The Connectivity Conundrum
Now that all the college kids in my neighborhood are back at school after the year-end holidays and January terms, I’ve been thinking about parent-child connectivity. (My children are still small, but in our always-on world, I know I’ll have to address this sooner than I might think.) I heard a story not too long [...]
Should Branding Begin at Birth?
[Originally posted on Forbes.com.] I’ve written extensively about brands—personal brands, community brands, conference brands and so on. But I’m certainly not alone. This era is widely regarded as the age of the brand. But most of the personal branding conversation doesn’t focus on the age at which we begin branding; it focuses more on adults [...]
The Future of Education: Constant Schooling
[Originally posted on the Huffington Post.] This is the seventh in a series of 14 posts expanding on Salzman’s forecasts for 2013 in her annual trends report, a program of global communications group Havas Worldwide. This year’s book, What’s Next? What to Expect in 2013, was published on 12/12/12 and is available at 120MBooks.com. Salzman [...]
Here Today, Here Tomorrow?
We put the kids on the bus for the first day of school and stood talking with a few other parents about … tattoos, of all things. We shared stories about why we got one and what it meant. We realized that most of our 30-something peers had a tattoo as well. Our kids had [...]
Trendspotting: Early Bloomers
Recent studies show, alarmingly, evidence of widespread “precocious puberty” among daughters all over the world. The average age of breast budding has fallen significantly since the 1970s, and 7 is now considered within the normal range for pubic-hair growth. As if to prove out those reports comes news of a 10-year-old girl giving birth in [...]
Trendspotting: Rx for Zzzs
Always a hot topic, the problem of insomnia factored heavily in our 2011 American Audit; it turns out people are carrying the problems of their days into their (sleepless and worry-filled) nights. In the U.K., too, one in three is plagued by sleep problems, now the most widely reported mental disorder. Mothers, it seems, are [...]
Informed Consent
My husband and I are both on Facebook and share many—but not all—of the same online friends. I’m generally a more prolific user of social media than he is and update my Facebook status more often, with text, photos and location-based check-ins. I know that his universe of friends includes co-workers, friends and clients, so [...]
Stuff Dads Say
This is the fifth in a series of five. See Euro RSCG Worldwide PR’s latest white paper, “Male in U.S.A.,” for more analysis about the state of men in America today. If you’ve been searching for parenting advice on the Internet lately, you might have noticed the huge number of pontificating papas. With the male [...]
Oversimplifying the Pill
In her already renowned Nov. 28 New York feature “Waking Up from the Pill,” writer Vanessa Grigoriadis equates the birth control pill to “magic,” but with a catch—although it promises, she professes, “eternal youth” to women, it also causes them to delay starting a family until they discover that they have indeed waited too long. [...]
Booting Up
This is the fifth in a series of 12 posts expounding on the 2011 forecasts in the annual trends report from Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR and an internationally respected trendspotter. Watch out in 2011 for the return of skin-thickening boot camps to toughen up kids and employees for the rigors of the [...]
Digital Learning Curve
The iPad is all the rage. It’s going to save the publishing world. It’s going to revolutionize how we entertain ourselves. But it might also change how we and, more important, tomorrow’s leaders learn. A few months back, our office received an iPad to test. I took it home. Instantly, my 3- and 4-year-old kids [...]
To Stay Connected…or Not to Stay Connected?
I’ve recently returned from parents’ weekend at Penn State University, where my oldest daughter is a freshman. In the seven weeks since she left home, we’ve Skyped a few times, texted and had the occasional phone call. (The phone calls generally come at random times as she’s crisscrossing the massive campus.) I’ve tried mightily to [...]
Connected Yet Detached
We’ve all known people who seem to be living vicariously through their children. But now there is a whole new generation that has taken that concept one step further: They are living vicariously through technology. Ironically, in doing so they are really living anything but vicariously. This is something I’ve observed, here and there, over [...]
Who’s Watching the Kids?
Many people breathed a huge sigh of relief when 16-year-old Abby Sunderland was rescued on the open seas. We immediately knew she was OK because when her quest to become the youngest person to sail around the world ended, the media covered it extensively—and Abby blogged about it…in real time. Was anyone surprised, then, at revelations that [...]
An Ounce of Prevention, or a Pound of Anxiety?
My husband and I gave our kids all their vaccines throughout their childhood and never had any regrets. Part of our rationale stems from my having worked with vaccine manufacturers and pharma companies throughout my career, and I have spoken with parents who actually lost their children to benign illnesses such as chicken pox before [...]
Should P&G Pamper Parents?
As a mother and devoted Pampers user, I was understandably concerned when I heard that the new Dry Max version of the Pampers Swaddlers and Cruisers diaper lines might be causing severe diaper rash and even chemical burns on babies. As a public relations professional, I was surprised and disheartened by the tone of Procter [...]
The Transformation of American Youth: From Teenager to Teenagent
Originally posted on the Huffington Post. Would it be an exaggeration to say teenagers are running popular culture? We don’t think so. And, if anything, we’re willing to up the bet. Take a look at teenagers today—their habits, their purchasing power, their mastery of media—and momentarily suspend your belief in the stereotypes or hollow assumptions [...]
Rethinking Teen Rebellion
If you google “teenage rebellion,” you get a gazillion sites that explain how to cope with, prevent or quash it. You even get advice about how to medicate it—a couple of years ago, bloggers began talking about “oppositional defiant disorder,” though most of the response to that diagnosis was highly critical. What seems to have gotten [...]
Let’s Move!
creativecommons.org/by Ed Yourdon While listening to NPR recently, my disappointment grew as callers complained about Let’s Move, a new government-sponsored initiative that aims to conquer childhood obesity and general poor health. One person said something to the effect of, “We’re trying to make children too skinny,” while another said, “Our culture only likes thin people.” An [...]
Comedy Gone Too Far
I’ll start off this commentary by saying that I have a love/hate relationship with the television show “Family Guy.” While it is very often clever and absurdly humorous, I almost always wind up shutting it off because the humor usually goes too far and crosses the line into offensive…for me, anyway. So it was no [...]
Snow Business in the Age of Facebook
Speaking from the snow-bound city of Pittsburgh, nowhere has social media been the bearer of the now-prized real-time news and an exemplar of the trend toward hyperlocal news than during the blizzard of school closings and delays that have rocked our lives in the past week. One of my most vivid childhood memories comes to [...]
