Oh My Tech!

Sarah Kimmel
  • 5.0 (19)
  • Parenting
  • Updated Weekly

The tech podcast for parents who love technology, but don’t have time to keep up! From parents who are just starting out, to those with kids who are grown and flown, and even those kids who happen to be our parents. This is the technology podcast that focuses on using the technology in your life to make it better! Oh My Tech will bring you interviews with folks using tech in unique ways, the latest news or trending topics, and maybe even help you find something to watch. Join Sarah Kimmel as she breaks down tech in ways that anyone can understand! Learn more at https://familytech.biz

  1. 3d ago

    Instagram’s New Teen Limits, and Why You Want to Be the One Who Can Say Yes

    Instagram is about to hand your teenager the strictest version of itself: a two hour daily cap across Instagram and Facebook, a midnight to 6 AM lockout, silent notifications during school hours, hidden like counts, and pauses every hour. All of it on by default, and none of it requires you to do anything. Which sounds like good news until you read the fine print. Every one of those defaults can only be loosened by a linked parent. A teen with nobody attached to their account cannot change a single setting in the entire document. Meta is not allowed to say yes. Somebody has to be. This week: what a consent judgment is and why it matters, every default that switches on and when, the three things the two hour limit quietly does not count, what parent supervision actually shows you (spoiler: a guest list, not the conversation), how Instagram plans to catch finsta accounts, what happens to a 10 year old's account, and the two scripts for having this conversation depending on what your house already looks like. This week's task: ten minutes, their phone, not yours. Sit down and train the feed together. Free one sheet on training your social media algorithm is linked in the show notes. I read 130 pages of court filing for this one, which is genuinely my idea of a good time. I am not an attorney. The One Sheet on how to train your social media algorithm: https://familytech.biz/train

  2. Sep 8

    Fear Is a Business Model: The 3 Questions That Turn a Scary Headline Into a Plan

    A speaker came to my kids' middle school and put a picture of a handgun next to a picture of a smartphone. Then he told a room full of parents those two things were the same thing. He was giving a similar talk to the students the next day, and I told my kids they had my permission to skip it. This week: why fear is a business model and you are the customer, why "just take it away" is a wish rather than a plan for most families, and the three question tool that turns any scary headline into a decision in about 90 seconds. I also get honest about the parts that do not flatter me. What choosing calm costs me in views every single week, why fear creates a faster bond than capability ever will, and the months I spent accepting title suggestions from a scoring tool until I had optimized my own videos out of my own search results without ever noticing. Plus the reframe at the center of the whole episode: a warning makes a kid anxious, a rehearsal makes a kid ready. Same headline, same facts, completely different result sitting in your kid's head. One problem: Fear is a business model, and scared parents are an easier audience than capable ones. One fix: Three questions, 90 seconds, run the moment your stomach drops. One task: Catch one scary headline this week, run it through the questions, and decide what you are going to fix or what you are going to stop worrying about. If you have ever said "I'm just not good at technology," this episode is for you. You are not behind, and you are far more capable of this than anyone has bothered to tell you. New episodes every Tuesday. This is Family Tech powering down.

  3. Sep 1

    The 4 Questions That Replace “Is This App Safe?”

    Sarah told parents BeReal was safe. She had good reasons: no filters, no likes, no followers, no ads, and critically, no direct messages. No inbox meant there was no door for a stranger to knock on. That was a real structural protection, not a promise or a policy. Then BeReal added messaging in 2023. Then ads in 2025. Then a creator program. Then it got acquired by a mobile games company for roughly half a billion dollars. The advice went bad in about eleven months. Nobody noticed for three years, including the person who reported the change herself. In this episode, Sarah walks through the pattern behind why this keeps happening to every "safe alternative" app, using three Augusts of receipts from Instagram. Then she hands over the fix: a four-question check that works on any app, forever, because it asks about features instead of asking for a verdict. Messages, discovery, audience, money. About 30 seconds per app, no subscription, no monitoring tool, no cost. Plus: the one BeReal setting that "is BeReal safe" would never have found, and why "that's not a parenting failure" is not just a nice thing to say. This week's challenge: pick an app you already said yes to, one you approved so long ago you cannot remember approving it, and run the Four Doors on it. Then come tell Sarah which app it was and which door was open. No sponsors on this one.

  4. Aug 25

    Asking Your Kids Before You Post: The Veto, The Undo, and The Handoff

    There are videos on my channel that will never exist. Not because they were bad ideas, but because one of my kids said no. When the word "family" is in your brand name, that is not a small thing to give up. I killed them anyway. This week I am walking through what about 10 years of asking my own kids for permission before publishing actually taught me, and almost none of it is what the internet will tell you. We get into why "is this photo embarrassing?" is the wrong question entirely, and what the right one is. Why the most reasonable sounding question in parenting, "why not?", might be quietly turning your kid's consent into an appeals process. What to do during the years when your kid is genuinely too young to answer. And the counterintuitive move I make when a relative posts my kid without asking, which involves me getting out of the middle entirely. Plus: what Congress and four state legislatures have independently landed on that looks suspiciously like the rule some families were already running at home, and why Matthew McConaughey spent real money on a right your 17 year old already has for free. Three things you walk away with: the veto, the undo, and the handoff. This week's challenge: two searches, about five minutes. Google your kid's name, then reverse image search their face. Do that one first, before you touch a single old post, because it is what a classmate would do. Nobody is asking you to delete a decade. Take a breath. This is a system, not a purge.

  5. Aug 18

    The Gamification of Health: Why Games Work When Willpower Does not

    Your fitness tracker is collecting dust and your habit app is buried in a folder. You are not alone, and it is not your fault. Most health technology assumes that access to data will change your behavior, and humans simply do not work that way. What does work is turning it into a game. This episode is a practical tour of the gamification of health: the points, badges, streaks, and leaderboards that get people moving, and how to use them in a real household without adding one more thing to manage. Sarah covers what gamification actually is and why your brain responds to it, the difference between doing something for a badge and doing it because it has become normal, and the honest truth about how long habits really take to form. Then it is into the tools: Apple Watch rings and family activity sharing, the Fitbit to Google Health transition and what it now costs, Garmin's absurdly generous badge system, Oura's readiness scores and its full price tag, and habit apps including Habitica, Finch, Streaks, and SuperBetter. Plus chore apps that turn dishes into points, and the games that are genuinely exercise: Ring Fit Adventure, Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Zombies Run. Every cost is stated out loud, subscriptions included, and nobody paid for a single mention. The episode closes where it should, with the guardrails: orthosomnia and sleep tracker anxiety, streak stress and how to spot when a tool has flipped on you, and what to watch for when your kid is the one using the app. This week's challenge: pick one tool and use it for seven days. Just one.

  6. Aug 11

    6 Tech Parenting Mistakes I Made, Even Though I Teach This For a Living

    I know how to check my son's browsing history. I have shown thousands of people exactly how to do it. And I have let months go by without checking it once. This episode is not a tutorial. It is the honest version. Six tech parenting decisions I would make differently, from the parental controls I loosened for a trip and never fixed, to the Discord promise I kept when my gut said not to, to the consequence I announced and never enforced. They all fall into three patterns: the knowledge gap, the exhaustion trap, and the commitment trap. I walk through each one, why it happens to basically every parent, and the single fix that actually helps. If you have been quietly carrying some tech regrets of your own, this one is for you. No fear, no judgment, no doom and gloom. Just a conversation about being human at this. In this episode: The three patterns behind nearly every tech parenting mistake Why temporary settings changes become permanent, and the calendar fix What a family tech agreement actually does, and why I still do not have one signed How to walk back a promise about an app without breaking your kid's trust Why fitting the punishment to the crime beats going nuclear every time Streaks, resets, and why I do not set New Year's resolutions Free family tech agreement template: http://familytechzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/techcontract.pdf Subscribe to Oh My Tech for honest, practical family technology guidance every week.

  7. Aug 4

    Lurking Counts! How to Find “Your People” Online

    I've been finding my people online since 1994, and I've never once gone looking for a community on purpose. Once I was looking for a boy. Once I was looking for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This episode is what actually works instead: how to tell what a room is really for before you invest six months in it, why you only ever need four usernames, and why lurking counts — for months, for years, however long you need. Plus the two Facebook groups for the same water bottle that explain everything, and the night my smart lights kept turning off on my husband's game night.

  8. Jul 28

    Your Kid’s School Just Banned Phones. Now What?

    Twenty-six states now require schools to ban or limit phones, and no two are doing it the same way. What your state actually requires, what happens in an emergency, and how to talk to your kid before day one. Covered: the three tiers of state law and where yours sits, why enforcement varies school to school, the emergency plan most families skip (a family code word and a pre-chosen meeting spot), what kids are already doing to get around the pouches, and where I land on whether any of this will work. This week's challenge: call your school — not the district — and ask how enforcement and emergency contact actually work. Then pick your code word and your meeting spot with your kid. Less fear, more capability. Family Tech powering down.

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About

The tech podcast for parents who love technology, but don’t have time to keep up! From parents who are just starting out, to those with kids who are grown and flown, and even those kids who happen to be our parents. This is the technology podcast that focuses on using the technology in your life to make it better! Oh My Tech will bring you interviews with folks using tech in unique ways, the latest news or trending topics, and maybe even help you find something to watch. Join Sarah Kimmel as she breaks down tech in ways that anyone can understand! Learn more at https://familytech.biz

Information

  • Creator
    Sarah Kimmel
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All content is property of Family Tech, LLC
  • Show Website
    Oh My Tech!

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