Empowering Teens & Parents with Practical Tools for Digital Wellbeing
Announcing Dayo + Peace in Schools Partnership
In the past decade, we’ve learned a lot about how social media can both positively and negatively impact our lives. Most of us have experienced firsthand how screen time, when unchecked, can eat away at our time, our real-life intimacy, and our sense of self-worth. Overexposure to social media can be particularly acute for teens. Experts like Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, have underlined the dangers of social media on young minds and are fighting to ban phones from schools and set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts. Just last week, three of the world’s biggest tech companies went to trial over claims that their platforms deliberately addict and harm children.
Rather than framing the dangerous outcomes of social media use as an individual-discipline problem, public awareness is shifting toward seeing screen time as a systemic issue. This is great news. The other good news is that there are a myriad of ways we can support ourselves and our youth right now, within this present moment.
At Peace in Schools, we define mindfulness as “being here and now with kindness.” In our for-credit high school class, teens learn tools and practices that empower them to place their attention where they want it to be, rather than where it’s been habituated to go. When in the present moment, teens get in touch with important and life-changing questions like: "How can I be happy? What do I value? How do I want to spend my time?" They find new joy in relationships in and outside the classroom.
Peace in Schools is thrilled to announce a new partnership that empowers families to explore digital wellbeing together. Dayo is a mission-driven company striving to get families their time back. With their incentive-based app, teens and parents can partner to track screen time and set shared goals. It’s a tool for building self-regulation and autonomy in an increasingly digital world. Peace in Schools is now offering mindfulness practices for teens and parents through Dayo’s platforms.
“I personally find just noticing in meditation to be the most helpful. I feel like with all the phones and technology we never take our time to just notice and focus on sounds or birds or the feeling of our clothes. I usually do this outside of meditation and notice that I feel more connected to the world around me because of it.”
Mindfulness is not only a powerful tool for digital wellbeing, it’s also a practice that enriches our lives away from the screen. The present moment is where we can connect to ourselves and our young people, and it’s these connections that will see us through whatever is to come in the age of social media, Ai, and beyond. For families of Mindful Studies students who are already on a path of exploring mindfulness, Peace in Schools is thrilled to share Dayo as a complimentary tool for mindful living.