Tech support group, Screen Sanity, coming to Tallahassee

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• Screen Sanity, a nonprofit organization, is offering guidance to Tallahassee parents on navigating technology use for their children.
• Screen Sanity suggests designating no-screen zones in homes, such as bedrooms, bathrooms, and dining areas.
• A free interactive session for parents will be held at Downtown Community Church on Thursday, April 3rd, at 6:30 p.m.

Tallahassee parents who are having trouble navigating the battleground of technology while introducing it to their children are being offered a crash course by Screen Sanity, an international nonprofit dedicated to offering parents support on the matter.

“There are screens everywhere and kids use them for school, they use them for sports, and they use them everywhere and we look at how we can create some guardrails and safety systems for kids when using devices,” Gretchen King, Screen Sanity partnership manager, told the Tallahassee Democrat.

On Thursday, April 3, parents are invited to attend a free interactive session at Downtown Community Church where they can meet other parents and walk away with resources and guidance to help with progressively introducing technology to their children.

Parents will discuss topics like social media, screentime, smartphones, pornography and video games. The event comes as Florida’s new law banning social media platforms for younger teens is still being challenged in federal court.

Tracy Foster and Krista Boan were looking for tips and resources on how they could effectively transition their children to using smartphones but to their surprise and disappointment, their search was unsuccessful.

So, they launched Screen Sanity in 2018 to collaborate with parents, schools, and even tech companies to discover ways to highlight the positive uses of technology while mitigating the negative effects.

“We had a hunch that there was a correlation between unchecked, unhealthy tech use and the mental health side effects that were bubbling up in families,” Boan said. “Parents were overwhelmed by the challenges their kids were facing in the digital world.”

King said Screen Sanity training suggests parents implement no screen zones to be tables, bedrooms and bathrooms. The group also offers a comparison for technology introduction to riding in the car.

“When you’re a baby, you start in a car seat, and then you move up to a booster seat and eventually you can just sit in the regular seat of the car, then you transition to sitting in the front seat and when you finish that training you move to the driver seat,” she said.

“Technology gets the same approach. There is a gradual progression until you have a pretty good handle on it.”

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Alaijah Brown covers children & families for the Tallahassee Democrat. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter/X: @AlaijahBrown3.