With the start of school, you want your kids to have plenty of time for homework. But what about everything else they need, like to play and sit down for meals? Two easy-to-use online tools help kids of any age to be more balanced, active, and durable–in school and out.
Get started with the Family Media Plan. Created by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Plan allows you to set up and print out guidelines not only around media use, but other necessities like physical activity, enough sleep, manners, and good digital judgment (such as my personal favorite, to charge cellphones out of the bedroom).
You can make a custom profile for each child, based on his or her age. For older kids, the plan also covers tech use and driving.
If digital gadgets and games are being designed to attract and hold kids’ attention, American pediatricians are pushing back with their own design.
“The goal is to give parents, and everybody really, a visual of how a child’s day maps out and we can really understand what affects the balance in their lives and what you need to do to have a balanced lifestyle,” says Corinn Cross, MD, FAPP, who came up with the idea for the Media Time Calculator, a major piece of the American Academy of Pediatrics new Family Media Plan.
Parents and kids can sit down together and use the calculator to ensure a 24-hour day includes not only screen time, but everything else a child needs to be healthy, balanced, and durable.
Cross hopes the tool will help families make time decisions based on their own needs and priorities. “We don’t want media use to be the driving force, but just to fill in gaps.”
In the Media Time Calculator, the recommended times for sleep and physical activity are set by default according to a child’s age. You can see in this 3-minute demo how time available for screen-based entertainment quickly disappears:
I define durable humandesign as “the making and doing of things that promote and advance one’s ability to be an effective, contributing human in a complex and increasingly digital world,” so the Media Time Calculator certainly qualifies.
Get a free 1-page printable Time Priorities checklist to help you help your family spend time wisely.
At long last, the American Academy of Pediatrics has revised its ideas for how kids should interact with screens. There are some surprises, especially that the guidelines cover much more than media.
Babies and little, little kids are still not supposed to watch any screen-based content, with one exception: Continue reading →
