Easy Ways To Keep Your Child Away From Mobile
In this era of digital revolution, comes a mobile phone that has its own pros and cons. The benefits outweigh the hazards though. The onus is on us whether to reap the benefits or succumb to its side effects.
Digital eyestrain is a well known phenomenon that has become a pandemic itself. Continuous and longterm exposure has been causing an array of health hazards including dry eyes, insomnia, refractive errors, behavioural disturbances, etc
Here we suggest a few ways to keep children away from mobile phones as it greatly affects their eyes, psychosocial behaviour, and attentiveness.
In This Article
Easy Ways to Keep Your Child Away From Mobile:
- Encourage Outdoor Activities
- Do Not Introduce Smartphone Earlier
- Involve in Creative Works
- No Phone During Family Time
- Turn Off the Internet When Not in Use
- Spend Quality Time With Your Kid
- Have Fun Events
- Introduce Limited Social Media
- Spend More Time With Children
- Set a ScreenTime Limit
- Use parental control apps.
Encourage Outdoor Activities
The best way to keep your kids away from mobile is by encouraging them to do outdoor activities such as gardening, watering plants, walks with pets, visit parks, and so on.
A child gets bored when he/she continuously stays inside the house and demands the phone to have fun. When you engage them in outdoor activities, they get distracted and forget about mobile.
Do Not Introduce Smartphone Earlier
When you introduce your child to the cell phone earlier, they might become addicted to it and not concentrate on any other things.
A child should not be introduced to a mobile phone until he/she knows about using mobile and reaches the appropriate age of using a digital platform. Parents should not expose their child to social media accounts except in video calls.
Content they are watching should be supervised.
Some parents offer their child mobile phones to calm and introduce them as entertainment when they get bored and do not give time to look after their child.
It makes children addicted to the phone as they learn to use everything and get active everywhere from an earlier age.
Involve In Creative Works
If you involve your kids in creative activities, they might get distracted, making them stay away from mobile. You can give them various tasks that help build up their mind, and it is essential for the child’s healthier growth.
The mobile phone makes children mentally weakand suppresses their creativity and thinking. Parents should make their child involved in creativity like painting, swimming, drawing, gardening, creating stories, reading storybooks and essays, and playing different indoor and outdoor games without introducing mobile in the beginning.
Also, for the healthier growth of children, they must create, explore, learn, play, imagine, and innovate new ideas in their minds. Their mind should be free of stress and any other distractions from mobile.
So you must leave them alone and keep them free from any kind of distraction. Offering your kid a smartphone is one of the main factors which distracts their mind and makes them dull and inactive.
Online gaming addiction makes them anti-social, and their creativity gets lost.
No Phone During Family Time
You need to encourage your child not to use mobile or any other digital devices during family time as the mobile phone makes your child anti-social and becomes poor in communication.
When you allow the child to use the phone anytime, they do not put it off even when they are in the family gathering. So it is better not to allow them to use the phone when they are having dinner or something else with family.
These days parents often stay busy using their phone even when they are with children and do not spend quality time with family. This will hurt children as parents should give their children more time and interact with them.
If you want to spend quality time with family, you can turn off the internet and become device-free instead of liking pictures on Instagram, playing games, chatting, etc.
You can set rules where phones are not allowed during family time, set time for a meal with the whole family, and interact with each other. This increases the family bond, and children often become happy and learn many things.
Turn Off The Internet When Not In Use
You need to turn your internet off when you do not have any work with it. It is better to download limited media on your kid’s device and turn the internet off so they do not access social media.
Turning off the internet helps you and your kids stay away from cell phones and other devices, and you can engage yourself to play with your child rather than giving them phones. Similarly, you can keep your kids away from using cell phones and socialize with family members by turning the internet off.
You need to spend more time playing indoor or outdoor games, talking, teaching, and innovating your child rather than keeping yourself busy chatting with friends or colleagues.
Turning off the internet helps you and your kids stay away from mobile. You can also download the appropriate media on your phone while introducing media and giving it to your child. It is better to download the media on Youtube for offline use and turn off the internet not to use it further.
Spend Quality Time With Your Kid
The more time children spend with their parents, the more they develop communication skills and gain more knowledge. Parents are the first teacher of every kid.
Raising a child depends upon the parent’s hand, so parents should play every role for their kids. They need to be children’s best friends, guardians, leaders, teachers and guide their children by spending quality time with them.
Parenting becomes productive when you can spend quality time with your children. You can play indoor and outdoor games with your child, make them visit the garden or park, take them to party during weekends, and communicate openly.
When you interact with kids, you can know about their interests and desires, and you can also be their best friends. Children learn from others’ activities, so when you spend time with them, they can develop good communication skills and become polite and responsible.
Take Them to a Party or Organize a Party During the Weekend.
You can try something new with your kids to see good results in parenting. Children get to learn many things when they visit different places and interact with other people.
You must pay attention to your child as they continually seek attention and want their parents to communicate with them. So it is your responsibility to commit yourself to have a fun family during day or night.
It can be having dinner outside, inviting guests to your house, and having a get together party, traveling to different places and celebrating vacation, organizing parties during special events like birthdays, new year, and so on.
It helps your kids to explore places and meet different people and learn new things. It also helps build communication skills and become active when they go out and interact with people.
Have Fun Events
You can organize fun events in the family to keep your child distracted so they do not remember using mobile. You can gather their friends in the house and make them play indoor games, cook food, etc., and allow them to entertain themselves.
They can arrange to cook their favorite foods, bake a cake, make them visit their friend’s house, socialize with neighbors and relatives, take them to parties every weekend, and so on.
You can also encourage your kids to participate in sport, drawing, painting, reading books, etc., which helps keep them productive. These activities make them busy, and they do not remember to use mobile. You can also teach them and tell bedtime stories and not quarrel for mobile phones.
Spend More Time With Children
Also make it a point to play few board games everyday such as Chess, Scrabble, Pictionary, Mastermind, Monopoly, snake and ladder, carrom etc. This would help them develop their vocabulary, lateral thinking , fine motor skills and improve interpersonal behavioural skills.
Children’s learning is based on how much time they spend with their guardians. When a child gets more time to spend with parents, the parent-child relationship also becomes more robust, and they get a chance to know about cultural and religious values and beliefs.
Set A ScreenTime Limit
Another effective rule is setting a screen time limit for using each app. When you select a screen time limit, they cannot use their cell phone more than the time. You can set screen time based on the age of your child.
Screen time should not exceed beyond 30 min- 1 hour on mobile phones. While Tv and Laptops screen time should be limited to 1-2 hrs per day
Use Parental Control Apps.
As a parent, you can use parental control apps to keep your child away from mobile addiction. Using parental control, you can set a limit for using the individual app. It helps you to set a screen time limit for your kid based on their age.
Using parental control can help parents ensure that their child uses cell phones safely and is not involved in online dangers. It also prevents your kids from cyberbullying and other online crimes by tracking all your kid’s device activities.
Fenced.ai helps you to identify the children’s internet usage and track their every activity. It allows you to determine how much time your children spend on the internet and their device’s use from a dashboard. It also tracks the location of your kid from a GPS tracker by showing the path of travel.
Parents can limit the app’s usage with parental control solutions by blocking inappropriate apps and content. You can monitor each activity regarding calls, messages, and the location your child visits with latitude and longitude using parental apps.
It allows you to spy on your child’s device and protect them from the wrong track. So, it is the best way to keep your children away from mobile.
How to keep my child away from mobile addiction?
It can be challenging for a parent to keep their child away from mobile addiction when you offer them a cellphone at an earlier age and allow them to be engaged on it. As a parent, you need to spend quality time with your kid by keeping mobile away from you and your child and interacting with them, helping develop your kid’s communication skills.
Is it reasonable to offer my kid a mobile?
It might benefit if you allow them to use mobile for productive purposes like watching appropriate content, downloading and researching education materials, and so on. Also, it can be harmful when you do not observe your kids’ activities after offering them a cellphone.
Conclusion
As a parent, you need to determine your childrens’ weaknesses and strengths and support them to fulfill their goal from their initial stage of life instead of offering them mobile.
The healthier growth of children depends upon their parents’ effort and education as parents are the first teacher of every child, so they need to perform the role of a friend, guide, leader, and make their kid productive.