By Kayla DeKraker
Sesame Street wants to help families combat unhealthy social media use by emphasizing digital wellbeing through the company’s Sesame Workshop.
“We were very curious about this term,” Rocio Galarza from Sesame Workshop told GOOD MORNING AMERICA of digital wellbeing. “Thanks to the collaboration with Google and the funding from google.org, we asked experts and families, and what we discovered is that digital wellbeing is about the use of technology in healthy and balanced ways for the well-being of the entire family.”
“With support from Google.org, the global nonprofit behind Sesame Street is launching new resources to help children build healthy relationships with technology from a young age,” Google announced of the partnership on the company’s blog. “New videos and digital resources featuring the beloved Muppets of Sesame Street teach children, families and caregivers how to create healthy digital habits — from how to ‘stop and take a breath’ when using digital media to prioritizing connections with loved ones.”
Galarza emphasized that the campaign is all about giving families “strategies.”
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“What we want is to have strategies, but to think about the how and the why we’re using technology,” she said. “And a lot of families told us, ‘Look, we’re doing great in the in this aspect of healthy habits and thinking about the child wellbeing, [but] we feel guilty about the screen time.’ And so what we wanted was to give them strategies so they know it’s okay to use technology as long as we do it in a balanced way.”
Adults often need reminders about their screen time habits just as much as children.
“We do struggle, and sometimes we actually have the same strategies for adults and children, like noticing your body,” Galarza explained. “Your body sometimes gets tense when you use technology for a long time. Sometimes we also, as adults, need to plan…we want is to have a range of strategies to choose from and make sure that digital wellbeing looks specific to my family.”
Sesame Workshop shared a few of their tips to support digital wellbeing in a blog post.
They encourage families to make a conscious choice about how they are using screens and to “Practice becoming aware of how we feel in different situations (whether using media or not), and make choices considering those feelings.”
Screens are part of almost every child’s life, so teaching them healthy boundaries with media will help them thrive in a digital world.
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