In terms of screen time, parents start to worry less about the time their teens are online and focus on content quality.
In the age of online courses and meetings with friends and Zoom’s circle of family members, the quality of youth content is more vital than ever, according to a Common Sense Media report released Wednesday.
“Not all screen uses are the same, especially at a time when other connection and learning tactics are being cut off,” said Michael Robb of the report and senior director of studies at Common Sense Media.
Digital media will be used as a “social safety net” to allow teens to interact with their friends and join the circle of family members they can’t see in person, he said.
It’s vital to balance screen time with other activities and make sure your child gets enough sleep and finishes homework, Robb added.
Many parents are adamant at allowing their children to see a screen, Robb said, citing old rules from the American Academy of Pediatrics that do not exceed two hours of time in front of the screen according to the day.
According to Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin, chairman of the AAP Media and Communications Board, these guidelines, which go back to the early 1990s before mass-market smartphones and tablets, are and do not apply to screen time.
The 2016 rules are much more fluid in terms of the amount of screen time a child receives, and apply in particular to recreational screen time in particular, Ameenuddin said.
With many schools online, Ameenuddin said it’s vital to note that school paintings don’t count within screen time limits. However, it is also mandatory to balance the school with offline activities.
“You’re sitting in front of a screen for several hours,” he said. “It’s smart or healthy for anyone.”
Not all of this is good news. A child’s socioeconomic prestige also influences their intellectual aptitude and ability to interact with technology, according to the Common Sense Media report. Children from families of low socioeconomic prestige have fewer of their parents when it comes to navigating the world online.
“Our most vulnerable teens, especially those who are black and from low-income households, can’t access and get reliably,” Robb said.
These same teens face a major threat of intellectual aptitude problems, which can spread to online spaces, according to the report.
Young women also face similar effects in the virtual world. There is a correlation between increased depression and suicide among young women and increased use of technology; causation is uncertain, according to the report.
Robb claimed that there is no established link in that generation that aggravates or causes intellectual aptitude problems.
Teens with anxiety or frame symbol disorders are more likely to report more negative online experiences, he said. However, teens who are part of a marginalized network report the benefits of having an online network to get help they might not get anywhere else.
According to Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and a commentator on the report, parents deserve to start learning about their children’s online content rather than counting the minutes on the clock.
Your parents look for 3C when tracking their children’s online activities: content, connections, and context.
For content, young people should have interaction in educational content as well as content that stimulates their imagination. Livingstone also encourages young people to bond with their friends and their circle of family online and not as strictly screen time. Finally, there’s the context, where you encouraged parents to see how their child interacts online and what else they’ve done in their day.
“If your child has been running all day and comes back and watches a movie that’s been going on for more than two hours or plays a video game, run everywhere,” Livingstone said. “So the context is that they did their exercise, they can’t run all day … make a judgment on the scale.”
Parents also deserve a better perception of their children’s online entry into the pandemic.
“The amount has increased, and I think it becomes problematic for everyone to criticize themselves for it, because other people face the highest ordinary circumstances,” Livingstone said.
Finally, adults want to interact with their children and ask questions about their online activities. Livingstone said that when interviewing teens, many of them say they would like their parents to ask them why they like a certain game or activity.
Livingstone said the parents told her that “my son still plays in Fortnite”, she asked them if they were asked what they liked about the game. Most of the time, parents never asked their child to do that.
While parents play a very important role in browsing and tracking their children’s online experiences, some social media corporations and the government will also have to make their component to create safer online spaces.
Social media corporations will have to take care of the large number of teenagers on their premises to create safer online environments, said Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate and commentator on the report.
Social media corporations first check the age of young people on their sites, Yang said. About a portion of teens have some form of social media until age 12, according to another common sense media report.
“Social media corporations have some age restrictions, however, it is true that millions of young people safely circumvent these restrictions because no effort is made to determine the age of young people,” Yang said.
The report also indicates that more and more young people have intellectual aptitude data online, but there are also no virtual intellectual aptitude equipment designed for teens.
In his comment for the report, Yang spoke of the need for public schools to include a program on mindfulness and the guilty use of technology. “During this period, we need to review to supply equipment to other people online,” Yang said. “It makes sense to me that there are very few intellectual aptitude resources for children, so we deserve to invest in them.
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