Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.
r-waggling denialist. Like many, she appreciates the upsides that smartphones can bring: video chats with her parents in her native Canada, communities interacting and organizing for common cause, buying a pinafore for her three-year-old daughter on a vintage website and receiving a note that read: “My daughter loved this, I hope yours does too.”
Instead, she’s phlegmatic. Despite the “common analogy” between electrical devices and cigarettes, the two are not the same, she insists. “We can exist without cigarettes,” she notes. “As it stands, most of us cannot exist without technology.”
So, it’s time we took control. How exactly? That’s the question the mothers in the park (Regehr also has a second daughter, aged five) kept putting to her. Her goal for the book that subsequently emerged is unapologetically ambitious: “I want to change the culture. I want my kids … not to see parents opening up iPads to shut their kids up, [I want them] to think that would look weird.”
Smartphone Nation covers everything from unrealistic body ideals and pornography to parental controls and the nitty-gritty of the Online Safety Act. Its core thesis, however, can be boiled down into three main buckets of advice: admission, moderation, and education.
As with any addiction, honesty is step one. If we’re using our phones too much (which, let’s be honest, most of us are), then fess up. Not in a beat-yourself-up way. As Regehr explains, the apps and algorithms of today’s ad-funded smartphone industry are “built to pull us all in”.
Next, set boundaries and work on developing healthy habits. Again, this isn’t about horse-hair shirts and extreme digital diets. It’s about working out what works for you (and doesn’t) and designing ways to make it happen.
Regehr’s chief advice here is to focus on quality, not quantity. Not that quantity isn’t important: too much of anything (love, fresh air, and intimacy excepted) is rarely healthy. But, as with food (she calls herself a ‘digital nutritionist’), quality can make all the difference. An hour spent watching an Attenborough documentary and discussing it with your kids is, she suggests, infinitely more beneficial than 15 minutes of mindless doomscrolling
Read the full article on Positive News here: Read More
Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.