How to Protect your Children from Excessive Screen Time: A Practical Strategy for Parents
Transform your children through gentle parenting
This article is focused on the transformation of your children by using a gentle parenting style for redirecting them to healthy activities in an effective and friendly way without forcing them for it. Empathy, care, love, mutual respect, and parent-child connection are the essential elements of gentle parenting. Use all these elements of gentle parenting to transform your children. Excessive screen time is extremely harmful to a child and it even inhibits the ability of a child for experiencing, observing and participating in the usual social activities which are essential for social, psychological, and physical development. It can cause obesity, mental health issues such as depression or anxiety, backache, pain in the neck, and other health issues. Screen time should not be more than one to two hours. If a child has excessive screen time then parents need to intervene with a proper plan to replace the screen time with healthy time in a creative way. Forcing your children from stopping some activities is not an effective and healthy way. It has so many side effects. Instead, transform your children through gentle parenting.
Unlike the traditional parenting style in which parents use all their energies to stop children from doing harmful things, gentle parenting techniques guide you through the process of parenting in a peaceful and friendly way. Use these gentle parenting guidelines given in this article for practicing gentle parenting to transform your children.
Read more about gentle parenting in this article.
Distract and redirect by using gentle parenting techniques
When you take a knife away from a child, give him a toy to play with. This African proverb is closer to the concept of gentle parenting.
Caution! It is very important to fill the void with something better and healthy.
Take the following interesting and practical measures of gentle parenting to decrease the screen time of your child.
1. Giving proper and regular time to your child is essential in gentle parenting
This is the pre-requisite for solving the issue that as parents you are willing to give the time and energy required to protect your child from a harmful activity and replace it with healthy activities. Initially, it will be required to allocate more time. However, gradually you will have to give less time comparatively when the child will adopt the new routine and automatically screen time will be decreased. Giving regular time to children is also closer to the concept of the emerging concept of gentle parenting, which requires parents to create an effective bond with children.
2. Do not keep the screens on unnecessarily at home
Keep the screens off so that your child should not feel the urge to watch the screen. Keeping the screens on diverts the attention of your child and hampers his opportunities to learn, interact and grow. when the screen will be off the child will be observing the environment, participating in various social situations, and experiencing new things. Unlike the traditional concept of parenting, gentle parenting guides in a way that is more friendly and gentle. Gentle parenting focuses on creating a conducive environment for better parenting and gentle discipline. Promote other healthy activities according to the age and development stage of your child.
3. Do not use smartphones unnecessary, instead, spend time with your child
There is an African proverb that train a child the way he should go and make sure you also go the same way. Do not use your smartphone unnecessarily. Children learn from what we do rather than from what we preach to them. If you want to decrease the screen time of your child, you have to demonstrate it practically in your daily routine. Inspire your children according to the principles of gentle parenting by setting practical examples rather than forcing them to do things you want them to do.
4. Assess your child’s tendency towards particular sports through gentle parenting
Gentle parenting is a friendly way of parenting. Guide your child finding activities according to their aptitude. Discuss with your child about sports and try to know the tendency of your child towards particular sports. Provide more interesting information to your child to increase the interest of your child in sports. An increasing interest in physical sports will lead to decreased screen time ultimately. It is the goal of gentle parenting to transform the children without forcing them for doing things. You can buy him/her some basic set of sports items to check the tendency toward some specific sports. Such sports items are available online. You can order this at Amazon.
5. Discuss some leading sports champions with your child
Gentle parenting is the way to inspire and motivate the children for doing amazing and healthy things. Tell your child about the current champions and leading figures of that particular sports your child is taking an interest in. It will increase the interest of your child in that specific sport and decrease his interest in unhealthy activities on smartphones, video games, or television screens.
6. Buy your child some sports equipment
Gentle parenting is a friendly way of parenting. Buy some attractive new sports equipment for your child and coach your child that how to play with this sports equipment. Ask other siblings, family members, or peers of your child to join. Such activities will not only improve the health and wellbeing of your child but will also create a good parent-child connection which is the goal of gentle parenting.
7. Plan for some sports activity especially on holidays
On holidays plan a family level tournament and announce it in a dramatic and exciting way about it. Also, announce the trophy, etc or prize for winners :). The free holiday time of your child will be utilized in healthy physical activity and exercise, instead of staring at the unhealthy screen of a tablet, smartphone, video game, or television. This gentle parenting practice will be very effective for gradually redirecting your children from unhealthy screens to healthy interactive activities.
8. Encourage your child to play with peers and friends
Playing sports with peers is fun and your child will enjoy this positive experience. This new experience will urge your child to cut screen time and play with friends. Gentle parenting is according to the principles of child psychology and social psychology. Better socialization of children is one of the important goals of gentle parenting for raising well-socialiaed children.
9. Start making a schedule for sports in a gentle parenting discipline approach
Gentle parenting is not about raising children without discipline. Gentle parenting discipline is different from the traditional approach to discipline. Synonyms of discipline are regulation and order. The goal of parenting discipline can be achieved through a gentle parenting approach to discipline. On observing the increasing interest of your child in sports and growing distance from smartphone screens or video games, you can start planning for the sports activities on regular basis. Through proper scheduling of sports, you can help you get rid of excessive screen time. So, never miss the opportunity of properly creating the schedule for sports when you observe that it is the right time to take this action because of the increased interest and routine of your child. It is time to say bye-bye to extended screen time indecisive way. Thus, gentle parenting provides you an effective way to discipline your children without forcing them.
10. Encourage your child to play sports in school and join the team
Encourage and inspire your child to join to play sports at the school level. Inspiring your children for doing healthy things is an effective way of gentle parenting. By playing in a team, our child will learn so many new things along with the healthy physical activity.
It will take determination and persistent efforts for some time to decrease the screen time of a child by replacing this time with healthy physical activities with proper planning. However, after some time the child will be tuned to new routing and it will take less effort to keep the child on that healthy track of physical activities. This is the power of gentle parenting that it transforms the children without causing any harm to children.
Gentle parenting is an effective way to transform your children
Conclusively, gentle parenting is an effective way to protect your children from the harmful effects of screens by engaging them in healthy activities. However, it requires commitment, empathy, care, mutual respect, and spending time with your children. How powerfully gentle parenting can transform your children during the process of parenting? Read more about it in this article on gentle parenting.