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A simple exercise for (digital) parenting

August 15, 2020 By Anne 3 Comments

Annie Spratt/Unsplash

This is inspired by all the families in Parenting for a Digital Future, the book I reviewed earlier this week (I also added this as a sidebar in that post for readers’ convenience). It’s a little exercise to explain and expand on the statement I led the review with: “family context eclipses screen time.”

Please customize to make it meaningful to your family. Instead of watching the clock to measure screen time, take a family environmental scan – just you or together as a family. Questions you might consider:

  • What do we value as a family? or What’s important to us?
  • What’s going on in our family these days?
  • What’s happening in our household right now?
  • What’s happening out in the world that’s affecting our family and each one of us individually?
  • What’s going on in our heads (parent’s and child’s)?
  • Only after thinking about some of those, ask, “How can our devices and the apps on them serve us – what we value, what’s going on with each one of us right now and how we’re doing as a family?

There are certainly many other questions parents can ask themselves which point to children’s basic needs, which of course need to be addressed first and foremost. Here are some the authors offered parents back in 2017 in their essay, “The trouble with ‘screen time rules’”: Is my child “eating and sleeping enough? physically healthy? connecting socially with friends and family – through technology or otherwise? engaged in school? enjoying and pursuing hobbies and interests – through technology or beyond?” They continue, “If the answer to these questions is more or less ‘yes’, then perhaps the problem of ‘screen time’ is less dramatic than many parents have been led to believe. The notion of ‘addiction’ to the screen requires particular care, and certainly cannot be determined by simple measures of time.”

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Filed Under: Parenting, Research, Risk & Safety, Youth Tagged With: Alicia Blum-Ross, Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone

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2016 TEDx Talk on
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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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