OUR SCREEN TIME POLICY

An increasing number of early childhood specialists are recommending extremely limited screen time (TV, videos, iPhones, iPods, computers, electronic games, etc.) until a child is able to read well. Brain research is making it clear that screen time is sub-par brain food and deprives young children of essential experiences needed for good brain growth and development. To learn more about this, we highly recommend you read How Television Poisons Children’s Minds, Undermines Schooling and Threatens American Civilization, by Miles Everett, Ph.D. Below is an overview of the book’s recommendations of what children need instead, to maximize their lifetime brain capabilities.

  1. Parental love - Screen time can do nothing but interfere with love, to whatever extent viewing time displaces interaction shared by parents and child.

  2. Physical exercise - Screen time negatively affects mental development, supplants exercise, and encourages children to prefer sedentary entertainment to physical activity.

  3. Good Nutrition - TV promotes junk foods, carbonated drinks and snacks of all kinds. Advertising creates conflict between toddlers and parents.

  4. Verbal experience - Talking with and reading to your child provides an important foundation for literacy and all the intellectual capabilities dependent upon literacy.

  5. Sensory experience - Viewing screens emphasizes one sense and starves the other four. Touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, and seeing is essential to a child’s full brain growth and development.

  6. Free time - Free time for play and reflection should be the largest part of a young child's waking hours.

  7. Excursions and explorations out of the home - These are of excellent value in learning about the larger world.

In order to provide the above brain growth and development needs, we ask that you do your best to limit your child’s screen time at home to 2 hours or less each week. We invite you to inform friends and relatives who might care for your child of this agreement and educate them about the importance of limiting screen time, as needed.