Was “digital detox” or “reduce screen time” on your New Year’s resolution list, but it’s not really happening? Maybe you’ve been glued to recent world events or news happening right in Canada and feel like you can’t put the phone down? You aren’t alone.
Helping Kids Build Safe and Smart Digital Habits
There are four main strategies to help kids become resilient to online risks. We can:
Curate our kids’ media experiences;
Control who can access our kids and their data;
Co-view media with our kids;
and be our kids’ media Coaches.
Helping Kids Build Safe and Smart Digital Habits
Parents can focus on helping kids this age explore safely by choosing high-quality experiences, setting clear boundaries, and teaching them how to recognize when something feels off.
There are four main strategies to help kids become resilient to online risks. We can:
Curate our kids’ media experiences;
Control who can access our kids and their data;
Co-view media with our kids;
and be our kids’ media Coaches.
While they’re not going through as much development as tweens, moving to high school at the beginning of this stage – and moving out of it at the end – can be stressful.
When it comes to digital wellbeing, one of the most important things is to establish an ongoing conversation with your children about their online lives. There is no one size fits all; every family can develop strategies that work best for them. But having access to a wide range of tools can help you adapt those strategies at every stage of your kids’ journey. Here are some of the key principles for those conversations:
What are healthy digital habits?
Healthy digital habits are ones that make our tech use manageable, meaningful and mindful. That means they:
There’s no denying that being online can have negative effects, for adults and children. At the same time, we are living in a digital age where being online has become threaded into our everyday lives with various effects, some positive and some not so much.
The Building Better Tech Habits workshop offers parents and guardians actionable strategies for managing screen time, with a focus on the understanding that digital well-being solutions are not one-size-fits-all. The workshop addresses both the opportunities and challenges that digital technology presents to youth and adults alike, and provides a comprehensive and informed perspective on digital well-being.
There is one place getting more attention lately for increasing the quality of conversations: in-person.
I probably could, and maybe should, write about all of the social media changes we are seeing. The troubling updates to Meta’s content moderation policies and the removal of their fact-checking program, the complicated TikTok ban in the US, all of it.