8 Ways To Give Your Kids a Healthy Digital Life

So you’re worried about your kid’s digital health wellbeing. You’re not alone.

ou’d love to be able to rest easy knowing that your children are in good hands and you don’t have anything to worry about.

But with 48% of children aged between 6 and 13 either owning or having access to a mobile phone, it makes it seem difficult to find the right solutions to solve this problem.

The team at G-mee have put together some things to be aware of, and some ways you can beat the problems. With solutions covering safety and appropriate content without spending a fortune.

With four safety and four entertainment products for you to consider, you might find something that suits exactly what you are looking for in our 8 Ways To Give Your Kids a Healthy Digital Life guide.

Life’s too short to spend worrying about the dangers of devices.

Get on-top of it now.

SAFETY

1. Life360. It’s a location-sharing app aimed to bring your family closer with smart features that are designed to care for those that matter most to you. With millions of monthly users, it’s one of many digital monitoring tools on the market with a wide variety of services available in both a free plan as well as a paid plan. One of the services that Life360 offers is real-time location sharing of family members in a private, invite-only “circle,” making it easy to plan and coordinate. If required, you can set up smart notifications when your family members arrive and leave locations like home. As a bonus, you can also get an alert if anyone’s phone is running low on battery.
2. No Cameras. Since one of the world’s first camera phones were released in 2000, things have come a long way. From the quality of the photos through to the ability and speed of sharing them. With the good, comes the bad – the risk and dangers that it can bring. Protect your loved ones by giving them a device without a camera, or by using an app like Camera Block Free. Prevent spyware, malware and viruses from taking unauthorized pictures and videos on your phone, and prevent any invasions of privacy.
3. Curate Content. rom social media to unfiltered web access and the dangers of the deep web, it only takes a short amount of time for anyone to stray. From accessing content that is meant for a mature audience, communicating with strangers and many other risks.
   Take control of your child’s device and curate the content that they can see. Services like Google Family Link is one of many options that can help you give your children healthy digital habits. From helping them make decisions on what they do on their device and manage the apps that they use and can install.
4. Schedule Locking. Restrict the amount of time that your children can spend on their apps with an app like Digital Wellbeing. The app monitors things like how long you have been on the device, how many times you’ve picked it up, and how much time
   you have spent on a specific app. One tool that comes with Digital Wellbeing is App Timer. With this, you can restrict how much time can be spent on any app per day. E.g. 30 minutes of YouTube per day

ENTERTAINMENT

1. Spotify. Does your family like listening to music? Well, Spotify has you covered with their family plan.
   Coming with parental controls, you can create up to 6 Premium accounts under a premium family subscription. Every account gets access to their own premium Spotify account. The benefits of a premium account include the ability to;
   – Download and play offline content,
   – Remove ads from your listening experience,
   – Play any song you want when you want,
   – Skip as many songs as you want
   Parental controls that come with a Spotify family account consist of explicit content filters so you can control what they do and
   don’t listen to. The account admin is the one who controls the ability to turn the filter on and off.
2. Youtube Kids. Created to give children a contained environment that is simple to explore and watch age-appropriate content, YouTube Kids is an app made just for them. While it is a content delivery service, there are also inbuilt parental controls that can give you the power you need in your household. From controlling what content they engage with, limiting screen time and even blocking videos and channels – it all can be done within the app.
3. Smiling Mind. Wellbeing is an essential element in everyday life and with mindfulness becoming a more significant element of a child’s upbringing, with meditation something they are bound to experience. Smiling Mind is a not-for-profit that is driven by the impact that meditation can bring by helping to develop foundational skills. From having better emotion and behaviour regulation, better academic performance, lower depression and anxiety as well as better social skills, what’s not to love about that?
4. Tynker -Learn to Code. Programming is bound to become an essential skill to have an understanding. Thankfully there are a wide array of educational apps that can help your children begin to understand the basics and give them the headstart they need. Tynker is one such app that helps children learn programming by solving puzzles to learn concepts, building their own games and even step by step coding tutorials.