Your Step-by-Step Guide to a Healthier Digital Lifestyle for Your Family
What is a Family Pledge?
It's a dynamic tool designed to instill healthy tech habits and define expectations collaboratively. By initiating this conversation within our families, we invite our children to participate in shaping their digital journey. Through the Family Pledge, we provide our kids with defined parameters and tangible outcomes for upholding them, fostering a culture of accountability and trust. We, as parents, also want to make sure we model the practices we expect from our children. We don't want to demonize technology. We want to encourage independent and critical thinking!
Benefits to a Family Pledge for Tweens & Teens?
* Crafting a family digital wellness strategy fosters accountability and strengthens familial bonds.
* It nurtures unity and understanding among family members.
* Allows the growth of a mutual respect for one another’s challenges with and favorite things about technology
* Instilling a family digital wellness strategy empowers tweens and teens to grasp the significance of balanced screen time for their overall well-being.
* Initiating a family digital wellness strategy initiates an ongoing dialogue crucial for navigating the digital landscape.
* Implementing a family digital wellness strategy offers greater adaptability and flexibility in managing screen time dynamics.
How It Works:
Choose Your Family's Priorities
Select the areas of focus that matter most to your family from the categories provided. Remember, less is more when starting to set boundaries around family screen time, especially when involving your tweens and teens in the process. Choose a few to start with, as it’s easier to have success. Then, you can add more or change them if necessary.
Generate Your Personalized Pledge
After making your selections, your unique family pledge will be compiled and created, reflecting your chosen priorities and commitments. You can download and print this pledge to hang somewhere central, save it as an image and make it your wallpaper for added reminders, or keep it as a pdf that is easily shared in your family emails/chats as reminders when people may be slipping.
Customize Your Pledge
Check the specific items within each category that resonate with your family's values and goals. Really focus on where your family would see the most benefit right now. In an ideal world, we’d select them all and hope for a perfect screen time family! Sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s just not reality. Start small and choose what matters. Think about the ages and needs of your children as you do this. But remember, this is a FAMILY pledge, so you need to be invested too!
Commit and Support
Remember, implementing your pledge requires dedication and support from every family member. Together, you can hold each other accountable and work towards a healthier digital lifestyle.
* You will be able to come back and update your pledge as you like! Just bookmark the pledge page, and you'll have access for life!