The Family Tech Cycle: Navigating Screens, Devices, and Social Media
No matter their age—preschoolers, school-aged children, or adolescents—there’s little doubt that children are surrounded by technology as they grow up. Parents also find it challenging to constantly manage their children’s technology use and help them develop healthy digital habits.
Last year, in partnership with Joan Ganz Cooney Center, we traveled around the country to learn from families with children ages 4–14 about their struggles with cellphone adoption, their concerns, and the strategies they would design to support their digital wellness.
From family rule cards and contracts to family connection cards, digital licenses, phone jails, and screen-time meters, parents and children co-designed tools and strategies to support their family’s tech cycle. In analyzing the findings from these sessions, we also learned that the way tech products enter and exist within family life is not a one-time acquisition, but part of a recurring cycle of decision-making, onboarding, negotiation, management, and reassessment as children grow.
In this report, published by our partners at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and supported by Verizon’s Responsible Business Digital Wellness Initiative, you can read more about the new framework, “The Family Tech Cycle,” and explore actionable strategies for tech designers and product managers to improve families’ digital wellness.
Drawing on the findings from this report, we have also designed a series of Digital Wellness Workshops for families - a unique opportunity for families with children ages 5 to 12 to learn how to create safe spaces that foster healthy digital well-being. During the workshops, parents and children will create their own set of “Family Rule Cards” and a “Family Contract” template to establish family rules, routines, and boundaries. Families will leave with a set of actionable strategies and tools to support their children’s digital well-being, along with “Family Rule Cards” co-designed by children and parents in our GIANT community. New York families will be the first to join these workshops, followed by families in Houston, Boston, and San Francisco.
Soon, we’ll also bring these programs to Verizon retail stores, where families can learn, discuss, and create their own family media contracts and connection cards as they make decisions about their technology use.