Tips and tools for managing kids tech

We have discovered how to make homeschooling or "afterschool learning" manageable for a busy family with many activities, who wants to incorporate technology while ensuring safety. We live in the tech age. Let's welcome the positive aspects and jointly secure the negative ones!

This classroom has a section for teaching kids why we have boundaries around tech and a section for helping parents build their toolbox for safe kid tech.

The parent section will give you tools for:

• using AI for school wisely with some tips and tricks & our favorite ones

• set up screen time safely on your Apple devices

• our favorite non-bluelight tablet for eye-strain, ADHD, or focus issues

• our favorite way to manage tech in the home

• learning apps that are safe for kids that teach & entertain with no algorithms

The Science for the kids & parents:

"Video games can be fun. But they can also be fake power, fake connection, and fake achievement wrapped in dopamine, colors, sounds, and nonstop stimulation. They feel good like a drug, and that's a danger-but look deeper...because a boy can start believing he's becoming strong, dominant, and capable while sitting still in a virtual world that demands nothing real of him. What our boys actually need is the chance to become strong, grounded, good men in the real world, where effort costs something, relationships are earned, and masculinity is lived-not played." -Sean Donohue

We have to be careful because freedom without responsibility creates entitlement. When a boy learns early that actions have consequences, he grows into a man who can handle pressure without collapsing. So if a boy doesn't have guardrails around tech management, how is he learning to live his powerful self? Parents and teens, we hope the following information helps motivate you to manage your tech wisely.

Screentime:

We have to be careful with technology because it impacts our daily routine, and our future outcomes. The governor of New York just announced as I write this article that she signed legislation requiring social media platforms to display warning labels alerting users of potential mental health risks linked to certain addictive features such as autoplay and infinite scrolling. These can lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health concerns, particularly among young people.

The average American touches their phone 2600 times per day...After 12 hours of not touching your phone, your brain might even start to get anxious and release cortisol, the stress hormone. Often it is just a handful of apps on your phone that cause this. There may be very important and useful apps on your phones and tablets that are critical for life... But then there are the ones that you just open a lot because they are just plain easy to access quick fun. You see, in the olden days kids had to run to the neighbors farm to find friendship, now they can find it with a touch of a button. In the olden days, kids kicked metal tin cans around, climbed trees, and chased the pigs. Now a days you hop on your ipads and play Minecraft for two hours. The problem is not that Minecraft is evil or anything, the problem is that fun is too easy to access. A distraction does not need to be evil to be effective. Our brains like to save energy, so they usually choose the easiest way to do things. This is called the “path of least resistance.” It means our brain prefers familiar thoughts, habits, and actions because they take less effort. This especially applies to entertainment. The brain looks for the path of least resistance, or the shortest route to a rewarding activity. Even though the brain is small, it uses about 20% of the body’s energy, so it tries to work efficiently. When we repeat something, the brain builds stronger connections, making that action easier and faster next time. Scientists call these shortcuts “neural pathways.” The more a pathway is used, the easier it is for the brain to follow it again.

You will grow into a powerful creator of good healthy habits, lifestyle, career success, and family life if you take the higher roads in life. The path that does give you resistance is the path of power.

Which is the shortest route do you think your brain thinks between these two fun things:

• Touching a button on your mom's ipad that lets you play Clash Royale?

Or...

• Going outside to look for wood pieces to build a tree house?

You got it, the shortest and easiest route to fun is "Clash Royale" according to your brain. Your brains want to find shortcuts to everything. Some shortcuts are very valuable for your brain to learn, like the ones I discovered in homeschooling. Other's are not good for the brain, like throwing your night-time retainer on the kitchen table while you eat, instead of taking it back down stairs to your bathroom where it belongs. But what you want to do is challenge your own brain and tell it that you will have fun once you start something outside in nature instead. Remember this little science law: "Objects that get in motion, stay in motion." The most challenging part is starting, but once you're in motion, you'll be eager to continue. It is hard to tell a young kid who is given an iPad with 12 amazingly fun and addictive games on it, during the dead of winter, to put on all his snow clothes and go outside to build a snowman. Indeed, we've all experienced these mental battles. There is a shorter route to fun..."just push the buttons" is what your thoughts will be. But which type of fun do you think is more rewarding? More lasting? And better for your health?

I read this on a Silo and Sage Instagram post, "The average 18 year old is on track to spend 27 years of their life on screens. The average elementary aged child spends only 4-7 minutes of unstructured playtime outside. Over the last 20 years, the Oxford Jr English Dictionary has been removing nature words like acorn, monarch, and dandelion, replacing them with technology words like blog, chatroom, and mp3. It's no surprise, that our kids are spending less time outside and more time on screens, when the culture and world around them is telling them that technology is more important. We pack our calendars full of sports and lessons and co-ops, not realizing that if we don't plan time spent outside and in nature, the pull of the screen and the modern conveniences of life will win. The studies are clear: kids need nature for healthy development, and the more time our kids spend on screens, the less they go outside. We need a plan to push back against encroaching technology and a life spend indoors." We moved to Puerto Rico six years ago, and we moved from a winter state that has four seasons. I am not going to lie that the time this is most true for our family is in the winter, because when we moved to Puerto Rico and started homeschooling, we spent 70 percent of our days outside. It was a life-changing thing for our family. We had to strike a balance with tech and nature, and we often go back to our original home state that has winters. We decided we needed to bring back our island lifestyle to this state even though we didn't have a beach nearby. Being outside is not the path of least resistance in our brain, but it is the most rewarding. We have empathy for families trying to achieve tech balance during the winter month areas, because even as I am writing this, I have been sick with influenza and inside during a cold January for three weeks. I have had no vitamin D in a month. I understand we can not live our own mottos perfectly. Luckily, life is full of opportunities and fresh starts. We just have to be intentional about them. This is also why I could never tell a family that you should remove all tech. I have my kids watching TV all the time, when I need focused time to fulfull my responsibilites. I do not live on a farm, althought that would be fun. So we are not perfect in this household, but we are trying day by day to get a little better at tech management. There is no way to create perfect balance, but there is a way to create systems and guardrails.

According to Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and researcher at Cincinnati Children's Hospital: "Neurons that fire together wire together." That means the more you practice anything the more it reinforces and organizes the connections in your brain. Young children are particularly vulnerable. Children's prefrontal cortex "has a more protracted development" and "is highly vulnerable to environmental influences over an extended period of time." The choices we make about screen time during early childhood can have lasting impacts. Preschoolers with more than 2 hours of daily screen time are 7.7 times more likely to meet ADHD criteria by age 5 compared to those with less than 30 minutes of screen time.

Dopamine is also critical for focus and motivation, so even small changes in dopamine sensitivity can wreak havoc on how well a child feels and functions. You won't want to miss our secret to self-restraint class for kids here! It will teach your family what dopamine is good and bad for and create more self-awareness. We are so use to instant entertainment, we forget how valuable it is to just.....be somewhere...present in the moment. Every psychologist will tell you the important of mindfulness, presence, and stillness off the phones.

According to Victoria L. Dunckley, MD, author of Reset Your Child's Brain: "Screen time desensitizes the brain's reward system. But when reward pathways are overused, they become less sensitive, and more and more stimulation is needed to experience pleasure."

That means that if you travel the same road over and over again in your brain, you will stop feeling pleasure. You need a challenge, you need to build work ethic, and you need to do it in nature!

Gaming and excessive screen time on entertaining apps are just the beginning of technology-related issues that can be harmful.

Eye Focus & Blue Light:

Are you an athlete who wants to get offers in college? Studies show that scrolling on social media before games lowers your hand-eye coordination. A question to google popped up this response for scrolling phones before playing sports:

Sustained social media use and exposure to fast-moving content on small screens can negatively impact your ocular (eye) health and function: 

• Gazing at smartphone screens for even one hour a day can cause digital eye strain, leading to symptoms like blurred vision, dry eyes, and headaches.

• Studies have shown a reduction in the speed and accuracy of saccadic eye movements (rapid shifts in focus) after sustained social media use, making it harder to track objects effectively (like balls in sports).

• When focused on screens, people tend to blink less frequently, which contributes to dry, irritated eyes. 

When we first started homeschooling with online classes that were on computers (before we found our secret-sauce favorite way to homeschool) we had our son use a laptop or ipad and he would always sit in the downstairs area when he was doing his school work online (we do not use laptops anymore...discover our favorite new way to homeschool here). He really liked the couch down there and the quiet, but it was a little darker down there. He worked really hard to focus and try and do it but after a while, we started to notice that he would blink alot in basketball practice. It was almost like he developed a permanent squint. We discovered that he was experiencing eye strain. This is a kid who doesn't like missing a beat with basketball, so you can imagine how frustrating it was for him to be squinting so much. Learn from our mistakes, and limit screen time, get the correct type of tablet(s), and use our secret-sauce homeschool education apps that teach in less time and are beyond effective. We provide resources in the parent section for which tablet we use so keep reading. The homeschool programs we use, are totally different than the ones we use to use when he got eye strain, and we only need screens for two hours or less depending on our kids ages. Learn from our mistakes and use our secret homeschool tech learning tools!

A world-renowned brain doctor, Dr. John Hatch, explained to us that large screens, like a TV five feet away, do not have the same effect on hand-eye coordination as small phone screens that you carry around all day. The quick images and videos on small devices you view on to see Instagram or gaming apps are not healthy if you are on the bus driving up to your basketball game with the intention of playing with focused eyes. In athletics, having focused eyes is crucial. He explained that part of the problem with tech use is lowering our neck to look down at our phone or screen. That lowering of the neck causes all sorts of physiological responses that are negative. Kids looking down on their laps at their ipads strain necks, and can put them in "fight or flight" or red brain as we call it. How you sit with your tech even matters. Just remember, if you look like you are drooping your head, you will droop your moody brain. Moving your thumb up and down to scroll also induces addictive responses on the phone. Marketing companies know that when you are scrolling on social media. The phone is there as a tool, but it can turn into a device that triggers biological responses in your body that damage your habits. Dr. Hatch uses eye exercises in his medical practice to help fix anxiety, depression, attention deficit, and other brain related injuries like concussions. Not only does it matter what we view on technology, but how we view technology with our eyes.

"The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." -Jesus

The eyes take in everything we see and read. There are eye doctors who track eye movements in young children now, and prescribe eye-movements to help fix attention, focus, and reading problems. If you are reading or watching things that over-stimulate your brain like fast-moving images on youtube kid shorts, it can change the brain's ability to focus. No matter what that talent is you want to accomplish, reading music, performing a surgery, playing basketball, editing a paper, or even doing homeschool on a tablet, you will have a disabled ability to focus with too much fast-moving, over-stimulating screen time. Being calm, collected, and focused is really hard to do when you are in an over-stimulated red brain state. The answer....less screen time, and a special tablet we found that blocks over-stimulating colors, and enhances your ability to get off the screens quicker.

Blue light activates parts of the brain that help you pay attention and stay awake. That’s helpful in the morning—but at night, it makes the brain over-stimulated and restless. But often we view our technology at night, or late-afternoons, and that is messing up our circadian rhythms, affecting our attention spans, and causing eye strain. Our sleep is depedent on us not viewing blue light too late in the day. A sleepy brain has a harder time calming thoughts and controlling impulses. Kids’ eyes and brains are still developing, so blue light affects them more strongly than adults. This means screens at night can disturb their sleep faster and more intensely. This can cause fidgeting, quick emotions, and trouble staying on task the next day. We found a tablet that fixes all of these problems! It also works outside and has amazing battery life so we can actually take our tech and go homeschool in nature while still plugging into core subjects that need consistency like math. We also discovered these bad boys.

Yes you must invest in some good blue-blocking glasses if doing anything in evening or mornings early. They look cool on too. Too much blue light at night tricks the brain into staying awake, and when the brain doesn’t sleep well, it’s harder to focus, stay calm, and think clearly the next day.

Youtube:

These days kids want to spend alot of time on youtube watching funny shorts or quick videos of people doing crazy things. So even if you are watching youtube from a healthy distance on the TV, and not up close on a small tablet, now you have to think about how short and fast each video is. The more short videos you watch, the faster your brain has to work, and the more you create lower attention span and over-active processing centers in your brain. Did you hear me? The algorithms that tell you what to watch next on youtube, will cause you to gain some form of focus and attention difficulties. Removing algorithmic scrolling on TV's has been one of the biggest battles at our home. Winter months for one, but Youtube is very entertaining! Youtube just knows what you like to watch, and pops up very intriguing similar videos, and you just can't stop watching. Luckily, we found a solution to this too (included below). There are so many valuable things to watch on TV, but we have to filter through them. We have to be intentional about what our eyes take in each day.

Have you ever wondered how our brain is suppose to react to eight shark attacks in one day? How many of you are guilty of watching a few in a row on Youtube, Instagram, or Tik Tok? The reality is, your brain can trigger responses to that even if you are not there in person. Your brain doesn't register whether the shark attack is far away or up close and person, if it views eight shark attacks in a day, it triggers a response into your body! Why do you think Hollywood makes so much money! People love a thrill, adventure, and humor. Hollywood use to be a story of happy endings, clean humor, a happily ever after. If you watch people lock themselves up in a box, with a bunch of poisonous spiders on youtube, and then you watch a lion attacking a safari guide, and then you watch eight more videos similar to that, what kind of things do you think are happening in your brain? The brain has a survival system called the amygdala. Its job is to detect danger.

• When you see a threat (a shark attack, someone trapped with spiders, a lion attack), the amygdala can activate even if you are completely safe.

• It responds to images and stories, not just real-life danger.

This triggers:

• Adrenaline

• Cortisol (stress hormone)

• Increased heart rate

• Heightened alertness

From a brain perspective: “Danger detected.”

The brain does not pause to check distance, time, or location the way logic does.

Humans were never designed to take in that much aggression in one day. We know it is tempting and fun, it certainly is in our household, so don't worry, we've discovered solutions that let you keep YouTube in a safer way if you so desire like we did. These solutions remove the algorithms, and allow you to intentionally choose which playlists and videos to watch, which is especially important if your kids are home alot or moms get busy. We find this is unnecessary to do on the big family TV right in the living room, but it is very important on tech that gets moved away from mom or dad and is not the central gathering place. Of course every family has a different set of values around this idea, as the success habits social media recently outlined:

• Responsibility always comes before freedom.

• Discipline matters more than motivation.

• Excuses slowly destroy self-respect.

• Life is unfair, and complaining changes nothing.

• Control your emotions or they will control you.

• Comfort too early creates fragility.

• Work ethic outlasts talent.

• Choose long term gain over short-term pleasure.

• Control impulses or live with regret.

• Respect time more than comfort.

• Become dependable before becoming powerful.

Look, we all love TV, and let's face it, if you live near a winter season, and there is no snow outside to go jump in, you may find you are watching TV a lot. You just need a few tricks for managing it. This list of success habits is a good motivator in our family to create guardrails around tech.

Social Media:

Most of us have some form of social media, some of us delete it off our phones occasionally, some of us practice social media fasts, some of us don't have it. We are all human, trying to discover the delicate balance with online social connection. There is no real exact science on how to balance our time on it. But just remember, we are more valuable as a human, if we produce, than if we consume. I know people who make millions of dollars because they know how to produce content for their social media marketing and youtube channels. We personally know families that travel the world and film their life for a living. They have huge Youtube channels with over millions of followers. We have influencer friends who make millions because of the food content they post about on Instagram. But guess what, they don't spend a minute on their social media! AI agents do it for them, or software programs allow them to upload their content on a calender, and it just schedules the posting for them. No matter what career you choose, the old saying rings true, "produce more than you consume in this world, and you will be very successful." Look around you. Do you think your friends are producing more than they are consuming? Does it make you think twice about how you browse your tech? Because the habits you form as teenagers, can grow and stick.

We can choose to do the acting in our life, or we can choose to be acted upon. When you consume media, you are being acted upon. You are reactive instead of proactive. When you produce media, and it makes you money, well what do you think? I would call that doing the acting in life. Which version of yourself do you want to be? The intentional creator? Or the all-consuming reactor?

The biggest concern with social media, is where your heart is at. Are you needing validation from others? Do you feel the pressure to send out "Here Am I" all the time? The "Here Am I" world is strong right now! What if the world sent out "Here Are You" and we were all posting about the beautiful things we see humans do on this planet? Yes the funny stuff is fun to watch on social media, as long as you are not crossing the boundaries of racism, prejudice, judging, & bullying. But remember, the pleasure center takes control of your habits too fast. If you need a good laugh, it is always going to be better in person with friends. If you do scroll funny videos, just remember that your brain will have to compensate for all that "fun." Compensate means reduce or counteract (something unwelcome or unpleasant) by exerting an opposite force or effect.  You can learn this in our dopamine classroom here.

Of course, we can not leave out the dangers of pornography that pop up on social media. The ways you decide to manage social media on your phones, if approved by your parents, have never been more crucial. Families, if you are allowed snapchat, and you have a group thread with your friends, remember that if one of your friends decides to share an inappropriate picture on there, you can not delete that picture on your snapchat thread. The only way to remove it, is if you start a new group thread, or the original person who pinned it decides to remove it. Do you have enough leadership and bravery to self-regulate and keep your friends clean? Will you be brave enough to delete the group chat? How do you stand up and stand out?

Social media can create FOMO; fear of missing out. If you decide to be on social media, you will just need to know right now, you will feel like you are missing out sometimes. But I hope you remember, the best way to let go of FOMO, is by just not having any social media and not knowing what you are missing...because you can not escape that feeling of being left out once you know who is where. Or you can stay connected on it, in small doses, but you have to work on your thoughts around how you value your time, and what friendships you want to focus on, because FOMO is a natural human response with young people especially. Humans crave connection. Keep in mind that people frequently share only their best moments, while they don't share their worst ones. We all have bad days, but it sure doesn't appear that way on Instagram. Emotions stay in your body if they are not processed. This is another reason, you need to be careful about what thoughts you experience on social media. If you do not resolve or challenge those thoughts with positive affirmations, light, love, and truth, you can really enter the damaging state of a comparison mindset. Ladies, visit our comparing classroom here. You will love the authentic documentary created by women in my community on this very subject. If you feel vulnerable to FOMO, I recommend you stay away from social media as long as you can. I am a mother of four children, and I admit to you right now, I avoid social media. I feel so much happier off of it. Yes I do have it, and yes I do post occasionally, but no... I can't browse. I have to connect with people in person. I would rather play pickleball with friends at a park than browse social media and see who is where everywhere. It is the best feeling when you just stop caring about those virtual, false connections. Real connection is made in person, and especially in nature.

BrainRot:

One last piece of advice for tech management. We have to look at the new popular buzz word going around....brain rot! Let's learn what brain rot means:

We realize that every family will prioritize tech safety differently. Some moms and dads are still learning to self-regulate on tech as much as their kids are. But we believe the generation that you kids were born into, have inner genius inside you specifically for growing up in this tech age. There is a way for your generation specifically to not only thrive using tech, but to find success off of it as well and into nature! The opportunity is yours, to look at your habits, look at your life goals, and set guardrails and boundaries as families, on what is appropriate time restraints for different apps on your phones, websites, etc.

Managing AI:

The last subject for today is how to use AI! We LOVE AI in our home because we homeschool, and we have learned how to use it effectively. I do believe there is a place for it for teenagers... even kids! But what I can tell you, is that if you are going to use it for learning math, you won't actually learn much if you just get the answer from ChatGPT. Did you know that you can use ChatGPT for your math steps, without it spitting out the final answer? You can challenge yourself, without disabling yourself. Because we are a homeschool family, and we have a very special way that we like to homeschool, I do set up ChatGPT very carefully. Tips for parents for that below as well.

ChatGPT can really help you with writing and creating. It is a very powerful, amazing tool! Even as I write this, I use it to fix my grammar (sorry if I messed up anywhere) and I use it sometimes to help me rephrase things. I also love how it organizes information for writing things. If you want to, you could really cheat in life and let it write you a talk or a paper. Unfortunately, that is not building character and we do not recommend that. So much of learning comes from trying to articulate our thoughts and our opinions. If you let Chatgpt do all the work, you will lose the heartfelt insights you need to share with the world. We need all the heart we can get in this AI world or robotics and instant information. Chatgpt can not include intuition. It also is not always accurate. A very prominent figure in a Christian book publishing company, called Deseret Book, recently asked ChatGPT who she was. "Who is Wendy Nelson"...she asked Chatgpt. ChatGPT told her that she was the wife to a prominent leader for her church, and that she was New York Times "Woman of the Year" a few years back. Wendy had to laugh, because that is not true. So please do not trust every fact you look for on ChatGPT. There are some beautiful ways to use it when editing your grammar, and checking your facts, and we have a few tips below in the parent section as well.

Now lets talk about a really unique way to use AI. AI can develop a certain personality. It can feed you what you want, and that can be very useful or dangerous. You can actually create a personality lens that Chatgpt can answer from. There are a million ways this could be detrimental in the hands of a child or teenager who suffers from severe psychological or mental disturbances. However, I want to focus on the positive part! If you want to develop friendship skills, for example, you can frame your AI with the personality you want to emulate.  Remember words have power, and we all need to learn how to use them more powerfully. Tell ChatGPT the"personality lens" to write from first, and then input a text or email you want to respond to. Start with a thread, and tell it the parameters for your conversation. Here is an example, lets say you want to be more witty, more confident, and more poised when you respond on a text to a friend. Here is a good example of a wholesome lens, that chatGPT could help you with. "Hey, please respond to my text this way: I want to sound witty, patient, kind-hearted, and confident. I want to be able to respond with the lens of my (insert your religion) (or insert that you disagree with the email) or whatever it is. Now insert the text or email and see how ChatGPT would respond based on the personality lens you give it. This can be a powerful, free coach! You don't need to copy it word for word, but you can learn powerful new ways to explain yourself, and develop your ability to communicate. Are you working on being more witty? More confident? More patient? Let it coach you through some power words! Be very careful to monitor this if you are a parent. Knowing the lens that your child is starting from is obviously important. Once again, there are some unique tools to help parents manage AI down below.

If you are considering homeschool, you will want to use tech! And we finally found the secret recipe for a thriving homeschool life that does use nature and tech. If you are needing help with regular school work, you will need tech as well. And if you are in college, you definitely will need a laptop with full internet access, so we can only hope you learned self-restraint from an early age. So...how do we decide what tech to use? Well we like to think this family has tried it all! The next section is our favorites for the family!

Tech Tips and Tools for parents: