Technology is here to stay. So, as parents, how to we control what our kids are seeing?
At Yellow Brick Road, our leadership team has been taking time each week to focus on helpful ideas on increasing our Core Value focus in our schools! We watched the video attached and just completely fell in love with these ideas that some of us may have forgotten about.
Serve and Return interactions shape brain architecture. Eye contact serves as a primary base of communication for children and infants. An easy visual for serve and return would be a game of ping pong… back and forth, back and forth, until the cycle is broken. Screen time for children or parents breaks the cycle of communication. Responsive relationships are paramount for growth in the child’s senses as well. If an adult responses are unreliable, unresponsive, inappropriate, or just non-existent, you can probably imagine the potential consequences.
There are a number of reasons adults may not engage in serve and return interactions: stress, relationships, financial obligations, health struggles, and more. On the flip side, will short lapses in interaction hurt your child? Probably not… but for most of us, those situations seem to be habit forming. Getting caught up in a game on your phone or watching a show or even reading while you’re around your kiddo… we’ve all done it!
This is where we can lift the heaviness from the message. You’re doing great. You’re fantastic. If you have fallen into this pattern of not returning and maybe not even serving… now you know! We have all made mistakes, but now is the time to make it right. Our kiddos deserve it. Maybe its time to put our heads up and our phones down. Start decreasing screen time by a few minutes a day. Remember to put your phone down until the kids go to bed.
The time we have in the first five years is so precious. Let’s all commit to building our children’s skillsets together: emotional, social, connectedness. We get to build their capabilities and strengthen their health and behavior. Eye contact, facial expressions, words…. These are the foundations of our children’s future. Lets not squander the time we have to impact our future generations!