Take a moment to look around you the next time you are in a busy pedestrian area like a college campus, park, or bus station. How many of the people surrounding you are plugged in to some device and therefore disengaged from what is happening around them?
Everyone’s in their own little world.
Now think of your own family. How can you create family togetherness if everyone is on their own planet of texting, Ipods, and video games? And how do you encourage social interaction with people if you focus your entire sensory being into all of these devices?
You need to limit, or eliminate, the electronics if you want your kids to have a valued take away from the activities that you are doing. And if you want to be an engaged parent, you must also make the choice to unplug! Facebook posts, blog updates, email responses, texts, etc.- the majority of it can wait until your kids are asleep or in school.
We try to hold off the electronic frontier for as long as seems reasonable. Our Bluey has no electronic games, no computer games, and a limited interaction with television. We even try to limit the amount of toys that emit electronic noises (see a later post on dealing with noisy toys.) Our Plum, well, she has a laptop , DS game system, and a Nano. But we curtail her allowable hours on those devices to force her to interact with the real world. She has no internet connection on her laptop (see our future post on kids and the internet.)
And we do our best to make sure that if one parent has to be plugged in for a limited amount of time while the kids are up, the other parent is free of devices and is actively engaged with our kids. There are endless activities to do together as a family when you are unplugged. Remember board games? Go have an outside adventure like a hike or scavenger hunt. Read a book together. Get out the Playdoh or paint a picture. Plant some flowers. The world is yours!