June 2025 {View as Webpage}

It's Summertime — and Time to Play

With the summer a few short days away, it's a great time for families to unplug and make real-life memories. Read on for some ideas about how to create a great summer and year ahead for you and your kids.

So many parents have come to our coffee mornings and speaker presentations asking a lot of questions about their older children. While many of them have not yet signed the pledge, they are seeing that things could change in their families and want support on how to do it. We can see that there is need for conversations in families with older as well as younger children.

As we head into the summer, anything that your family can do to give your kids more time unplugged will help. Spending more time playing together in the real world will help your children, as well as improving your family's quality of life.

Please enjoy this newsletter and be sure to share your feedback with us.

Have a great summer!

Co-Chairs Brie and Jeffrey Kimel and the Unplugged Bialik Parent Ambassadors

Smartphone Alternatives

We hear from parents that they give their children phones so that they can keep in touch with them and their kids can communicate with their friends, especially as they get more independent going into Grades, 4, 5 and up.

If you're thinking about giving your kid a phone, please take a look at the alternative smartphone options for keeping in touch. There are many ways you can give your child a cool-looking phone — either a "dumb phone" or by restricting access on a smartphone — and you won't be unleashing the full power of the Internet in your child's hands before they're ready.

An Apple Watch for Kids is one of the newly available options that you may want to check out as well.

We've heard from parents that they've been able to instal parental controls on their kids' phones themselves and some are getting help from suppliers like Grow Electronics.

Head to our website to find out more about smartphone alternatives and suppliers.

Useful Resources

If Not Screens, Then What?

If we take away some of our kids' devices, how can we stop them from being bored? "Don't be scared by offline time," advises Katherine Johnson Martinko, in her blog The Analog Family. Independent active play, without screens, is a muscle that needs exercise to get it to function well, starting with a "replacement phase" to change patterns.

The Mass Trauma of Porn

"What Have We Done?" asks Freya India, writing on the Beyond Babel Substack. She highlights how many young children are very young when they are first exposed to porn and it can have a traumatizing impact on them. "Children are learning about sex for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more degrading content." 

Click Smart, Think Sharp: Teaching Digital Citizenship

Karen Lidor, our Associate Director of General Studies, shares what Bialik is doing to teach students Digital Citizenship. You may be surprised about all the topics we cover, starting as early as Grade 1.

Bialik Hebrew Day School | T: 416-783-3346| F: 416-785-8287 | communications@bialik.ca | bialik.ca

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