Category: Well-Being

Technology can offer new ways for children with autism to communicate, learn, and engage with the world. Tools like apps, videos, and interactive games can all support language development and emotional regulation. But as helpful as technology can be, excessive screen time — or unrestricted access to digital content — can create challenges.

Setting digital boundaries is key for helping children with autism develop healthy screen habits. By creating clear guidelines based on a child’s age and individual needs, you can encourage balance and maximize the benefits of technology.

Digital Boundaries Based on Age: General Guidelines

Screen time recommendations can change based on age. However, for preschool-aged children especially, the focus should be on high-quality, interactive content and moderation.

Here’s a general guide on screen time for children:

• Preschool (2 to 6 Years Old): The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommends limiting screen time to one hour of high-quality programming per day, co-viewed with a caregiver when possible. At this age (and all ages), technology shouldn’t replace social interactions, play, and hands-on experiences.

• Elementary Age (6 to 12 Years Old): Children benefit from structured screen time with clear expectations around device use. Digital interactions should be balanced with offline activities like outdoor play, reading, and socializing.

• Teens (13+ Years Old): Older children will likely request more independence but still benefit from healthy screen limits. Discussions about responsible internet use, online safety, and digital well-being are important at this age.

For children with autism, tailoring guidelines to each child’s needs is key. Some may thrive with structured digital tools that support communication and learning, while others may struggle with disengaging from screens. The goal is to create boundaries that encourage positive engagement without overstimulation.

What Are the Benefits of Technology for Children with Autism?

When used thoughtfully, technology can be an incredible resource for children with autism. Some key benefits include the following:

• Communication Support: For non-verbal children or those with speech delays, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps can help children communicate their needs and feelings more effectively.

• Visual Learning: For visual learners, educational apps and video modeling techniques help reinforce social skills, routines, and problem-solving strategies.

• Predictability and Structure: Digital tools, such as visual schedules and timers, can help children navigate daily routines. These resources provide consistency, reducing anxiety around transitions and unexpected changes.

• Fine Motor Skill Development: Some apps and touchscreen activities support the development of fine motor skills, which can be helpful for children who struggle with handwriting or other manual tasks.

What Does Screen Time Overuse Look Like?

While technology can be a valuable tool, excessive screen time can lead to challenges, especially for children with autism. One of the most noticeable signs of technology overuse is difficulty disengaging from screens. A child may become frustrated or even experience distress when a device is taken away, showing signs of withdrawal similar to a strong emotional attachment.

Sleep disturbances are another red flag. Too much screen time — especially before bed — can interfere with melatonin production, making it harder for children to fall and stay asleep. Poor sleep can then lead to increased irritability, difficulty concentrating, and challenges in daily activities.

Additionally, when screen time dominates a child’s routine, it may limit essential developmental experiences. Social interactions, play, and language development can all be impacted by excessive screen time.

How To Manage Screen Time: Setting Boundaries

One of the best ways to establish healthy screen habits is to create clear boundaries. You can introduce screen time rules based on your child’s age, needs, and daily schedule. For preschool-aged children, structured time limits and interactive co-viewing — where an adult engages with the child during screen time — can reinforce learning while maintaining connection.

Creating “tech-free” zones in the home, such as keeping screens out of bedrooms or limiting device use at the dinner table, can also help balance screen time with other activities. Establishing predictable screen-free periods, such as before bedtime or during family interactions, allows children to develop routines that don’t rely on technology.

For older children, setting up screen time “contracts” or using visual schedules can be helpful. Modeling and teaching self-regulation — such as setting a timer for device use or taking breaks between screen activities — helps children develop healthy digital habits as they grow.

Monitoring Internet Use and History: Tips

As children become more independent with technology, ensuring their safety online is just as important as managing screen time. Many parents assume platforms like YouTube Kids provide a completely safe browsing experience, but inappropriate content can still slip through filters.

Autoplay features can also expose children to videos that may not be developmentally appropriate.

Content Controls/Restrictions

Parental controls and content restrictions can provide an added layer of protection. Most devices and streaming platforms offer built-in safety settings, allowing parents to set screen time limits, block certain websites, or filter content.

However, technology isn’t foolproof. Regularly checking browsing history and discussing online safety with children can help them responsibly navigate the internet.

Healthy Dialogue Around Digital Habits

Beyond technical safeguards, open conversations about digital habits in the home can help you stay involved while fostering trust. Rather than relying solely on restrictions, engaging with your child on what they’re watching or playing can help guide children toward safe, age-appropriate content and help strengthen a healthy relationship with technology.

Final Thoughts

Technology plays a significant role in the lives of children today, offering tools that can support communication, learning, and social development. However, without clear digital boundaries, excessive screen time can interfere with sleep and real-world interactions.

By setting age-appropriate limits, encouraging balanced screen use, and actively monitoring online activity, you can create a healthy digital environment that supports your child’s growth.

Brad Zelinger is the founder and CEO of Stride Autism Centers.

Living in a multigenerational household can transform the way families interact, care for one another, and raise children. It’s an opportunity to create a strong support network while fostering a connected environment for kids. However, while it has its perks, multigenerational living isn’t without its challenges.

Whether you’re considering this lifestyle or already navigating it, understanding the advantages and potential drawbacks can help you build a happy and healthy home for your family.

Strengthened Familial Bonds

One of the most rewarding aspects of multigenerational living is the opportunity to create deeper, more connected relationships between family members. The constant proximity allows grandparents, parents, and children to form bonds that might otherwise be more challenging to nurture due to distance or busy schedules. Shared experiences like preparing meals, celebrating milestones, or simply spending time together help strengthen the family unit and teach younger children the value of family support and togetherness.

Assistance With Child Care

For busy parents, multigenerational living can provide a built-in support system for child care. Grandparents raising grandkids, along with other adult relatives, often take on a hands-on role in caring for children. This can alleviate some of the daily stress for parents balancing work and family responsibilities. Knowing that your kids are in the loving hands of trusted family members ensures peace of mind and allows you to focus on your personal or professional goals.

Improved Emotional Well-Being

Being surrounded by family can foster a strong emotional support system that benefits every member of the household. Children often feel more secure knowing they have multiple adults to turn to for care and guidance. Parents also gain emotional support from having someone to share the highs and lows of parenting with.

Grandparents, too, benefit from the sense of purpose they gain from helping raise their grandchildren. This mutually supportive setup creates an atmosphere that can reduce stress and improve everyone’s emotional health.

How Multigenerational Living Supports Senior’s Well-Being

Seniors in multigenerational homes often experience fewer feelings of loneliness due to being surrounded by family members. They may remain physically and socially active by contributing to household activities or spending time with young children. This shared environment helps grandparents stay engaged and feel valued, which is vital for maintaining emotional wellness as they age.

Lack of Personal Space

While multigenerational living has plenty of benefits, it also comes with challenges like a lack of personal space. Sharing a home with extended family often means fewer private moments and more shared spaces, which can lead to feelings of being crowded or overwhelmed.

To combat this issue, it’s important to plan the home layout carefully and consider completing home projects to enhance privacy. Establishing private areas for each family unit or adding a mother-in-law suite to your home can create balance and provide everyone with a sanctuary to retreat to when needed.

Conflicting Values and Perspectives

Another challenge of multigenerational living arises when differing values, lifestyles, or parenting styles clash. Each generation may approach situations differently, leading to misunderstandings or tension.

Navigating these differences requires patience and open-minded discussions. Setting clear expectations and maintaining mutual respect can prevent disagreements from escalating. Engaging in honest discussions about decision-making and family priorities ensures everyone feels heard and respected.

While multigenerational living has its challenges, the benefits of strengthened family ties, shared responsibilities, and emotional support far outweigh the difficulties for many families. The love and guidance grandparents and relatives provide can create a nurturing environment for children, enriching their lives in ways no other arrangement can.

Children experience stress from sources that often fly under the parental radar. A meltdown over a broken crayon might not be about the crayon at all. While you’re busy worrying about their screen time and vegetable intake, here are sneaky stressors that might be the real culprits behind those mysterious mood swings.

1. The Invisible Weight of Parental Expectations

In an achievement-obsessed culture, most parents place expectations on their children in a bid to make them succeed. What you may not realize is that children are attuned to parental expectations — both spoken and unspoken.

While most parents want the best for their children, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters. Parental pressure can push kids to live up to an idealized notion of success, which often does more harm than good.

Sometimes, parents are unaware of the pressure they’re putting on kids. You might think you’re simply encouraging excellence when you casually mention how proud you’d be of straight As. Your child might be hearing, “Anything less than an A is a disappointment.”

Young minds tend to internalize such talk, which can instigate harsh self-talk or feelings of inadequacy. This may lead to a myriad of negative effects, including stress-induced depression.

How You Can Help

Make it explicit that your love isn’t tied to your child’s achievements. Celebrate effort over outcomes and be mindful of how you discuss success and failure in your household.

2. The Tyranny of the Calendar

Your child’s Google Calendar rivals that of a Fortune 500 CEO. They have piano on Monday, soccer on Tuesday, coding club on Wednesday, math tutoring on Thursday, and dance on  Friday. It doesn’t end there. They have language tutoring on Saturday and strictly scheduled family time on Sunday.

Does this sound familiar? What you see as a schedule full of enrichment opportunities, they might experience as a hamster wheel with no exit.

How You Can Help

Audit your child’s schedule and ensure they have genuine downtime — not just gaps between activities. Ask them which activities truly bring them joy and consider eliminating those that don’t. Remember that boredom isn’t the enemy — it’s the birthplace of creativity and self-discovery.

3. The Academic Pressure Cooker

Education has become increasingly competitive, and kids feel it from a young age. Coursework can be challenging — particularly around assessment times — creating significant stress peaks throughout the school year. Musical theater clubs, debate teams, and other activities that complement a child’s education but take place outside of school can act as de-stressors, making it easier to succeed in the classroom.

How You Can Help

Partner with your child’s teachers to understand reasonable expectations. Create a calm study environment at home, and help your child develop time management skills — rather than pulling all-nighters — that will help them throughout their life.

4. Family Dynamics They Can’t Control — But Definitely Feel

Children are emotional sponges. That “private” argument you had with your partner in the bedroom? They absorbed every raised voice. The financial stress you’re trying to shield them from? They’ve picked up on those tense phone calls and furrowed brows.

While you don’t need an artificially perfect home environment for your young ones to thrive, be aware that children often blame themselves for adult problems they witness.

How You Can Help

Give age-appropriate context for situations your child sees or hears. “Mom and Dad disagreed, but we’re working it out” goes a long way. It’s important to reassure them that adult problems are normal and not their responsibility to solve.

5. The Social Media Funhouse Mirror

While you’re worrying about inappropriate content, your child might be suffering from something else online —  the comparison game. Social media is a highlight reel of everyone else’s seemingly perfect lives. If unregulated, it may leave your child wondering why their existence isn’t equally photogenic.

How You Can Help

Don’t just monitor content — discuss it. Talk about how social media users stage photos, exaggerate achievements and hide conflicts. Help your child develop a healthy skepticism without becoming cynical.

6. The Insidious Effects of Insufficient Sleep

Research shows that up to 50% of children experience sleep problems. Sleep deprivation magnifies other stressors. What might be manageable on a full night’s sleep becomes catastrophic if you’ve only gotten a few hours. Between homework, activities and the siren call of devices, sleep often gets sacrificed.

How You Can Help

Treat sleep as non-negotiable. Create consistent bedtime routines, model healthy sleep habits yourself, and keep technology out of bedrooms. Remember that an overtired child rarely announces, “I need sleep” — they have meltdowns instead.

Help Your Child Destress

Children are remarkably resilient, but they still need your help navigating stress and developing healthy coping skills. By recognizing and addressing hidden stressors, you become a more effective buffer and guide. Sometimes, the best stress relief you can offer is simply paying attention to what’s bothering your child and practicing active listening. They just want to feel heard in a world that sometimes seems too busy to listen.

Author bio:  Cora Gold is the Editor-in-Chief of women’s lifestyle magazine, Revivalist. She strives to live a happy and healthy life with her family by her side.
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As parents, we must prepare our children with physical things needed at school – backpacks, lunch boxes, paper, pens, pencils, and even clothes. However, one of the most important aspects of being ready for school often goes overlooked: their emotional well-being.

Children carry what we call an “emotional backpack” that is full of their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Ensuring that parents equip this backpack well helps foster confidence, success, and your child’s emotional health at school.

What is the Emotional Backpack?

Every child entering school every day carries this emotional backpack filled with fears, hopes, dreams, and past experiences. Sometimes, it can feel light and easy, filled with excitement and anticipation for fun things, but other times, it may be very heavy and filled with stress, anxiety, or self-doubt.

Nurturing your child’s well-being by addressing their feelings through their emotional backpack helps to manage their emotions. It’s a way to further prepare them mentally to take on the challenges of each school day.

Managing Anxiety While At School

School is a stressor for many children, and it could be due to several things. Fear of failing, academic pressure, social status and dynamics, and other such situations can contribute to feeling anxious or stressed at school.

Some helpful ways to manage these types of causes of stress include the following:

• Establish a routine – more predictable schedules help children feel more secure and confident, which helps eliminate uncertainty.

• Validate and reassure feelings – let your child know that anything they feel is normal because they are not alone with their worries, which can help ease the trouble they believe they are isolated.

• Practice mindfulness – encourage your child to take deep breaths or perform visualization exercises to help calm nerves and distract from pressure.

Supportive Home Environment

Your child’s home impacts their emotional health, so having a supportive and positive home environment is crucial to carry over at school. Spend quality time together by participating in family bonding activities, like family game nights, dinners, or walks.

Encourage your child to foster independence by having responsibilities around the house, such as cleaning up their play area. Remember that as a parent, you are the example, so your approach to tasks and problems will influence your child’s responses and actions.

Helping Provide Emotional Resilience

It is important to develop the ability to bounce back when situations are uncertain, cause fear, or set your child back. There are a few things you can do to strengthen this emotional resilience.

• A place for open communication – encouraging your child to be open by creating a safe space for them to express themselves is a good way to tap into their feelings and get them to talk about what is bothersome or causing worry.

For example, when you’re looking for the right study materials or shopping for affordable school uniform pants for girls and boys, you can take the opportunity to get them to open up when feeling comfortable and willing to talk.

• Problem-solving – once you’re aware of how your child is feeling or what is causing problems, you can help your child to look for solutions. Rather than provide them a solution, allow your child to devise ways to solve their problems independently, which helps build up their resilience and confidence in working through issues.

• Coping strategies – you can provide your child with ways that you cope with stress or disappointment that are healthy and helpful, such as journaling, writing things down, or talking through your problems.

Supporting a Growth Mindset

Helping your child understand the benefits of a growth mindset, which is the belief that abilities can be developed through persistence and understanding, is a way to help them take on challenges and learn from their mistakes.

Supporting this mindset involves praising their efforts and expressing appreciation for their hard work, even if it doesn’t yield results. You can also help them understand that making mistakes is a good thing because it helps promote learning. One last thing you can work on to assist their growth mindset is by creating small, realistic goals for them to achieve so they can have a sense of accomplishment.

Growing Social Skills

Social skills are an essential aspect of a child’s emotional well-being. Building friendships can be intimidating for children, so you can help encourage them to develop healthy interactions by focusing on empathy, considering how others feel, and practicing kindness.

Practice different social situations your child may run into at home so that they can act out and feel more confident when dealing with real-life interactions, rather than utilizing social media. Clubs, sports, and other extracurriculars also help to provide opportunities for children to create friendships and develop teamwork and collaborative skills.

Encourage Healthy Habits

Your child’s physical health is also a necessary part of emotional health. Ensuring your child has adequate nutrition with a balanced diet and regular exercise provides energy and mood stability. Sleep is another aspect of physical health that accounts for a child’s behavior and mood, so ensure your child gets the recommended amount of sleep each night for success.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes, your child could require additional support beyond what we as parents can provide. Recognize symptoms of anxiety, withdrawal, frequent bouts of sadness, or behavioral changes that may require expert or professional guidance.

Preparing your child for school goes beyond supplies and outfits. Ensuring an emotional backpack with confidence, resilience, coping skills, and a positive outlook is present for a successful and rewarding school experience. By nurturing their emotional well-being, you empower your child to thrive personally and academically, enriching their school days and ensuring a healthy future.

References

• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
• Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. Delacorte Press.
• American Psychological Association. (2021). Resilience Guide for Parents & Teachers. Retrieved from www.apa.org.
• National Association of School Psychologists. (2020). Helping Children Cope With Changes Resulting From COVID-19. Retrieved from www.nasponline.org.