GCP is back! After a brief hiatus to focus on family matters both sorrowful (the loss of my mom) and joyous (my oldest son’s transition to college), GCP is back in action, ready to provide more information, inspiration and resources for parents of African American boys. Stay tuned for regular postings and please tell your friends to visit us as well.

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Happy Labor Day! The end of summer, the beginning of a new school year for our sons, and a great time to focus on how we can help our boys start the year well. Here are some good sites to check out as your family readies for the first days of school:

Back-to-School Tech Questions: Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization which offers great resources for learning about the impact of media (hardware and software) on our children, recently featured “Parents’ Top 12 Back-to-School Tech Questions”, offering parents back-to-school advice, guidance, and solutions for managing technology in school and at home. If you have been wondering what’s the right age for your son to bring a cell phone to school, or whether you should let him bring an iPod to school, or if reading on the iPad or Kindle counts towards his daily reading time, you can find answers to these and other good questions here. The Common Sense Media website, found at www.commonsensemedia.org,is always chock full of interesting and thoughtful parenting tips. Check it out regularly and follow them on Twitter at @CommonSenseMedia.


Back-to-School Organization Tips:
“Nine Steps to a Smart Start”, found here, is a brief but comprehensive guide to helping our children get organized for school and stay organized throughout the year. These tips are courtesy of Great Schools, a national non-profit organization whose mission is “to inspire and support families to champion their children’s education – at school, at home and in their community”. Check out their website at www.greatschools.org; there is a lot to explore on this site.

Back-to-School Educational Websites: GCP’s September 2012 back-to-school post listed several academically focused sites to help us inspire our sons as they started the school year. We’ve just looked over these sites again, and they are still relevant and helpful. You can find “Check Out These Back-To-School Parenting Websites” here.

Any tried and true back-to-school tips that work for your family every year? Share them with us! Here’s to a great school year for our boys, and to our doing all that we can to support them in their efforts.