Every other day, my kids come home from school talking about the next new thing in technology:
“His dad got a smartphone, and it has this cool app!”
“Their mom got a tablet, and she lets them play on this awesome website!”
“This game system does this and that video game does that!“
The ever-changing technological landscape is one of the greatest challenges modern parents face. The number of decisions we have to make about our kids’ access to devices and social media is staggering, and it changes so fast it sets our heads spinning. Just when we think we have a handle on our kids’ relationship to technology, some new device comes along. Every time something new comes up, we have to re-evaluate what works and doesn’t work for our family, and for each of our kids as individuals.
When our son became obsessive about playing iPad games last year, we learned a hard lesson about the importance of being proactive and strategic about devices and technology. And the thing is, it happened all of a sudden, and completely by accident. We didn’t give our son a tablet of his own; we weren’t trying to introduce something new—it just happened. My husband got an iPad for his birthday, and one day he played a game of Plants Vs. Zombies with our son. And before we could say, “The zombies ate your brains!”, we had a problem: Within a matter of weeks, our son had become a zombie! These 26 questions were born out of our family’s quest to bring our son back from the land of the Walking Dead, take charge of technology in our family (instead of the other way around!), and establish the kind of family atmosphere we wanted to have.
