The Summer of 2022 | Week 1 Screens and our emotions
It’s that time again, the return of the school summer holidays! How are you feeling about it? For the next six weeks, we’ll be bringing you content to support you throughout the school break, inspire conversations to be had and deliver activities to do. To start you off, we’re discussing a topic that a lot of parents speak to us about, particularly during the summer holidays - and that is children spending time online.
While a short-term break from the norm, a relaxed structure, a shift in routine may be welcome during the summer months, some parents and guardians have concerns about just how much time is too much when it comes to gaming, scrolling, and socialising online. And what about the content they are consuming, and the effect that screen time is having on moods and behaviours?
Of course, there isn’t a simple ‘one answer to suit all’. The truth is that while, yes it is important to be conscious of our relationship with the internet and how we use it, it can also be a helpful tool during the summer holidays. There needs to be a healthy balance between time online and offline, and that balance will look different for each of us.
Staying Connected
If you look at the images we see on social media, on television, and in magazines, the summer break seems like a time for big family holidays, adventures in the sun, being carefree, a whole lot of fun. But those images can be far from reality. For a young person who is feeling left out, seeing their school friends and peers posting photos and videos that are the highlights of their time, the ‘Instagrammable’ moments, could potentially trigger feelings of jealousy, anxiety, and loneliness.
School isn’t just about academic achievements. It’s a safety net where students have regular, consistent, face-to-face interactions with friends and teachers. Without the regular school structure, some young people may not have the opportunity or the confidence to reach out to peers.
When approached in a balanced way, social media is a means for young people to stay connected.
World Emoji Day
One of the ways people stay connected online is the emoji. Particularly for young people, using these little graphics in digital conversations is helping them to express their thoughts and feelings and develop their sense of empathy.
Coming up, on the 17th July is World Emoji Day. In the lead up, Adobe release their Global Emoji Trends Report, which surveys thousands of people around the world on how they use and interpret emojis when conversing online.
Out of 7,000 people from across the UK, USA, Germany, France, Australia, and South Korea who were surveyed in 2021:
- 90% agreed that emojis make it easier for them to express themselves
- 88% were more likely to feel empathetic towards someone if they used an emoji
- More than half said using emojis in digital communication has positively impacted their mental health
- 55% are more comfortable expressing emotions through emojis than on phone conversations
- 51% are more comfortable express emotions through emojis than in person
- When it comes to the emoji categories they would like to see expanded, the top two were emotions/feelings, and relationship categories.
If you know your child uses emojis, use them offline too. We do this! Our therapists use emoji-based printed resources to engage young people in therapy sessions. Sometimes if they don’t have the words to express their thoughts and feelings, chances are there’ll be an emoji for it.
Technology is continually developing and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so we can all learn to grow with it, use it in a way that’s comfortable and healthy for us, and figure out which boundaries we need to set.
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling…
When your routine changes and all of a sudden you have time to spare, it’s easy to get lost in post after post, video after video, game after game. Before you know it, you’ve lost an hour! We know some time online can be useful, but it’s important to set boundaries to encourage children to put the phone down and step away from the games console.
Include online time in your conversations; getting to understand how they use their screen time can be helpful in finding an online/offline balance that you are all happy with. Is there a time of day when they prefer to be online? What is it they enjoy looking at?
Once you have started the conversation, listening to what they have to say and giving them the opportunity to ask about the content they are consuming, you may be able to set digital boundaries that work for you both.
