly: we should not regard screen time solely as harmful, but instead find balance and actively encourage children to use devices in ways that promote thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. That is a more demanding standard than a timer, but it is also a more honest one.
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🌟 FINANCES
Most Parents Think Kids Today Are Worse With Money Than They Were. They're Also Not Doing Much About It.
A new survey of 1,000 American parents and grandparents released this week by Wealth Enhancement found that 53% believe children today are less financially prepared to manage money as adults than they were at the same age. The concern is widespread and cuts across generations. And yet the same survey found that more than half of respondents have never opened an investment account for their child, and the majority identified avoiding impulse purchases and overspending as the hardest money lesson to actually teach. There is a gap here that most parents will recognize immediately: the worry is real, but the action has not caught up. Part of what makes financial education so hard to pass on is that it tends to require a kind of ongoing, low-stakes practice that daily family life doesn't naturally create. Kids learn to spend long before they learn to save, and they learn to save long before they develop any intuition about how money can work for them over time.
What the research on financial literacy in children consistently shows is that the conversations matter more than the formal lessons. Kids who grow up in households where money is discussed openly, where parents name trade-offs out loud, explain why they chose one thing over another, or involve children in small real decisions about spending and saving, develop meaningfully stronger financial instincts as adults than those who received no exposure at all. The arrival of Trump Accounts this summer, federal investment accounts seeded with $1,000 for eligible newborns, has given some families a concrete starting point for exactly those conversations. But the survey data suggests the bigger gap is not the account itself. It is the ongoing, unglamorous habit of talking about money at home as something real, not something to shield children from until they are old enough to figure it out on their own.
🌟 TLDR
How to Help Your Kids Make Friends at a New School — The Associated Press offers practical advice for helping children build friendships after starting at a new school, while encouraging parents to gradually step back so kids can learn to navigate relationships independently.
How to Make the Most of Parent-Teacher Conferences During Back-to-School Week and Beyond — The Los Angeles Times explains how parents can use brief conversations with teachers to establish trust, ask better questions, and create a stronger foundation for the school year.
Higher-Income Families More Likely to Enroll Kids in Organized Sports — A new AP-Ipsos survey finds that about half of U.S. parents with school-aged children say their kids participate in organized sports, with participation substantially higher among higher-income families.
The Back-to-School Reset — Parents looks at the pressure families feel during the annual return to school and makes the case for easing into new routines rather than expecting everyone to be perfectly organized from the start.
When Parents Are Stressed, Kids Get More Screen Time, Study Finds — New research suggests that children's screen use can rise alongside parental stress, highlighting how family technology habits may be shaped by the pressures parents themselves are experiencing.
