Family Guidelines to inform your tech decisions!
Your One Step:
✓ Create a family approach to tech! Spark collective action by sharing this blog post with parents in your local community to start a conversation.
Parenting is hard enough without having to parent devices and incessant requests for tech and time on screens! But here we are - tech is part of our lives! Our secret weapon: choice. We get to choose how, when and where we use tech in our families and communities.
Going back to school is one of the annual transition points when it can be helpful to re-assess your family's tech habits and re-commit (or try out) new healthier tech habits. But you don't have to do this alone!
Our Family Guidelines help TK-8th families keep tech in check so it doesn't crowd out essential in-real-life activities - like a good night’s sleep, free play with friends, regular family time, and physical activity. Families can use these guidelines to help inform choices around how tech is used at home.
Spark collective action with other parents in your community!
To make this easier, consider making tech choices like the above as a group - with your child's friends, neighbors, classmates or grade! When families implement tech choices in coordination with other families, we can make positive changes to how we navigate tech in our daily lives.
Consider sharing these guidelines with parents in your hyper-local community - as a starting point to react to and spark collective action. Could you all agree to these (or similar) guidelines? What tech use decisions can your group coordinate to help take the pressure off kids and parents?
Tech use is a social beast so the more we can huddle up with those in our social orbit to find common ground and develop similar rules and limits, the smoother for all!
Are you a school administrator?
Community guidelines help parents and caregivers build healthy tech habits at home. By making good practices a community norm, schools ease the burden on individual families to manage tech decisions alone. Schools can adopt (or adapt as they wish) our Family Guidelines to provide concrete recommendations that support healthy tech boundaries for their community.
For more information on how schools can help inform and guide community tech norms and habits,, check out our webpage about how school leaders can roll out these Family Tech Guidelines. If you're a parent, consider sharing this link with your school administration!
Are you in Marin County?
Curious what adopting tech guidelines as a community looks like? Kids IRL (in real life) is our Marin County-wide coordinated effort to keep digital tech in check and roll it out more slowly to our children. Through our Phone Pact, Family Guidelines, school ambassadors and parent ed events, we are working to adopt healthy tech habits together.
Our blog posts are often inspired by our monthly OneStep newsletters. In our email newsletters we give one simple monthly step towards healthier tech use. To get our tips and updates from ScreenSense direct to your inbox - click here!
To return to Blog Home page to peruse other topics, click here.
Thank you
Harbor Point
Charitable Foundation
for the generous support of our work.
