Ditching technology from family time

As parents in the 21st century, we have so much technology available to use, with just a click of a button. It is difficult to find balance and hard to say no to it, knowing how easily it can entertain our children but, at the same time, understanding how addictive it can become. In our house, we have a few things we allow the boys to do that work really well for us – there are some things we absolutely love about technology and some we just don’t. Before jumping into it, I want to emphasise that this is what works in our family and for our children. I know it won’t suit every one, and it may not work for us forever. As our children grow, so will our parenting style.

Images: Dora Botta

Introduce technology as late as possible

Knowing that, somewhere along the line, it will be inevitable that our children will consume a lot of technology on a daily basis, we consciously tried to hold it back as long as possible. The only thing we have introduced so far to our kids is television. We didn’t let our first-born watch anything until he was 20 months old and, even then, he was only allowed to watch 20 minutes in the evenings. It was usually nursery rhymes with shapes and colours. My second-born started earlier, due to his bigger brother, who was by then, watching television, but we still tried to keep him out of the room where the TV was until he was about one.