The increased use of technology has changed the physical interaction in our society to technology related interaction like chatting in social media using gadgets such as tablets, iPad’s, smartphones, laptops among others. Almost every member in our homes has a communication device including children who use them for doing school work and mostly in playing games. This makes it difficult to do exercises or other physical activities which are necessary in keeping your body strong, get sunshine and have a serious conversation with your children or other family members. Technology is not all bad or all good and its excessive use leads to internet addiction, depression, anxiety and it also impacts sleep patterns. There is need to manage the use of technology in our homes since we need it but its use should be regulated to avoid such side effects. The tips below will guide you on how to go about it.
Set Technology Guidelines
You should set the rules and guidelines to be followed in using technology in your home and you should get every member to accept them and follow them. Their creation should be a joint effort and every member in the family should participate in forming them. For example, there should be no use of any technological device like mobile phone at dinning time and the gaming devices should be always off at study time. This helps the family to connect and be together and helps the children to have time to do their revision and other school work since it is difficult for them to decide that by themselves.
Monitor the Adherence of Those Guidelines
Rules are useless with no enforcement and setting the rules and guidelines to be followed when using technology is all for nothing if the rules are not being followed. You should see to it that these guidelines are adhered to, especially if you did set them for your children since it is hard for children to follow rules on their own or with no supervision. You should also give them advice on how to use the tech in the right way by telling them what to do and what not to do with the internet. As a parent you should restrict the sites they can visit in the internet and the sites they cannot using administrator tools by connecting all their devices to your device.
Make Real Conversations a Priority
Children who have face to face conversations learn how to communicate and read other people’s facial expressions by watching us communicate. If all their concentration is in technology, they will be missing out on such important communication skills. These communication skills are not the only things these children would be missing but they would also miss out on other development stages that are as a result of exploring, interacting, playing, socializing and learning from the real world.
As a parent who want to see a social family, you should lead as an example since it will be easier for the others to follow what you say because you do not appear hypocritical. The effects of technology in our lives depends on how we use it and we should not let it impact us negatively by hindering our interaction with one another.
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