Dad and calm-tech nerd 🤓

I have a master's in product and interaction design, and I spent 25 years building and running digital products and agencies before going all in, from 2026, on Balansebarn and Homie, an app for organising everyday family life. Pouring all my energy into helping people through the tricky parts of life is SO much fun. And this site has become my playground for finding new ways to design the reading experience.

So why did I want to make Balansebarn?

We're constantly told that screens are harming our kids, but rarely what actually affects them, or how. And yet some of the most important and hardest work we do as parents is guiding our children through screen time, gaming, social media and AI.

Knowledge has always passed from one generation to the next. But how do you hand your kids tools nobody ever gave you? We're the first generation of parents to have been the experiment ourselves, run by the world's most talented technologists, with us as the product and our attention as the currency.

Technology and what it does to children has had my full attention since I became a dad 15 years ago, and I've guided my daughter through everything it has thrown at each phase of her life. At some point the pile of research and hard-won experience grew too big to keep sharing one parent at a time. So here it is, ground down into digestible portions and concrete advice: short, sourced and always with something you can actually do today.

Things aren't always terribly balanced at our house, by the way. We try and fail like everyone else. That's why I write the way I do: no definitive answers, just information and concrete advice built on what I've read and what has worked for us.

What the name means

Balansebarn is Norwegian, and the name is the mission. “Balanse” means balance, “barn” means children: kids in balance with technology. Not screen-free childhoods, and not childhoods run by screens, but the livable middle where technology has its place alongside everything else.

The way I approach it is probably quite Nordic too. Parenting here leans on trust: kids walk to school on their own, play outdoors in all kinds of weather and get real responsibility early. And when we set a rule, we explain it. Not because everything is up for negotiation (the rule stands) but because a child who knows why carries the rule with them. A child who only hears “because I say so” follows it exactly as far as the door.

That's what you'll find on every page here: a calmer pulse, a reason alongside every rule and small concrete steps towards a family life in balance.