When Disney+ was introduced last year, it kicked the nostalgia of my adolescence into overdrive. With shows such as Boy Meets World, Lizzie McGuire, That’s So Raven and many others from my youth now at my fingertips (not to mention lots of spare time to view these shows due to the COVID-19 quarantine), I’ve been […]
Continue Reading
Music is a healing balm. When you’re feeling down, depressed or struggling with being locked in your house, to the point of pacing around in your room like a caged cat with a bell tied to your tail (I’m not suggesting that I’m doing or feeling any of those things, mind you, ahem), music can […]
Continue Reading
Someday we will publish an issue of Culture Clips that doesn’t contain the words coronavirus or COVID-19. Alas, not today. Today, it’s hard to find an entertainment, technology or teen-oriented story out there in the vast reaches of the internet that doesn’t have something to do with this virus. Still, talk of beginning to reopen […]
Continue Reading
OK, so your socially-isolated kids have burned through their favorite books, games and streaming TV shows and are now asking … pleading … begging you to let them join in on this thing called a Houseparty. And as a protective parent, you harken back to days past when a house party was a usually teen-filled […]
Continue Reading
We’ve been reporting for a while that social media can bum you out. A new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal bears that out. The study focused specifically on teens, and it found that teen girls that use social media more than two hours a day have higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. […]
Continue Reading
It wasn’t that long ago that everybody from parents to clergymen to U.S. senators were all aflutter about the kid-destroying characteristics of videogames. These days, however, its not so much parents screaming at the kids to turn off the videogames as it is parents urging them to sharpen their button-mashing skills. You know, so they […]
Continue Reading
Movies? TV? Those things are soooo 2015 for today’s youth. YouTube is where it’s at. That’s what Common Sense Media found in its fresh-off-the-presses 2019 “Media use by Tweens and Teens” census. While tweens and teens aren’t increasing their screen time consumption at the rapid pace we’ve seen over the last decade or two, how […]
Continue Reading
Being a tween or teen has probably never been an easy thing. But the pressures faced by adolescents today—especially girls—are amplified in many ways by technology and social media. Author, speaker and regular Focus on the Family Broadcast guest Jessie Minassian has thought a lot about these issues. Her website, Life, Love and God: Where […]
Continue Reading
This past week, Lauren Daigle broke Christian music records as her song, “You Say,” became the longest running No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart. At 63 weeks in the top spot, it has beaten out Hillsong UNITED’s “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)” which previously held the top spot, according to The Christian […]
Continue Reading
They say numbers don’t lie. And if that’s true, then the online gaming world may have a problem on its hands, especially in light of a new study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Before you throw up your hands and digitally turn away grumbling about studies, let me pile on a whole bunch of numbers […]
Continue Reading
This just in: Fortnite Battle Royale, the wildly popular online shooter game, isn’t as wildly popular as it once was. Part of that dip is apparently the fault of Fortnite itself: Players were disgruntled with the tweaks made to the game in recent weeks and moved away from it—at least temporarily. But simple game fatigue […]
Continue Reading
When 13 Reasons Why debuted on Netflix two years ago, many voices offered a strong word of caution regarding the graphic depiction of a teenage girl’s suicide in the first season’s final episode. Experts worried that the scene could act as a trigger for young or emotionally vulnerable viewers. Plugged In reviewer Paul Asay wrote, […]
Continue Reading
You may never have heard the term “burner phone” before. But if you’ve seen a spy movie in the last, oh, 20 years or so, you already know what a burner phone is. Simply put, a burner phone is typically a cheap, disposable, low-tech mobile phone with an anonymous phone number that can’t be tracked […]
Continue Reading
This is the third part of a three-part series examining the connection between our entertainment/media culture and mental health, the latter of which is a growing problem for America’s youth. Last week, Paul Asay unpacked the ways that movies and TV depict characters struggling with mental illness. This week, we focus on what researchers are […]
Continue Reading
Underneath the reviews, the blog posts, the vodcasts and Twitter missives, Plugged In is built on one basic premise: Media matters. The entertainment we consume—the stories we watch and read and listen to and play—impact us deeply, and on levels we might not fully realize. Obviously, the relationship between entertainment and its real-world impact is […]
Continue Reading
About UsEn Español
Privacy Policy/Terms of Use
©1999-2014 Focus on the Family (1-800-A-FAMILY)
PLUGGED IN is a trademark and SHINING A LIGHT ON THE WORLD OF POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT is a service mark of Focus on the Family
apps
newsletter
facebook
twitter