How to Manage your Family’s Screen Time this Summer
Summer break from school is a time for relaxation and unwinding from a long academic year for our kids, teens, and their caretakers. Screens (like tablets, televisions, smart phones, computers, etc.) can be go-to entertainment sources to engage our children’s attention for extended periods of time. Continued research has demonstrated the potential negative impacts of long-term/chronic screen time.
How can we help manage our children’s screen time exposure and consumption while they’re at home, especially when their days are less structured and there’s more free time?
Set clear rules and boundaries
This is a very important first step that clarifies expectations, and minimizes the ongoing enforcement. Controlling access to their devices is the first barrier to controlling their screen time use. Take into consideration their age, their sleep and activity needs, family schedules, family availability of screens, etc. What controls, codes, filters, locks, time limits can be broadly implemented to further establish these expectations.
As appropriate, include your children in the process. Here are some questions to discuss with your spouse and/or children to begin outlining your home’s standards for screen time.
1.Collaboratively, how can our children feel more in control of the boundaries set?
2. Are there certain apps/games they’d like more time to engage with, and less/none with others?
3.What are the ways the family can “earn” more screen time, or how do members understand when screen time privileges get taken away?
Encourage Outdoor Activities and Creative Play
As part of expectations, activities in the backyard, local park, and/or pool and creative hobbies, like drawing, arts & crafts, sidewalk chalk, etc. can be promoted as priorities over screens. Maybe each morning between breakfast and lunch time (weather and safety permitting) our children are expected to be outside.
Revisit family values! Is moving our bodies and/or fostering our creative selves expressed as important at home? How can access to these activities be increased?
Do these activities as a family! Can there be a weekly family visit to the pool? A free drawing period where everyone just engages with any art supplies found in the home? A family hike? A scavenger hunt outside where each member comes up with things that need to be found? This time of year is a fantastic time to re-engage and re-center as a family before the school year begins again.
Responsibilities Come First, Screen Time Second
What is expected of our children when it comes to participating in household responsibilities? Tapping into each members’ strengths, divide household responsibilities. Personal responsibilities can also be included. Have they brushed their hair or their teeth today? Made their bed? Changed their clothes? Establish that these must be completed on a daily/weekly basis before screen time is granted.
Model Healthy Relationships with Screens
Children are being impacted by a lot of external influences when it comes to screen time, pressure from peers to participate, media itself, society, etc. Children are especially impacted by our screen time use as their caretakers! Reflect on what your relationships with screens are. What function does screen time play in your life? Have you found it increasingly more habitual to “wind down” after a long day by scrolling through social media, for example?
Children can struggle to understand the value of screen-free time when they’re being encouraged to read a book or build a LEGO structure while their parents are scrolling on their phone next to them. Demonstrating personal priority in staying active or nurturing creative hobbies helps to set and enforce these expectations with our kids. In our personal free time, are we consuming media or engaging with our children in conversation and actively listening? Modeling a healthy relationship with ourselves, our screens, and each other establishes the stepping stones for our children to develop the same for themselves.
We hope you take in every opportunity this summer to reconnect and or start new family traditions and have FUN together!