Children spend more and more time glued to tablets and cell phones and parents do not know how to control them. The experts recommend parents use FamilyTime parental control app to avoid conflicts at home.
Claudia is desperate. His 8-year-old son David spends hours with his iPad playing Minecraft, a kind of virtual Lego where children can build what they want using blocks with three-dimensional textures, as well as explore the environment, collect resources, create objects and fight creatures to survive As this is not a linear video game, users can spend hours immersed in it, just like David does. “He wants to play before going to school and goes to bed late at night for that reason,” says his mother, who does not know how to control him because he throws a tantrum when he hides the tablet.
Cases like this are daily bread at home and a recurring cause of family fights, as children and adolescents want to play with mobile devices, but their parents would prefer to see them in other leisure and learning activities. “Parents find it better to play Lego on the floor and it may seem uncomfortable to see them with tablets at all times, but it’s the world they were born in,” says author Katie Roiphe, who put this controversial issue on the table. In a recent article published in The Financial Times Magazine. In it, he states that many fears of parents are unfounded, as he has seen that some go so far as to prohibit their children from using the devices for fear that they will become obese, apathetic and unable to enter into social relationships. “It has always happened, from generation to generation, that parents consider harmful things that they did not have in their childhood, “says Roiphe. But in a way games like Minecraft or Pokémon Go! They impose something universal that every child has done since time immemorial with the toys of his time: “Living in a magical world much more attractive than what adults offer,” the author adds.
Although some scientific studies have indicated that spending so many hours with a cell phone or tablet can be harmful for children and adolescents, the key is to achieve a balance and that parents do not become too strict, because new technologies are present in the lives of children in an increasingly frequent and exponential way. Not only as leisure tools, but also for recreation and education. This is the reason that experts agree that parents should not only control the time they spend in front of the screens, but also the time they spend on this activity. For this, parents can make use of the FamilyTime parental control app that lets parents manage their kids’ screen time.
Children know the world through their parents. So that if they see that they do not disconnect the screens, they will not listen to them and repeat the same actions. That is why the limits to use the devices should be applied in the house as a general rule for all, in what some call the “digital diet”. That is, a regime that controls the use of mobile devices at healthy levels, to never fall into excesses.