Navigating Screen Time and Social Media: a workshop for parents
Navigating Screen Time and Social Media: a workshop for parents
Tuesday, October 21 – 7:00—8:00 PM
Registration is required.
This workshop will be presented at the Community Center, 39 Marrett Road, Lexington
Did reading The Anxious Generation, or does hearing about the dangers of phones and social media, leave you feeling helpless and even hopeless about how to handle technology in your home? Join coach Kerri Smith of The Well-Resourced Parent, as she leads a discussion about how stay regulated, identify your own personal tech values, and implement meaningful changes to digital use in your family. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and you can find your own.
About the book: In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.
Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism.
About Kerri: I’m the single mother of a teen daughter, and I know how hard it is to parent out of alignment with my own values, using an inherited “power over” paradigm to get results – and finding that it failed over and over, leaving me full of regret and shame. I became a parenting coach because when I learned how to parent in alignment with my values of unconditional love, collaboration, and mutual respect. No matter where you are now, you can find levity, joy, and connection with your child/ren – and yourself.
Before coming to coaching, I was a writing professor for more than two decades. When I’m not coaching, I’m writing historical fiction as Kerri Maher; from my years as a writer, I am comfortable with public speaking and plumbing the depths of the human heart.