How to Work With Your Child to Manage Smartphone Use

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As parents, we need to be able to say there is moderation. We have to be able to put that phone to bed. Let me just give a couple of, uh, very important examples. They have now, now found that if we are, uh, using our screens or on screens for extended period of time, it actually reduces the melatonin in our system through the blue light that comes, is emitted from the devices and it actually reduces the amount of melatonin in our system. Melatonin is actually what helps us sleep. So natural melatonin that the body creates may actually be reduced by excessive screen time. So there's a lot of research that's now suggesting that an hour to an hour and a half before bedtime, having our children, um, be off devices, this is actually true of us as adults as well, is actually gonna be more beneficial. So we need to create some guidelines around this. Uh, generally speaking, you don't want your devices sleeping with your children, and so I think we wanna be intentional about how we're using these devices and how our children are using them.

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Dr. Kevin Skinner