Digitizing Your Kid

When children first start using technology, parents are challenged with the task of limiting this usage to a healthy amount. My role as a mother is to assist, invent, and play, to allow and let go, to explain and educate. Although this balanced approach is the only one that makes sense to me, implementing it is a tough task. Researching and providing the right content is time consuming. Finding and administering the best rules is exhausting and annoying. It is important to monitor and plan screen consumption, especially with the younger kids. Nevertheless, most parents provide their children with the distraction of a tablet in order to gain time for themselves every now and then. It’s not that easy to raise a child in the digital age, especially now that technology seems to be progressing faster than research about parenting and plain common sense!

To hopefully make your journey a little easier, I’ve put together a few ideas and products that can help you and your little ones get the most out of the technology in your life. (after all, we’re all about sharing here at Grover, whether that’s sharing technology or ideas!)

Programming is exciting, trains critical thinking skills, and can most likely secure your child’s future in a well-paid job. Every little “digital native” should try out programming. There is a whole series of fantastic mini-computers, robots, kits and courses that introduce children to the basics of programming in a playful and intuitive way. You will find a list of these at the end of this post.

As great as technology is, many of the nicest things in life can not be replaced or imitated by it. Maybe it’s just us, the last generation who can remember what it’s like never being online, wanting to shut down the ability to enjoy a nasty, analog, standard definition of the world. It’s our duty as parents to pass down knowledge to our children, the knowledge of our experiences on this Earth. Because even though Facebook is normal for them, they shouldn’t forget how to read real emotions, and that you can “like” something without sharing it. It’s also wonderful to play for hours with sticks and stones. Think back to the memories that can only be saved in our minds, rather than on Facebook: the feeling of sunburn and scratched up knees, loud parties in the evening, passing love notes in class, being dragged along on a boring Sunday walk.

So while we won’t forget about teaching kids the joys of the analog world, you can prepare them for their digital future.

Products:

Programs:

LOOPIMAL — A friendly and simple music app for looping and sampling melodies

Courses:

Related posts:

Since the first email was sent back in 1971, the platform has facilitated the vast majority of communication in businesses. The intuitive nature of emailing allows anyone and everyone to take…

There has been the believe that Apple charge a premium for their products and services for a long while now. This phenomenon was dubbed the Apple Tax back in the 2000s. While it might have been the…

NottinghamshireLive were granted access to one of Nottingham’s intensive care units to report on the huge stress the NHS is now under. Photographer Joseph Raynor spent time at the ICU at Queen’s…