Frickin’ Fortnite. Your kids won’t stop playing it, and you’re fed up. What do you do? You could join one of the many parent support groups, or make a musical parody to vent your frustrations, or try locking the game consoles in the car and hiding the key (yes, this is really happening).
Or you can play, too.
You may want to spend less time on sites like Facebook and YouTube, but actually doing it can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. HabitLab is an open-source project from Stanford that attempts to make cutting back on habit-forming sites a little bit easier.
Even just a couple of years ago, the message to new parents was pretty clear: Screens, for the most part, aren't good for kids, so stay away. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended that kids not experience any screen time until at least age two, and then after that, they suggested keeping it very limited.
When I was a child there weren't many options for entertainment after school or on weekends: I could walk to a friend's house. I could watch TV on our 13 fuzzy channels. Or I could read. And so I read, and read, and read -- hours and even whole days would pass with no interruptions. I didn't have any choice but to concentrate.
The countdown makes me gasp every time. Ten seconds until the next episode of whatever show my daughter is watching. Nine seconds. Eight. Seven. Six.
There are a lot of numbers you have to keep in mind when you're raising a kid: Their height and weight. How many millilitres of milk they're drinking, at first, and then how many fruits and veggies they're eating, how much outdoor play they're getting, and of course, how many minutes a day they spend glued to a device.
Parents (understandably) don't want their kids to watch mindless drivel or disturbing cartoons. A redesigned YouTube Kids gives them more control.
Smartphones are a part of life these days, and if your kid doesn't use one now, they probably will before long. But with a great device comes great responsibility. The Smart Talk is a website that helps parents and kids come up with a set of phone rules together, and creates a handy agreement you can print out.
Not long ago, paediatricians recommended limiting the amount of time kids spend on phones and tablets to just one or two hours a day, with toddlers getting none at all. That has changed, and now parents are supposed to make sure kids have a healthy relationship with their devices. Where do you begin? Here are a few ways to approach the task.
Any time a new technology is introduced, it disrupts values, routines and behaviours. This goes back well before the printing press replaced oral histories or the telephone replaced face-to-face conversations, but is evident today in our regular habits of checking our smartphones for notifications. Kids are growing up with the expectation of auto-playing streaming videos and having access to our phones when we need them to be quiet.
