Hi! I’m Dr. Elizabeth Horgan, or Liz. I am the mom of two boys born in May 2020 and April 2022. On any given week you can find me chasing toddlers around the playground, trying to perfect my sourdough recipes, hiking our favorite Georgia trails, and being a PTA mom at my sons’ Montessori school. I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland and went to college in Washington, DC where I met my husband. 

Between undergrad and grad school I spent a year volunteering through AmeriCorps, worked in research at a children’s hospital, and worked at a non-profit as an education researcher. During graduate school, I trained as a researcher in the Cognitive Development and Media Lab and honed my expertise in childhood media use. After finishing my PhD degree in December 2022, I’m currently diving into creating Those Media Moms with Roxy while staying home with my boys. I’m so excited to help families navigate digital media through my combination of research expertise and first-hand experience with my two young kiddos. 

My passion is play. I find children’s play fascinating and am especially interested in play through touchscreen media like apps and games. My master’s degree research explored children’s learning from a science game in an app. My PhD research focused on parent preferences, beliefs, and behaviors regarding children’s digital play. Specifically, I was curious about whether parents view children’s media use as a form of play. Short answer– yes they do! One of our goals at Those Media Moms is to help make media a playful experience for your child, and to encourage you and your child to play together both on and off of the screen. 

I get it. Media is extremely complicated to navigate with young children. It’s constantly changing and feels like there are no rules. We’re all trying to do the best we can with the information we have. With two little ones, it’s especially tough for me to navigate how to offer screen time for my older kiddo while trying to minimize exposure for my younger one. Some days I choose to turn on a show to ensure that my older son will be safely occupied while I cook dinner. Other days it’s offering him the opportunity to wind down and be entertained after a busy and engaging morning. Sometimes we love to turn on a show and cuddle up on the couch together to enjoy some quality time. I recognize that purposefully choosing and using screen time as a tool helps me to be a better mom. 

That’s why we’re creating Those Media Moms. We want you to have confidence and comfort in your media choices. We hope to empower you with research-based, shame-free, knowledge about children’s media use. There are positives and negatives, and just like everything else in parenting, it’s about finding the balance that works for your family. We hope that through this knowledge you will have the confidence to make media decisions that you can feel good about.