Blog

As soon as December comes around, many of us wish for a jolly holiday season full of love and family time. Even so, the holiday season brings many hidden challenges, especially when your kids have vacation days off from school and you may have more travel or extended family plans than usual. We know that this is often the busiest time of the year for families, so here are some tips that you can use to make sure your holiday season is full of cheer even when you’re faced with family obstacles.

When faced with a problem, most of us turn to search engines like Google to find answers. With a world of information at our fingertips, searching up our symptoms when we’re feeling unwell has become a natural next step. If you have an unusually bad headache, or stomach pains that you haven’t had before, a quick search on Google will bring up hundreds of different diagnoses and potential treatments. Some of us may even know that dreaded feeling of scrolling and self-diagnosing the worst-case scenario.

We know that social media and screentime can make an impact on our children’s metal health and safety, both positively and negatively. As caregivers looking out for the children and teens in our lives, it is important to identify ways to protect our children from the negative impacts of social media and screentime. Nearly 70% of parents endorse that parenting is more difficult now than it was 20 years ago, primarily because of social media and technology. While the hard work of protecting children from the harms of technology should not fall solely on parents, here are the things that we can do within our scope of control.

Technology, social media, and screentime seem to become more and more entrenched in our lives and the lives of our children with every passing year. We engage with screens while watching movies or TV, shopping from home, communicating with family and friends from a distance, scrolling on social media, watching or creating videos, working, reading, and for many of our kids, even while doing homework! The use of screens day-to-day has become normal across the United States, at home, in schools, and everywhere in between.

This is a real interview with a parent who has enrolled their son in Camp Baker for 3 years now and is reflecting on the changes that Camp Baker has helped to create in their lives.