The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everybody!  I'm Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel. In this video, I'm going to tell you why I chose the name Marble Jar for my YouTube channel and blog. If you've seen my channel trailer, you'll know that my primary interest is in parenting in a world of constant internet access and using technology to help. But I also have a bunch of other curiosities and wanted to create a blog or channel that wasn't super limited and also reflected some things that I felt were important.  I decided to name my blog Marble Jar and today I'm going to share the 4 reasons I picked that name.  Visual -  The first and most obvious reason is that it is super visual. In other words, when I say Marble Jar, it is almost impossible for you to not generate an image of jar of colorful marbles in your mind. That visualization makes it easy to remember and, because marbles are usually multicolored, it's a fun, vibrant image to carry around in your head. Plus it'...

Hi, everyone!  I'm Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today we are going to going to talk about the discussion you should be having with your teenaged boys about Noodz - the term for racy photos on the Internet.  Listen up, parents of middle school and high school boys!  You HAVE to have this talk with your kids. If you've already done it -- good job!  If not, let's talk through some of the points you should make.  First of all, let's just acknowledge that this is happening. Boys are asking for Noodz and girls are sending them. I know you'll be shocked to hear that the reverse is rarely true. The term Noodz or just nudes covers a range of photos that includes actual nudes to just compromising ones with more skin showing than usual.   Originally I had combined girls and boys in one post and then I realized that I had way too much to say, so I split them into 2 separate posts. There might be a little repetition for those of you who have o...

Hi, everyone!  I'm Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today we are going to going to talk about the discussion you should be having with your teen girls about Noodz - or sending racy photos on the Internet.  Listen up, parents of middle school and high school girls!  You HAVE to have this talk with your kids. If you've already done it -- good job!  If not, let's talk through some of the points you should make.  First of all, let's just acknowledge that this is happening. Boys are asking for Noodz and girls are sending them. I know you'll be shocked to hear that the reverse is rarely true. The term Noodz or just Nudes covers a range of photos that includes actual nudes to just compromising ones with more skin showing than usual.   There are 2 things I'd like to change about how these conversations usually happen. First of all, we tend to have these conversations AFTER something has happened. That's okay -- that conversation is important t...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to share my technology solution for the Internet issues we face in my house with 2 teenagers.  There are really two issues that I wanted to address.  The first is that now that my kids are a little older, I needed to /filter out adult content/.  Even if they weren't actively searching for porn, it was way too easy to stumble on inappropriate stuff on the Internet. The second issue is that, like many teens, my kids were becoming entirely /too dependent on screen time/.  They were ALWAYS on their phones.  I felt like they were missing out on things that happen organically when you aren't being entertained constantly: conversation, creativity, and just smelling the roses to name a few.  Okay -- so that should be pretty easy, right?  Just 2 things to control and there were plenty of products available that did exactly what I wanted. But hold up -- whatever s...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to share my secret for how I lock up my kid's cell phone.  Here's the scenario -- you've grounded your kid and taken away their phone. Now - what do you do with the phone?  With some kids you might be able to keep it in plain sight with a stern warning not to touch it. That definitely did not work with my son.  It's possible that he started out with good intentions, but it was just too tempting to have a quick look if he happened to see a notification flash up on the lock screen.  And then the phone was back in his hands again.  Cue a giant mother-son screaming match.  So, I took to hiding the phone.  And it became this somewhat elaborate game of hide and seek. There were 2 problems to this: 1) it took creativity and mental energy to come up with new hiding spots and 2) sometimes my hiding spot was so good that I would actually forget where I put the phone...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to talk about how I handled the year or so before I was ready to give my kids a smartphone.  My kids, who are 15 and 13, both have smartphones now -- for better or worse.  But I thought a lot about what age is what appropriate to give them cell phones.  Middle school seemed like the right timing based on my research, so my son got a cast off iPhone for Christmas his 7th grade year. By the time my daughter reached middle school just 2 years later, the cell phone demographic had shifted somewhat dramatically to much younger, so she got hers within the first 6 weeks of school.  With both of them, they began to gain more independence earlier than that.  In 6th grade, both had extracurricular activities for which I dropped them and then came back to pick them up.  Both were walking the mile to school and back.  Both were allowed to walk into town or to frie...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel. Today I'm going to talk about the controls that Verizon offers under its Familybase product and I how I use it to restrict access for my kids.  There are truly a bewildering array of options out there to limit Internet content and usage. I use a combination of things, but one of the best investments I make is spending $5 a month for Verizon's Familybase product.  Almost every large cellular provider has a service like this and almost every one has a similar cost. I use it for one very simple purpose -- to limit the amount of cellular data my kids can use on a monthly basis. And of course, I didn't figure this out until AFTER I had a shocking cell phone bill (or 2).  My kids use data-hungry apps like Netflix or YouTube. They didn't have a sense of how much data that would use initially and frankly, didn't really care since they weren't paying the bill.  I really couldn't afford to hand...

Hi, everyone!  It's Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel. And today I'm going to show you how to turn an iPhone into a dumb phone. I'm assuming that most of you watching this are interested in this for your kid's phone and not your own. But perhaps that's a bad assumption.  A friend of mine came up with this solution when her daughter was making bad choices with her phone. She searched high and low for an actual old school phone and was shocked to find that cellphone providers didn't have this as an option. So rather than go through the hassle of buying a used phone on eBay and convincing her cell provider to activate it, she decided to work with the equipment she already had available.  Okay -- doing this demo is a bit risky for me. But I've backed up all of my data, so here goes. Step 1 - Delete all of the apps possible You guys already know how to do this. You are going to delete all of the apps you can with the press and wiggle methodo...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and this is the second and last video about my experience using the KoalaSafe router to limit screentime and filter content for my kids. If you haven't already, you should watch Part I where I discuss how Koalasafe works and why it's fantastic. In this second part, I'm going to talk about some of the drawbacks and enumerate some of the infinitely creative workarounds my son has employed.  I've been using KoalaSafe for just about a year now to help enforce rules that were theoretically already in place.  Obviously, the rules weren't being enforced well since after installing it, I practically had a family insurrection on my hands.  My kids were furious.  And the level of conflict and stress in the house rose exponentially for 2-3 weeks. My husband was traveling a ton at that time or else he might have just chosen to sleep at the office. It was brutal.  Just to recap from Part I, I keep ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and today I'm going to tell you about my experience using the KoalaSafe router to limit screentime and filter content for my kids. I'm going to do this in 2 parts.  This part will cover what KoalaSafe does, how, and why it's fantastic. When my son first got a cell phone, we put in place a bunch of behavioral rules and limits. We signed a cell phone use contract with him. It stipulated a bunch of things including a one hour limit on screen time per school day, that the phone needed to be docked in the kitchen at night and that he wouldn't be able to use it until he had his chores done.  Honestly, I can't remember if this even worked for a little while. What I do remember was that things started falling apart quickly. Just a quick note about my son -- some kids are rule-followers. He's is most certainly not:  he is sweet and lovable, but also sneaky and a bit of a trickster. Okay -- back to t...

Hi, everyone. Today I'm going to give a quick summary and my thoughts on a book published in 2015 by Sherry Turkle called Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.  I'm a book lover and I'm always reading or listening to several books. I have an eyes-are-bigger-than-stomach relationship with books. My bedside table looks like //this// at all times. I listened to this book on audio and I also got a hard copy from the library. Since I almost exclusively listen to non-fiction books and memoirs, I sometimes find it difficult to follow the author's cognitive organization, so I try to have a hard copy to look at as well.   Just to be clear, I'm not a book reviewer.  I'm mostly interested in sharing a brief summary and thoughts.  Some people don't have the time or inclination to read the entire almost 400 page book, but are interested in a summary. Others might be intrigued by this synopsis and seek out the book to learn more. Either way...

Last weekend I binged watched 13 Reasons Why.  My 13 year old daughter had already blown through it and I promised her (and myself) that I would watch it to discuss. Wow. I have a lot of thoughts -- I'll talk through some of those thoughts today.  There is a lot of controversy swirling around Netflix's recently released teen drama about a high school suicide and the incriminating audiotapes she left behind. Here's the plot in a nutshell - Hannah Baker, a junior in high school, dies of suicide. She leaves behind 7 audio tapes on which she reveals the 13 reasons (and the 13 people) "responsible" for her suicide. She has left instructions for the tapes to pass to each of the 13 people.  We follow her friend and crush, Clay Jensen as he listens to the tapes and navigates the heavy emotions, misdeeds, cruelty, and cover-ups that led up to and follow Hannah's death.  Tough topics, right?  And that is without digging into the "13 reasons why" which...