Those who follow us know that self-regulation is our favourite word at 3-6-9-12!
It means enabling children – and adults – to use screens only for the best, by gradually learning to regulate their time and content. This learning rests on giving children responsibility early on for the time spent in front of screens: as soon as a child starts using interactive and non-interactive screens alone, ideally not before the age of 3, you should make sure they always associate a duration with a screen. Digital worlds are worlds where time does not exist, and we all have this recurring experience: having sat down to answer two emails before going to bed, we sometimes find ourselves surfing for 2 or 3 hours, without having done the task for which we originally switched on our computer! Our smartphones, most of which now have apps that record the time we spend on them, give us very bad news every week: it is much more than we imagined!
A Swiss company, Peacefulfamily, sent us a very clever object to try out, intended for children and their parents: the Bizzy. It is a pretty owl made of untreated, eco-responsible wood, with a timer on its belly and a slot between its two ears for inserting tokens. You decide with your child, according to their age, how many 10-, 20- or 30-minute tokens they can have for the week. From then on, when they want to enjoy some screen time, they put one of the tokens into the Bizzy, and the timer counts… and rings when the time is up! When there are no tokens left, there are no screens… until next week. In this way, the child gradually learns to manage their screen time, to spread it out, and becomes aware of the time passing in front of the screen.
Unfortunately, Peacefulfamily’s Bizzy is a beautiful object… a little expensive. So why not a small family workshop to make an equivalent system by hand? You could imagine a simple timer, cardboard tokens that you cut out together, and two small boxes: one for the available tokens, the other for the tokens already used. Children are very proud of the trust placed in them to manage their screen time with tokens, and they generally play along very well. For children over 7, you can add a “little screen notebook” to the system, in which the child notes what they did on screens each time they used a token. It is a good way of then discussing it with them, seeing whether some activities come up more often than others, and making any suggestions to vary their screen use.
Medical director of the Hôpital de Jour pour Enfants André Boulloche in Paris, she works more particularly on the relationships young people have with screens, communication with young children, and autism.
