Do you remember the last time you checked the nutrition facts on food with attractive and child-oriented packages? Be sure to do this next time you shop, because not all that glitters is gold. “Yale Study Finds More Licensed Characters and Other Packaging Promotions Used to Market Less Nutritious Foods to Kids,” according to ArticleAnt.com.

According to a study conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity (Yale University), from 2006 to 2008 “the number of products with youth-oriented cross-promotions increased by 78%,” and “only 18% of products met accepted nutrition standards for foods sold to youth,” Public Health Nutrition informs us in its March 2010 issue.

Don’t allow promoters and advertisers to pull one over on you! Driving Kids, an online game for the smart kids of smart parents, hopes that you act smart. The next time you see attractive snack packaging with a character your children adore, don’t hurry to put it into your shopping cart: be sure to find out what’s really inside the packaging first!

9news.com published the article “Advice for parents who post kids’ pictures online.” FoxIllinois.com shared content supplied by SpringfieldMoms.org, giving “some tips and resources to help you keep your kids safe” in the article “Cyber Space Safety Tips.” The Christian Science Monitor focused on the problem of parent and teacher responsibility for children’s Internet safety, wondering “Whose job to teach kids about it?”

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We keep a close eye on this topic, don’t worry: we’ll keep you informed. On an optimistic note, we offer you and your children an Online Safety Quiz: your kids will receive useful tips for improving their online behavior.

What aspect of online safety for kids would you like us to cover? Let’s work together!

We think our educational and fun online game may be used as a way to reinforce a friendly and cooperative relationship between fathers and their children. By the way, just how many fathers do you know who don’t like skateboards, scooters, cars, and other high-speed things on wheels? We suppose that every father, to some extent, is a “driving” father. So we think that Driving Kids is the perfect online game for kids to get closer to their dads!

Dads, we kindly ask your opinion: do you prefer to watch your child playing educational online games? Or is it more interesting for you to play together with him or her, competing and comparing results? Please share your experience with us!

While families in the U.S. are engaged in the Let’s Move! campaign (we wrote about this a few days ago, you may find the article here), British families aren’t standing still either. The nationwide U.K. movement Change4Life announced Let’s Dance, a project allowing U.K. families to attend free dance classes this weekend.

“There will be something for everyone with more than 1,400 classes from street dance to Latin, hip hop to disco, at venues across England on March 6 and 7,” according to the press release “Let’s dance 4 free” published on ArticleAnt.com. To get free dance classes, you should book a place, through the project website for example.

If you’re fond of dancing but don’t live in the U.K., or have other plans for the first weekend of spring 2010, you can simply visit www.change4life.com/dance. Here you can find how-to tips from dancing stars, warm-up advice, fun games for dancers, examples of steps from different dance styles, and online video lessons from Diversity, the winners of Britain’s Got Talent. All this useful information is available for free online.

Our discussion topic for today may appear slightly weird, but we ask you nevertheless: what would need to happen to make you get up and dance right now?

This online project was created by 3P Learning for school students aged 5-18. World Maths Day allows participants to “compete in real time to correctly answer mental arithmetic questions in quick-fire 60 second games,” describes voxy.co.nz.

Last year, this online activity brought together about 2 million students from 204 countries. World Maths Day 2010 will try “to set a Guinness World Record for the Largest Online Maths Competition,” said a representative of the event’s creator.

Don’t worry if it is too late for your child to register this year: World Maths Day has big plans for March 2011. And keep in mind: kids are always welcome to improve their skills at fun and exciting math using a free educational online game… Driving Kids!

If being among the best teachers has never been your dream, test yourself to see if you are among your child’s best friends! Driving Kids proudly presents its own light-hearted test.

7 signs you might be among your child’s best friends:
1. Can the time you spend with your child daily be measured in hours?
2. Did you make each other self-made gifts last month?
3. Do you know what your child did at school yesterday?
4. Can you build a house from bricks and win at hide-and-seek?
5. Do you know the name of your child’s favorite doll or action figure?
6. Do you know your kid’s favorite online game?
7. Do you build houses, give names to toys and play online games together?

If this describes you and your child, many parents might be eager to follow your example. If you answered “No” more frequently than “Yes” – don’t despair! You can start making the situation better right now, at least as far as children’s online games and together

What do you think is more expensive for parents: to pay for kindergarten or for university? In China, for instance, EducationNews.org writes that “kindergarten costs more than college.” According to Chinese parents and teachers, it is hardly possible “to find a reputable kindergarten in Beijing that charges less than 1,000 renminbi ($150) a month, which is a quarter of an average salary in the capital.” At the same time, “tuition and accommodation at Peking University, the country’s best” require a little bit more than $100 per month.

Unfortunately, high childcare costs would seem to be typical nowadays not only for China. “Childcare costs in England, Wales and Scotland are continuing to rise, a survey by the Daycare Trust suggests,” the BBC informs us. For example, “in Wales, nursery fees for children aged two and above rose by 11.3%.”

Sure, childcare and education have never been the cheapest things in the world. But should it be really so expensive nowadays? And what could you propose to make these services more accessible?

“Parents to get online access to kids’ marks, attendance records,” the Sault Star informs us. Parent Assistant, an online program, will allow parents to “log on and view a student’s attendance records, credit accumulation, mid-term and final marks.” This novelty affects students under 18 in secondary schools under the charge of the Rainbow District School Board (Ontario, Canada). Representatives of the board said that the purpose of this initiative is “to engage parents in conversations with their children about how school is going.”

What do you think, should these officials take student attitudes about this move into consideration? Should elementary schools offer a similar service for parents? And, from another point of view, should an educational online game implement similar features? If we were to introduce a special parental account on Driving Kids, allowing parents to keep an eye on their children’s activities, messages, achievements and so on, would you use these features? Please share your thoughts with us!

As The Guardian writes, researchers from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) in the U.K. are following about 19,000 children from infancy to school. This longitudinal survey has brought many interesting results this year, and one of them showed that “…children whose parents read to them every day at the age of three were more likely to flourish in their first year in primary school, getting more than two months ahead not just in language and literacy but also in maths.”

If you feel sad that you haven’t given your kids enough care and attention, don’t forget that you always have the chance to work off your guilt, at least in part. One way might be to show children opportunities for self-development using computers and the Internet. Let them know about educational websites and free educational games. And don’t forget to play online together!

One of the campaign’s components is to make sure that children engage in physical activity. While they need one hour of active play daily, “…8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 ½ hours to using entertainment media including TV, computers, video games, cell phones and movies in a typical day,” as reported on the Let’s Move! website.

We undoubtedly agree that the situation described above is abnormal and extremely unhealthy. But if we try to solve it by keeping children off the computer, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Parents, teachers, and others whom children trust are still able to turn a “bad” computer into a useful educational tool.

Ultimately, we have to face the truth: prohibiting a child from using computers is hardly an accomplishable mission in the 21st century. From our point of view, playing free educational games for a few minutes a day isn’t the worst-case scenario for kids’ computer use. Thus, we would love to invite the First Lady and her daughters to check out an educational game for kids called Driving Kids.

Might the First Lady decide that playing educational games is a worthy way for children to use computers? Would she allow her daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha, to spend some free time on Driving Kids? If her answer to at least one of our questions is positive, it would most likely be one of the most important and significant appraisals that any online game for kids has ever had.

P.S. By the way, our fidelity to the concept of moving is pretty clear: we are Driving Kids, aren’t we?