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Parents tell me all the time that they feel worried and ashamed that their kids are in the driver’s seat when it comes to screen use. It’s an epidemic issue. Parenting these days is part bliss and part guilt. For the first time in history, digital native kids know more than their digital immigrant parents. It can seem impossible to stay ahead of them.
No more. The GKIS Connected Family Course will change that. Today you are getting started with a home staging program that will set up a system of safety, accountability, and cooperative negotiation. “Home staging”refers to the fact that this course sets up, or stages,your home for optimal success. With common understanding, sensible rules, parenting strategies, tech tools, and safer screen use stations, you’ll optimize balance and healthiest habits.
Not only will Connected Family setups fix the slips that are happening now, it will also launch habits that will pay off for years to come. You are no longer alone. When it comes to justifying the step-by-step changes to your kids, you can speak with utter confidence that you know what you’re doing and your directives will lead to positive changes. No more shame. No more blame.
Each stage of child rearing has its magic and its challenges. GetKidsInternetSafe blog articles offer inspirational parent techniques, discuss current events, or feature interesting and relevant scientific outcome studies, usually related to screen time. Sign up for your free weekly quick-read articles by providing your name and email address in the opt-in box on the top of the GetKidsInternetSafe welcome page.
Now that you are an official GKIS Connected Family, you are prepped to not only benefit from weekly articles, but you also get free lifetime access to our private FB page! For Connected Family members only, you’ll be able to
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The GKIS Home Starter Workbook contains the same content as your GKIS Connected Family Course (minus videos and some downloads). It’s up to you if you’d like to stick with only the online content or if you’d like to print this pdf format to carry with you. The workbook is currently offered on Amazon for $19.99 but is yours free as a bonus. Enjoy!
These days, parenting standards seem impossible to live up to. We feel guilty, worrying that we aren’t doing enough or that we’re doing too much. Where’s the perfect balance? It seems we are expected to provide our kids with almost constant entertainment, enrichment, and protection while giving them opportunity to build independent resilience. They are too often afraid to fail, and we are too often afraid to fail them. Add in screens expertly designed to capture our attention, and family life becomes even more challenging.
Dr. Bennett is a mom and licensed clinical psychologist who is a Screen Safety Expert. Through 26 years of practice, research, and teaching, she has found that a fun, cooperative parent-child relationship and sensible proactive home setup is key for child safety and healthy development. Designed to establish the “basics” for screen safety and parental authority and screen competence, the GKIS Home Starter Workbook will help you set up your cooperative family tech dialogue, establish important rules and parameters, onboard your digital toolbox for filtering and monitoring, and set up home working stations to optimize supervision, creativity, and balance in ten easy steps. For families with toddlers, school age kids, and teens.
Although I tend to be a fairly private person, I’d like to share with you why I became passionate about preventing digital injury and founded GetKidsInternetSafe. Six years ago my dad died at 72 years old from a heart attack. I was absolutely crushed. Although he lived a thousand miles away from me, he had always been my go-to person about everything in my life. Even at my age of 44 years old, he was the first person I called when I was excited, ashamed, or overwhelmed. He was particularly brilliant at knowing how to reassure me and make me feel loved. His loss was profound for me.
To make matters worse, my mom was suffering from the early stages of a debilitating dementia. We had always had a complicated relationship, partly due to her alcoholism and my desperate attempts to get her to stop. Like most families, I was left to watch her deteriorate slowly without much influence on her personal decisions. As I worked through the complications of managing my dad’s estate, alone without help, my mom was driving around town looking for children she thought she’d lost. I was terrified for her safety, and she was uncooperative. I had to go to court to finally get her the help she needed. It was really tough.
Soon it was to become even more difficult. Within a year of my dad’s death, my sweet stepmother was diagnosed with stage 4 oral cancer. As she spoke to me about her devastating grief over the loss of my dad, the love of her life, she was also struggling to stay alive herself. Six weeks after her diagnosis, I barely made it to her side as she passed away. She and my sister had been in conflict overly dad’s property. This, along with other issues, contributed to a brutal estrangement from my only sister.
So there I was, calling lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and doctors trying to settle my mom and dad’s very complicated estates while grieving the loss of both of my parents, my stepmother, and my sister. I’d essentially lost my whole family within a year while raising my own three kids.
One day during that time, I was feeling particularly crushed and overwhelmed. I looked up from my computer and reflected on what my dad would think about the job I was doing trying to take care of everybody. At that moment, I recall hearing my two little ones giggling in the back room playing Mine Craft. I was flooded with gratitude, love, and fear. Too overwhelmed to be my best self, I became frightened about how much I was relying on screens to distract the kids like the families I’d seen in my practice, families who were suffering from digital injuries like cyberbullying, online predators, and porn addiction. I realized at that moment, we could be next.
I got myself out of that computer chair that day, sunk into the couch behind the kids, and started to make a plan that would allow safer screen time and also help me bond even better with my family. I wanted to be their go-to person when they needed help the most, like my dad has always been there for me.
That is how GKIS was born. As I pulled together the know-how I’d earned from my many years of private practice and teaching, I got increasingly passionate about how GKIS programs worked. My clients were raving, and my kids and clients were building resiliency. From there, I launched a mission of moving beyond treatment and committing to the prevention of digital injury using the huge reach of the Internet for help.
I can’t wait to hear your progress as you move step-by-step through the GKIS Connected Family Course.
In Chapter 1, we will start by assessing where you are now and where you want to be when you’ve completed the course by starting with your GKIS Parent Report Card and GKIS Home Starter Plan. With this initial commitment to change, you can track change as you move forward through your ten easy steps. By the end, you will be able to look back and recognize that you’ve followed through and achieved true success with an expert action plan for screen safety and more fun, connected parenting.
Perhaps you’ve seen hints that there is already a problem in your home. If you have young kids you may be noticing they are too enthusiastic about getting on their screens, begging to get on and having tantrums when they get off. You wonder if they are at risk for addiction or missing out on critical nonvirtual learning tasks like socialization, creative three-dimensional play, or physical exercise. If your kids are school age, tweens, or teens, maybe you’ve found inappropriate content on the browser history, digital photo album, or in instant messaging or texts already. Maybe there’s no sign of risk, but you worry about it. Or you know there’s more you can do but can’t figure out where to start or can’t seem to get your kids’ buy-in or find follow-through impossible.
No more! Today you are getting started with a program that will set up a system of safety, accountability, and cooperative negotiation. Step-by-step, we are going to make real change that will establish habits that will last for years!
We highly recommend our free CONNECTED FAMILY SCREEN AGREEMENT to get started with screen safety right out the gate.This is like a digital contract but much, much more. It serves as a checklist for all of the things you need to be looking out for as a family. It also helps you negotiate sensible rules and start a fun, informed, mutually-educational tech dialogue. You want to be an ally from the beginning. Then your kids will come to your with challenges they run into in their virtual lives rather than shut you out. Dr. Bennett believes that a strong parent-child alliance is the #1 factor for family screen safety.
Did you know that kids are the #1 targeted population for identity theft? That’s because the cybercriminal can benefit from fraudulent charges for years before the victim discovers it. Protect your family from hacking, scamming, malware, and phishing with our CYBERSECURITY & RED FLAGS SUPPLEMENT. The low-cost supplement to our Connected Family Screen Agreement also offers the red flags for kids to alert them to online predators, hate groups, and cyberbullies plus the behavioral red flags for parents that signal when a child may be suffering digital injury. Recognizing red flags are an important first step to prevention.
Due to screen technology, this generation of children are more marketed to than any other children in history. Why? Because there’s BIG money in child and teen products. Kids are especially heavily marketed to in the video game niche, because the entertainment value of video games adds up to big money. In 2019, the global revenue for the gaming market reached 152.1 billion dollars! Social media influencers also market to kids, making big money from ads, affiliation fees with bigger brands, and their own product lines. Social media operates from the old adage, “If you can’t see the product, you are the product.” Teach your kids how to spot the strategies marketers and video game developers use to earn money from viewers with our HOW TO SPOT MARKETING RED FLAG SUPPLEMENT.
Too overwhelmed and busy to do the digital tool research? We’ve done it for you in our GKIS DIGITAL SCREEN SAFETY TOOLKIT! If you have screen-loving kids or teens, sound parenting strategies are not enough for online safety. You also need smart tech tools for filtering, monitoring, and management. Parents told us they felt overwhelmed by the number of options, so we made it easy for you. The GKIS Screen Safety Toolkit is a family-tested, outcome-based resource guide with our best recommendations, how-to information, and links to our favorite easy-to-onboard parental control systems. You’ll be set to create the custom screen safety toolkit for your unique child. Let go of the guilt, and let us do the research for you!
Driving has BIG RISKS for teens, so we require driver’s training. The internet has BIG RISKS too…Did you know that 86% of parents feel their teen spends too much time gaming? That the average age of smartphone ownership is 10 years old! That 1 in 4 parents say their teen knows someone with depression & 1 in 10 know a peer who’s committed suicide? Most kids spend an average of 10.5 hours a day on their screens & 4 out of 5 tweens are on social media before age 12! Due to online education, it’s almost impossible to enforce screen limits. Social media is now a critical element of healthy teen socialization. Prepare your kids for the unexpected in social media & gaming that even the most internet-savvy parents don’t know about with our GKIS SOCIAL MEDIA READINESS TRAINING COURSE for tweens and teens.
My goals for GetKidsInternetSafe courses are to inspire cooperative family dialogue and sound strategies for screen management. General practical tips are offered for informational guidelines rather than clinical service. As a mother and licensed psychologist, I am profoundly aware that each child, parent, and family is different and good parenting comes in many forms. Not all GKIS Connected Family Course tips work with all kids and families. Please use your best judgment and parental instincts when applying them. For specific questions pertaining to your child’s physical or mental health, please consult your local pediatrician or licensed clinical psychologist. If you are in crisis, please contact emergency services immediately. GetKidsInternetSafe Privacy Policy and Terms of Use apply.
Thanks for reading through the legal and ethical stuff. Welcome to our GetKidsInternetSafe community, and please enjoy all that your GKIS Connected Family Course has to offer!
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