Handling Screens and Technology as a Family

When should your child get a smartphone? What can you do if your child spends too much time playing video games? How can we protect our kids from the downsides of social media? Join us to talk about parenting and technology with Krista Boan, co-founder of the nonprofit Screen Sanity.

In this episode, we cover:

Digital Health:

• Screen Sanity’s 5 Rules of Thumb.
• Ride, practice, drive” approach for device and app introduction.
• How to handle a foster, adoptive, or kinship placement of a child that has already gone down that slippery slope of too much screen time and tech. How do you establish reasonable boundaries?
• Is it still recommended that parents establish a "no expectation of privacy" policy for online activity? At what age/stage should that start to change?
• How to handle when your family has vastly different rules from your child’s friend’s families when you don’t want your child to feel left out?

Screentime:

• What is a reasonable rule of thumb for how much screen time a child should be allowed by age?
• What is considered screen time?
  • School work?
  • Facetime with family or friends?
  • Drawing or coding games?
  • Social media?
• How do we handle cell phones and tablets when we see more negative behavior from any usage?

Smartphones:

• At what age should a child be given a smartphone? What questions should you ask before you give a child a smartphone?
• What are the alternatives to a smartphone? What are good starter phones?

Video Games:

• How to manage the addictive nature of video games?
• How to strike the balance between limiting the time of video games when this is where many kids socialize.
• Screen Sanity’s Video Game Decision Tree

Social Media:

• What are the pitfalls, and how can we protect our kids?
• When should kids be allowed to be on social media?
• How can parents keep up with what their kids are doing on social media?
• The Social Media Playbook is a parent-child workbook for starting powerful conversations about social media. Families are prompted to dig deeper into the purpose of social media in their lives and question the false standards it places on its users.

Pornography:

• How do we protect our kids and youth from pornography?
• Good Pictures, Bad Pictures book

Screen Sanity has parent guides, training, webinars, and study groups.

This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:

• Weekly podcasts
• Weekly articles/blog posts
• Resource pages on all aspects of family building

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