Is screen time harmful or useful for your children?
Published: May 15, 2019
We have entered a new era. An era and time where technology is booming. Phones, tablets, and video games have become the center of attention for our teenagers and even children. The almost daily routine has shifted from going to the playground with your children to sitting down in your TV rooms watching them play video games on Nintendo Switch, PS4 or on their phones.
Does this worry you? Does your child’s on-screen time affect their life? Does it affect their health?
The digital era is growing at an unstoppable rate, one that worries each and every parent out there. It pushes us to attempt to move our children away from their screens and to push them towards outdoor activities. But, is repressing a child and moving them away from technology really helpful? There is little proof that it works on an adult let alone a child; we always want what we cannot have.
The solution isn’t forbidding the child, it is supervising their daily habits. How? By recognizing the difference between passive screen time and active screen time.
Passive screen time is the use of digital content without any creativity. It is what most our children do on their phones, tablets and games. Have you noticed that when you speak to your child while they are gaming, they get hard-hitting with his answers as he is trying to focus on killing a zombie? The reason passive screen time is harmful for our children is that it is affecting their mood, behavior, creativity and communication skills. According to the Swiss Study of American universities, parents who drastically limit their children’ screen time will cause them to perform worse in college.
So, the question of how to balance what we believe is best for our children with the growing digital era that our children are drowning in, arises.
Active screen time appears to be the best solution by allowing our children to grasp digital content through Cognitive thought. It is the concept of turning a passive screen time into something our children could benefit from. Hence, teaching our children coding, teaching them how to communicate with family members that are miles away, or even teaching our children how to count and recognize colors by showing them videos. Did you know that the tech gadgets used increasingly at schools nowadays allow educators to tailor the lesson according to the level of each child? Did you know that this kind of adaptive learning process speeds up the rhythm of classes? Active screen time is inspired by the notion of adaptive learning, an online system used to customize education by analyzing a student’s performance.
At Geek Express; we teach our Geeks how to code a game and not just play it. Our screen time is monitored to an hour and a half of cognitive digital education. Not only does this education include gaming, it includes browsing and creating websites, it includes inspiring our children to make use of their on-screen time, and it definitely includes adaptive learning.
Lynch, Mathew. “5 Things You Should Know About Adaptive Learning.” The Tech Edvocate. August 13, 2017. Accessed May 15, 2019. https://www.thetechedvocate.org/5-things-know-adaptive-learning/
Fiske, S. (2019, January 17). In defense of screen time – TechCrunch. Retrieved from
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/17/in-defense-of-screen-time/
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