How Do Parents Keep Up with All of This New Technology?

Um, here's a question that is very difficult. If you ask me how do we keep up with all the technology? Uh, well, first and foremost, we probably won't, but that shouldn't be overwhelming and intimidating. We should understand the technology that's in our home. And, and what I really mean by that is what technology devices, what about what do we have in our home and what are, what's its capabilities? So I might actually, uh, ask a person when I buy something, help me understand how this interacts with the internet web. Help me understand what it is, uh, that my child is going to be doing. And, and really, we, we wanna be educated. We wanna talk with our children about it as well, so they understand. Now, I, I should preface everything I'm saying here is, is this, one of the core principles that I would suggest to all of us is healthy relationships are the foundation of every parenting, everything that we're trying to do parenting wise in our schools as educators. Healthy relationships is the foundation for everything that we should try to do. So I want to create an environment where my child feels safe and protected, where they feel like they can come to us. Now with technology, if I have a relationship before I give my child any device, we can talk about the guidelines and the structure and why this is so important. So, I would strongly encourage all of us to recognize that if we're going to, um, use these devices, which we all are, that we're educated and informed, that we understand how to communicate, and maybe as important of all that is, we create limitations before we give the device. So we're not trying to, uh, at, you know, midway through they say, wait, wait, wait. We're fine. This is, you're spending way too much time. We want the conversation, we want to talk about it beforehand. And then when we start to see if there are issues that we put some guidelines on, okay, let's have a day away from this just to see what it's like. Recently we did that with my 14-year-old son. Uh, he was, uh, I found him out in the front playing basketball. So I went out and I was playing basketball with him, uh, working on some feet work of how to move his feet. And at the end of the night, he said, that was so much fun, so much fun. And, and I, and I, I just simply please say, you know, how many of these opportunities are we missing? We're not taking, because we're just so consumed with life that we're not pausing to say, Hey, let's go do something without these devices. Let's go on a hike. Let's go for a bike ride. Let's go for a walk. Let's go to the park. Let's go swimming. Let's go on a camping trip. Those things can help us replace that question of technology and just get a break away from it. Because our body's autonomic nervous system, our, our body needs to be away from that kind of constant information overload.