Balanced Lifestyle for Your Kids: Limit Time Spent on Gadgets

We see it all around us day-in and day-out children are becoming more connected with technology as tech companies wants their products to be integrated to people’s lifestyle. Unfortunately, children have more time to allocate to learn about these latest technologies than adults do, and as I’ve mentioned before – they learn faster than us too! Suddenly people are talking about transhumanism nowadays and this term means humans adopting cybernetic implants for augmentation to become stronger, smarter and better than the average human being.

balanced lifestyle

While that notion is way too far ahead to consider, it would be best to keep yours and your family’s lifestyle tech-free or at least keep exposure to technology minimal. This is especially true for your kids.

Do you remember the 1980s or the 1990s? Kids from that time developed better emotional intelligence and social interaction compared to today’s kids. Various research have been conducted and scientists are astounded to come to an alarming conclusion that our children today suffer depression 30% – 40% higher than we did back in our day due to the nature of technology, particularly on how it is being used in social media.

Children Suffer an Identity Crisis
Kids who use android tablets and other gadgets wander off in virtual space absorbing all sorts of information they can find. The reason why this is happening is due to irresponsible parents, very young kids gets mixed up with older kids who can bypass the parental controls set on their gadgets and are unsupervised by adults accidentally access information not appropriate for their age, and other unexpected factors. Once they begin to learn about pop stars, modern culture, how the world is being polluted and destroyed on a daily basis, etc., then they start to have depression and identity crisis.

balanced lifestyle

They’ll just come home from school or playing with their friends one day and tell you that they want to become ScHoolboy Q or Beyonce or Miley Cyrus. These celebrities sing songs that inspire violence, terrible attitudes towards women, celebrating criminality, unapologetic rampant consumerism, drug-addled, status-obsessed and being hedonistic. This will absolutely turn your innocent child into a deranged lunatic!

Learn and Play with them Together
Think of your children as investment portfolios and each one requires your attention almost on a daily basis. You need to sit down and play online games with them on their android tablet for kdis, guide them through the stuff their playing, ensure that the games do not inspire violence or any negative behavior, and teach them some moral lessons (if necessary). Even more important is when they’ll research information on the web. There are ocassional pop-up ads that might lead them to inappropriate sites that you don’t want them to wander off to. Aside from placing parental controls on their tablet or laptop, do your own manual filtering as well.

Plan Daily Activities
As a safety precaution you can create a daily strategy of pre-planned activities that your child will enjoy doing besides using their tablet or other gadgets. Pediatricians recommend that a maximum of 2 hours screen time per day is enough for your toddler or adolescent kids. But since there are times when they use the android tablet to learn, create art and music, then that could be considered as an exception to the rule. Apparently, kids use screen time in foud different ways according to the The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens:

  • Passive consumption: watching TV, reading, and listening to music
  • Interactive consumption: playing games and browsing the Internet
  • Communication: video-chatting and using social media
  • Content creation: using devices to make digital art or music

balanced lifestyle

Three out of four of these things are actually useful in the mental development of the child, so I’d say, if you were to set a time limit for them using android tablets and other gadgets, then allow them to do so with this in mind.

Here are some activities you can include in their daily lifestyle (for children not ready for school yet):

  • Watch their favorite shows on tv or on YouTube Kids at 9am – 10am, or take them to music lessons or martial arts/other sports activities
  • Let them play with their playmates or siblings out in the lawn or the play ground at 10am – 11am
  • Lunch break from 11am – 1pm
  • Nap time from 1pm – 3pm
  • Learn new things and play games online from 3pm – 5pm
  • Review what they’ve learned from 5pm – 6pm
  • Dinner at 6pm – 7pm
  • Bed time by 8pm

balanced lifestyle

You can do daily variations of the things you want to do with your kids to make it more enjoyable as you go along. The important thing is to keep them busy so you can get them off being on android tablets and other gadgets all day or more than the time they should be on it.

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