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Technology, screen time, social media and YOUTH🧍🏽♀️🧍🏻🧍🏿♀️🧍
The dialogue is ongoing on better understanding the role of technology in life today and how using technology is impacting our children.
🔸Most youth, parents and educators understand that social media has many significant benefits by helping youth develop communication skills, make friends, pursue areas of interest, and share thoughts and ideas – especially during these stressful and physically distanced times.
🔹But as with everything in life, there are also challenges – the downsides of social media. In particular, social media can have a negative impact on mental health, overall wellness and early childhood development.
🔸Young Kelowna is a platform developed to share the results of a research project from UBC Okanagan conducted over the last three years. Biological, psychological and social data was gathered from 400 Kelowna students in grades 4–9, with the help of six schools and Central Okanagan Public Schools.
🔹 This information is geared towards helping us understand what it means to grow up in Kelowna today and how we can help kids take care of their own well-being as well as important resource for parents.
🔸In the end, helping kids and youth focus their screen time, media and technology use for creative and identified and personal purposes and learning rather than consumption.
🔹 In the next eight weeks we will share with the 8 wellness ingredients, what it means and how you can apply these to your own life. Following a summary of each major finding, we will help you and your family reflect on where you are currently at, help you identify potential areas you would like to work on, and help give a roadmap for moving forward using a small changes goal setting framework (shown to support and promote behavior change).
🔸This is not about getting ideal numbers or setting rigid limits. Rather, taking a wholistic look at what youth are really doing, and how it is impacting them. Moreover, we hope to support you in reflecting where you and your family are at now, and supporting you in making small changes, relative to what you are doing now, that are realistic and will work for you and your family. We also hope it starts an important and ongoing conversation about how we can help families become resilient, even thrive, in a digital world that is here to stay.
🔹Keep following this space and learn how to get the most out of your devices for improving you and your families health and wellness.