3 Tips For Using Screen Time With Your Dyslexic Child

Can screen time help you support your dyslexic child? You might be surprised to know that we think that it can. In this video, we'll talk about three ways we think this is true.

Hey everyone, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, where we help you support your dyslexic child. Okay, so today we're talking about how screen time can actually be beneficial for your dyslexic child. And by screen time, we're specifically talking about shows here. So, the first way that screen time, particularly watching shows with your child, can be beneficial is that it can provide a nice break from the stress and effort involved for your dyslexic child in tackling schoolwork and academic work.

And there's, I think, two aspects of this that I wanted to delve into. One, is that it can provide good bonding time between you and your child if you actually watch the shows together. This is because when you have a child with dyslexia, you are going to be spending probably more time helping them with homework, helping them learn to read, and working with them on academic stuff that is going to be challenging for both of you.

It's going to be stressful, and you're going to be doing this more than you would with a child who doesn't have dyslexia. And so it's especially important to have other activities that you can do with your child that are not academic, that don't feel academic at all. And so someone might object and say, well, why don't you, instead of watching shows, play board games? And we're a big fan of board games in our family.

We love board games. We play lots of board games with our children. But sometimes board games can actually feel a little too academic. A lot of them involve reading, for example, even in small ways. And so they can actually be sometimes stressful as well for your dyslexic child and can be something that they just don't necessarily want to do after focusing on academic work. And so sometimes watching shows together can be a good way to just really relax and enjoy the time together.

So that might not sound like the content is as important. But the next two ways that we're going to talk about actually do have more to do with content. Do you want to talk about the first way? Sure. So the first way that the actual content of what you're watching can be not just a good break, but actually beneficial for your dyslexic child is if we're talking about sort of educational content.

So documentaries, things like that. A child with dyslexia is probably not going to be learning as much about the world by reading. So children who don't have dyslexia are more likely to be able to learn about animals or dinosaurs or space or whatever their interest is by reading a nonfiction book. But a child with dyslexia is just not going to do that as much, most likely. And so watching educational content on Netflix or whatever your streaming platform of choice is can actually be a way to give your child that information through a different medium that is just as valid a way of giving that information to your child as it would be if your child was reading about it on their own.

Right. And of course, this doesn't exclude things like going to a museum that hopefully has interactive exhibits and not only placards to read, you know, just as doing bonding time with your child. Maybe it's a nice day out and you go do something physical. But it's nice to think, I think, of ways to have some downtime and some educational time at home as well because we do spend a lot of time at home for various reasons.

The third way that we think that screen time can be beneficial to your child, specifically talking about shows, and this one's also a beneficial content way, is that a show is a story. So you really can treat it like literature in terms of how you talk about it with your child. You don't, I mean, you can be very conversational about it, right? But it's more like in the sense of like talking about the characters or talking about how the show goes.

I'm actually also a creative writing mentor. And, you know, a lot of the times when we're talking to students about their writing, their fiction writing, we're talking about like how do movies do it and, you know, thinking about it in these other ways that are also related to the way that shows and movies are produced. So I would encourage you to, when you're watching a show with your child, get into some of those aspects.

Again, it doesn't have to be in a way that feels like they're trying to make it into, you're trying to make it into school or something like that. But you can certainly talk about the storyline, you can talk about themes in the show, all kinds of things. And it's not exactly the same as reading, of course. Reading is a different kind of interactive process. And, you know, the child is visualizing themselves.

But that does not mean that it couldn't be valuable to learn about story and some of the aspects of literature from watching a show. So a couple of things you might be thinking at this point. And so we just want to address those, take the devil's advocate view here. So one might be you're wondering about, like, just, you know, screen time as not being as beneficial and, like, aren't we always trying to limit screen time, that kind of thing.

And I want to point out just that I think that's not mutually exclusive. Absolutely, you can still be discussing and agreeing on limits with your child. So to me, that feels like a separate discussion. So definitely, it doesn't mean that it has to be a lot, a lot of screen time still in your child's life, necessarily. Right. And the second objection that I think a lot of you might be thinking right now is, well, if my child has dyslexia, shouldn't they be focusing on learning how to read and not wasting time watching shows?

And I think that's a good question. I think, though, that as parents or as people with a dyslexic child in our life, we have to understand that it's a lot of work for that child trying to learn how to read, and it's just not going to be really beneficial to really force that child to spend so much time on that work that is really mentally exhausting for them, and they need breaks.

And if they can get a break where they are feeling like it's totally different from school, totally different from the difficulties they have with reading, if they can get that break by watching a show and still learn something, still get a good sense of craft and story, maybe it'll spark an interesting ethical discussion in the family, I think that's great. And, again, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Your child can work on learning to read and then can also watch shows.

And just one last final comment there is that, you know, of course it can be mutually agreed upon a show, but it should be definitely something that the child is choosing. So that gives the benefit both of it being this chosen activity where a lot of homework and stuff does not feel that way at all, and then they're more engaged with what it is. So even when we were talking about, like, documentaries or that kind of thing, ideally it would be a topic that's really interesting to your child.

So I just wanted to make that final point. Anything else you want to add? No, I just, I'm really curious what you think about this. I think some of you probably disagree with this, with our approach here, and that's great. We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment, and let's have a discussion about it. See you next time. Bye. Bye.