Šeima ir technika: dviejų savaičių programa, skirta paruošti savo vaikus mokyklai --- Blogus laiko prie ekrano įpročius galima sulaužyti keliais paprastais žingsniais

„Cameron ir Madison Louie mokslo metai buvo tokie sunkūs, kad, atėjus vasarai, šie vaikai nenorėjo nieko veikti.

 

    Nors Šiaurės Kalifornijoje įsikūrusi Louie šeima Havajuose buvo visą vasarą, 13 metų Cameron ir 12 metų Madison didžiąją laiko dalį praleidžia miegodami, žaisdami vaizdo žaidimus ir žiūrėdami televizorių. Cameronas mokslo metais ėmėsi pagreitintos matematikos, žaidė klubinį futbolą ir krepšinį, taip pat bėgiojo krosą.

 

    „Norėjau užmigti ir pradėti atsipalaiduoti“, – sakė jis.

 

    Louie vaikai yra, kaip daugelis, kurie per pandemijos nuotolinio mokymosi dienas priprato prie lėtesnio tempo, o atnaujinus pamokas klasėje vėl buvo įstumti į užklasinių užsiėmimų sūkurį. Daug vaikų, patiriančių įvairaus laipsnio stresą, šią vasarą tai pakišo koją dėl stovyklų ir kitos suplanuotos veiklos. Tėvai, jausdami prastovų poreikį, iš esmės sutiko.

 

    Madison mama bandė ją motyvuoti siūlydama įvairias dienos stovyklas ir išgirdo daug „ne“. „Aš veltui raginu juos išeiti į lauką, – sakė Eunice Louie, nuotoliniu būdu dirbanti technologijų įmonėje, – bet dažniausiai aš tai leidžiu.

 

    Tėvai, kurie nesilaikė savo įprastų ekrano laiko taisyklių, dabar nerimauja, kaip iškels savo vaikus nuo sofos ir pasiruoš naujiems mokslo metams. Vykdydami toliau nurodytus veiksmus, vaikai per dvi savaites gali susilpninti savo vasaros technologijų įpročius ir pereiti prie mokyklai palankaus tvarkaraščio.

 

    Perkelkite miegojimo laiką anksčiau

 

    Tikriausiai nėra nieko svarbiau, norint sėkmingai pradėti mokslo metus, nei pakankamai išsimiegoti, sako psichologai ir pedagogai. Daugelis vaikų vasarą miega iki vėlumos. Likus dviem savaitėms iki mokyklos pradžios, pradėkite atitolinti miego laiką maždaug 20 minučių per naktį, kol vaikai užmigs tinkamą valandą.

 

    Pasak Ligų kontrolės ir prevencijos centrų, paaugliams reikia maždaug devynių valandų miego per naktį, o jaunesniems vaikams tiek reikia mažiausiai.

 

    Norėdami užtikrinti, kad vaikai nežiūrėtų į telefonus, jei pabunda vidury nakties, neleiskite visų įrenginių miegamuosiuose ir nusipirkite jiems žadintuvą.

 

    Niujorko viešųjų ryšių vadovė Sandra Glading sakė, kad šią vasarą ji buvo atsaini su savo dviem sūnumis, tačiau planuoja 5 ir 8 metų vaikus anksčiau vesti miegoti, prieš prasidedant mokyklai. Neseniai ji pradėjo žaisti pasakas prieš miegą iš programos „Calm“, kad padėtų vyresniajam sūnui nusiraminti.

 

    Nustatykite ekrano tikslus

 

    Sąmoningi ekrano naudojimo tikslai gali padėti motyvuoti vaikus keisti savo įpročius, sakė Brauno universiteto psichiatrijos ir žmogaus elgesio docentė Jacqueline Nesi, tirianti socialinės žiniasklaidos poveikį paaugliams.

 

    Ji siūlo pasikalbėti su vaikais apie tai, ko jie nori pasiekti mokykloje. Jei vaikai nori gerai sekti mokslus arba tobulėti sportuodami, taip suformuluokite diskusiją apie ekraną, kad jie suprastų, kad sutrumpėjus pramoginiam ekranui skirto laiko sumažinimas paskatins jų sėkmę.

 

    Paklauskite savo vaikų, kuri skaitmeninė veikla labiausiai atitraukia jų dėmesį, ir naudokite tai siekdami konkrečių tikslų, pvz., netikrinti „TikTok“ atliekant namų darbus arba nežaisti vaizdo žaidimų, kol nebus baigtos mokyklos užduotys. Tikslai gali apimti, kiek laiko ir kokį paros laiką skirti konkrečioms programoms ar veiklai internete. Šeimos gali kartu nustatyti tikslus ir sukurti laiką miegoti visuose įrenginiuose.

 

    Lėtai sumažinkite ekrano laiką

 

    Naujas tyrimas, paskelbtas žurnale „Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry“, parodė, kad daugiau, nei keturios valandos per dieną ekrano naudojime yra susijęs su didesniu elgesio sutrikimų paplitimu tarp 9–11 metų amžiaus vaikų.

 

    Fareedah Shaheed, mokanti šeimas, kaip būti saugiai prisijungus, siūlo vaikams stebėti įrenginio naudojimo laiką ir po truputį mažinti naudojimą kasdien, per dvi savaites, arba tol, kol pasieks naują tikslą.

 

    Sukurkite aplinką

 

    Kad jūsų vaikai pasisektų, svarbu sukurti palankią aplinką. Jei vaikai žino, kad atlikdami namų darbus juos lengvai atitraukia TikTok, jie gali palikti telefoną kitame kambaryje, pristabdyti programos pranešimus, nustatyti programos laiko limitus arba namų darbų valandomis įjungti telefoną į „Netrukdyti“. Didžiąją dalį to galite padaryti vaiko įrenginio nustatymuose arba net savo, jei naudojate „Apple Family Sharing“ arba „Google Family Link“.

 

    Pakeiskite ekrano laiko tipą

 

    Vaikams gali būti lengviau ugdyti naujus ekrano naudojimo įpročius, kai jie keičia vartojamą turinį, o ne patiria stresą dėl prarasto įrenginio naudojimo laiko. Nicole Rawson, skaitmeninės sveikatos trenerių tinklo „Screen Time Clinic“ įkūrėja, siūlo dalį laiko, praleisto naršant socialinėje žiniasklaidoje telefone, pakeisti filmų žiūrėjimu dideliame televizoriaus ekrane, kad būtų galima lavinti vaikų smegenis, pripratinant prie lėtesnio mokyklos tempo.

 

    „Sutelkti dėmesį į ilgą filmo siužetą yra kasdieniškesnis dalykas, nei greitas socialinių tinklų ar žaidimų tempas. „Nors vaikai ekranuose atrodo atsipalaidavę“, – pridūrė ji, „jų smegenys yra stimuliuojamos ir dėl to sumažėja dėmesys.

 

    Išvalykite socialinius kanalus

 

    Dabar tinkamas metas išvalyti socialinės žiniasklaidos kanalus. Ponia Shaheed siūlo paaugliams taikyti Marie Kondo požiūrį į socialinę žiniasklaidą ir paklausti savęs, ar kiekvienas jų sekamas asmuo ar paskyra teikia jiems džiaugsmo. „Jei ne, nustokite juos sekti“, – sakė ji.

 

    Sudarykite tvarkaraštį

 

    Vasara, praleista be rutinos, vaikams gali apsunkinti sugrįžimą į mokyklos struktūrą. Gali padėti sudaryti grafiką paskutinėms dviem vasaros savaitėms. M. Rawson siūlo sukurti laiko blokus, kurie atspindėtų mokyklos dieną, skirdami veiklai 30–50 minučių, atsižvelgiant į vaiko amžių, kartu su nustatytu pietų laiku.

 

    Vaikai turėtų turėti įtakos nuspręsdami, kaip užpildyti dienos laiko blokus. Veikla gali apimti bet ką, išskyrus ekranus. M. Rawson siūlo nemokamą atsisiunčiamą tvarkaraščio pavyzdį ir kitus išteklius tėvams.

 

    Elžbieta Milovidov, skaitmeninės tėvystės trenerė, sukūrė penkias veiklos kategorijas, kurias nori, kad jos du sūnūs, 12 ir 15 metų, užsiimtų savaitėmis prieš mokyklą. Tai apima ryšį su draugais ir mokymąsi klasėje. Ji leidžia berniukams nuspręsti, kaip tai daryti.

 

    „Sukūriau struktūrizuotą laiką“, – sakė ji. „Jie turi jį užpildyti“ [1]

 

1.  Family & Tech: A Two-Week Program to Get Your Kids Ready for School --- Bad screen-time habits can be broken in a few straightforward steps
Jargon, Julie. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Aug 2022: A.11.

Family & Tech: A Two-Week Program to Get Your Kids Ready for School --- Bad screen-time habits can be broken in a few straightforward steps

"Cameron and Madison Louie had such a packed school year that when summer arrived, the siblings didn't want to do anything.

Even though the Northern California-based Louie family has been in Hawaii all summer, 13-year-old Cameron and 12-year-old Madison have been spending most of their time sleeping in, playing videogames and watching TV. Cameron took accelerated math, played club soccer and basketball, as well as ran cross-country during the school year.

"I wanted to catch up on sleep and start relaxing," he said.

The Louie kids are like many who had gotten used to a slower pace during the pandemic's remote-school days, only to be thrust back into a whirlwind of extracurriculars when in-class instruction resumed. A lot of kids -- experiencing varying degrees of stress -- put their foot down this summer about camps and other scheduled activities. Parents, sensing the need for downtime, largely agreed.

Madison's mom tried to motivate her by offering various day camps, and heard a lot of "no" in reply. "I do nudge them to go outside," said Eunice Louie, who works remotely for a tech company, "but for the most part, I've been letting it go."

Parents who haven't been enforcing their usual screen-time rules now worry about how they'll get their kids off the couch and ready for a new school year. By following the steps below, children can scale back their summertime tech habits and ease into a school-friendly schedule in two weeks.

Shift bedtime earlier

There's probably nothing more important to kicking off the school year successfully than getting adequate sleep, say psychologists and educators. Many kids stay up late and sleep in during the summer. Two weeks before school begins, start moving bedtimes back by about 20 minutes a night until kids go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Teens need around nine hours of sleep a night, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while younger children require that at the very minimum.

To make sure kids aren't looking at phones if they wake up in the middle of the night, keep all devices out of their bedrooms and buy them an alarm clock.

New York PR executive Sandra Glading said she has been lax with her two sons this summer, but plans to get the 5- and 8-year-old to bed earlier before school starts. She recently began playing bedtime stories from the Calm app to help her older son wind down.

Set screen goals

Having intentional goals for screen use can help motivate kids to change their habits, said Jacqueline Nesi, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University who studies social media's impact on teens.

She suggests talking to kids about what they want to achieve in school. If kids want to do well academically or excel at sports, frame the screen discussion that way, so they understand reducing recreational screen time will drive their success.

Ask your kids which digital activities distract them the most and use that to establish specific goals, such as not checking TikTok while doing homework or not playing videogames until after school assignments are completed. Goals can include how much time and what time of day to spend on specific apps or online activities. Families can set goals together and create a bedtime for all devices.

Slowly reduce screen time

A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that more than four hours a day of screen use is associated with a higher prevalence of behavioral disorders among 9- to 11-year-olds.

Fareedah Shaheed, who teaches families how to be safe online, suggests kids track screen time with their devices, and reduce use a bit each day over two weeks, or until they reach their new goal.

Create the environment

To set your kids up for success, it's important to create a conducive environment. If kids know they get easily distracted by TikTok while doing homework, they can leave their phone in another room, pause the app's notifications, set time limits for the app or put their phone on "Do Not Disturb" during homework hours. Much of this can be done from the settings on your child's device, or even from your own if you use Apple Family Sharing or Google Family Link.

Switch up the type of screen time

Developing new screen habits can be easier for kids when they change the content they consume rather than stress over losing device time. Nicole Rawson, founder of the Screen Time Clinic, a network of digital-health coaches, suggests swapping out some of the time spent scrolling social media on the phone with watching movies on a big TV screen as a way to train kids' brains for the slower pace of school.

"Focusing on the long plot of a movie is more mundane than the quick pace of social media or gaming content," she said. "Even though kids look relaxed on screens," she added, "their brains are stimulated and it decreases their focus."

Cull the social feeds

Now is a good time to declutter social-media feeds. Ms. Shaheed suggests teens take a Marie Kondo approach to social media and ask themselves whether each person or account they follow brings them joy. "If not, stop following them," she said.

Make a schedule

A summer spent without routine can make jumping back into the structure of school difficult for kids. Setting a schedule for the last two weeks of summer can help. Ms. Rawson suggests creating blocks of time that mirror those of the school day, allocating 30 to 50 minutes for an activity, depending on the child's age, along with a set lunch time.

Kids should have a say in deciding how to fill the day's time blocks. The activities can involve anything but screens. Ms. Rawson offers a free downloadable sample schedule and other resources for parents.

Elizabeth Milovidov, a digital-parenting coach, created five categories of activities she wants her two sons, ages 12 and 15, to do in the weeks before school. These include reconnecting with friends and getting organized for the classroom. She lets the boys decide how to do those things.

"I created the structured time," she said. "It's up to them to fill it."” [1]

1.  Family & Tech: A Two-Week Program to Get Your Kids Ready for School --- Bad screen-time habits can be broken in a few straightforward steps
Jargon, Julie. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Aug 2022: A.11.

Kinai lavina savo įgūdžius kovoti su pandemija, kaip mokymo priemonę naudodami gana švelnų Covid

 Įgūdžiai apima klasikinę pandemijos kontrolę ir gana aukštas technologijas (PGR testas daugeliui milijonų žmonių per kelias dienas, gal pageidaujate?). Kai pasirodys kita Juodoji mirtis, kuri neišvengiamai pasirodys, tie įgūdžiai gali būti labai naudingi. Tada likęs pasaulis turėtų daug pigaus turto, įskaitant žemę, ar ne? Spėkite, kas supirktų tą turtą?

Chinese are developing their skill to fight a pandemic using pretty mild Covid as a training tool

The skill includes classical control of the pandemic and pretty high tech (PCR test for many millions of people in just days, anyone?). When next Black Death will show up, as it inevitably will,  that skill might be very handy. Then the rest of the world would have a lot of cheap assets, including land, wouldn't it? Guess who would buy all the assets?

You'd Be Stupid Not to Evaluate Risk

"Before the 2008 financial crisis, one of my neighbors took out a home-equity loan from Wachovia, paying around 5%. Wachovia never sent an appraiser to the house, but that isn't the weirdest part of the story. My neighbor asked his financial adviser what to do with the money left after he'd paid some expenses. The adviser suggested a money manager who guaranteed 12% returns, explaining "you're borrowing at 5% and getting paid 12% -- you'd be stupid not to do this."

It was stupid, all right. The money manager was buying homes and hockey teams, and his Ponzi scheme soon collapsed. No warning label said: "The more enticing the interest rate, the higher the risk." Risk is often nebulous, hazy, unmeasurable -- so it is usually ignored. Years of zero interest rates have caused havoc, but with the Federal Reserve raising short-term rates, investors should be extra careful shuffling money around.

Bernie Madoff promised an 11% average annual return and faked brokerage statements before he made off with investors' money. You can almost hear the cocktail-party conversations in New York and Palm Beach: "You'd be stupid not to do this."

Same for the crypto scheme known as Anchor Protocol, which offered 19.5% yields -- practically screaming risk -- with tokens backed by nothing but hot air. It soon imploded. So did crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital whose founder told the Journal, "The Terra-Luna situation caught us very much off guard." The word lunatic is too kind.

Recently, bankrupt crypto lender Celsius was offering interest of up to 18.6% annually to attract deposits. Celsius' assets reached $25 billion last October. You would have been stupid not to invest -- except, well, the company now has $4.3 billion in assets and $5.5 billion in liabilities, mostly owed to depositors.

It reminds me of July 2007, when Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince told the Financial Times, "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing." His job was to assess risk, and he didn't do it. Citigroup should have sat out the next 18 months.

When you buy high-yield debt, junk bonds with ratings of BB+ and lower, there is a default risk, though it's rarely noted. The best junk bonds today pay 6%. In January it was 4%. In November 2008, as Lehman Brothers and others were imploding, it was 16%. Higher yields imply higher risk. A recession (yes, we're in one) accelerates defaults.

Risk is also built into stock dividends, which might be cut. A famous example: In September 2017 General Electric declared a quarterly dividend of 24 cents for a 4% yield with its stock around $190. Three months later, as the stock slid to $135, GE cut the quarterly dividend to 12 cents for a still-respectable 2.8% yield. By late October 2018, with the stock around $70, GE cut the dividend to a penny. That 4% yield in 2017 was enticing but dangerous. Dividends are a false signal. Ignore them.

Stock prices are based on a company's profits, growth rate and risk. What risk? No one knows for sure. Risks might come from competition, obsolescence, CEO turnover, inflation, Fed rate increases, recessions, wars, pandemics. But the risk can be implied. Investors often look at a stock's price-earnings multiple to judge its value. The S&P 500 today sells at 20 times earnings. That PE multiple was 33 in the 1999 dot-com boom and as low as 7 in 1980.

Stocks with a high PE multiple have an interest-rate risk embedded. How? Lower interest rates mean investors are willing to pay more for a company's future earnings, meaning a high multiple. A company growing at 10% may have a PE of 16, but one growing at 25% could have a PE of 60 or more. Then there are companies that are losing money, and investors pay a high PE on the "potential" for future earnings, as they did with Rivian and Carvana. But when interest rates rise, PE multiples collapse and investors flee, which explains the recent rout of high-multiple tech stocks.

Fed surveys say the inflation expectation over the next three years is 3.6%, and over five years it is 2.8%. That means short-term rates need to be around 4% to 5% to maintain a normally growing global economy. That might be the new baseline for short-term rates soon.

There is a lesson in all this. Do your homework, even if you are buying an S&P 500 index fund. Study the fundamentals, assess future risk, and never fall for the siren call of high yields, especially "guaranteed" returns you'd be stupid not to take." [1]

1. Inside View: You'd Be Stupid Not to Evaluate Risk
Kessler, Andy. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 01 Aug 2022: A.15.