News

With Father's Day coming up this weekend, we wanted to celebrate Dads by sharing this exclusive chat we had at TimeTokens HQ with Superdad Phil Spencer.  He tells us how screentime affects his own kids and family and guess who his is favourite Frazzle is! Phil you are hugely busy with your work, which involves a great deal of time away. But you are a dad of two boys too. How have you so far managed to balance the roles? “I’m away 2-3 day/nights during the school week. I try and justify it to myself by always making sure I’m around during the school holidays and...

We are over the moon that www.timetokens.com is an official Partner of this year’s National Unplugging Day on 25th June. National Unplugging Day UK was born in May 2015 and got off to an amazing start with founder Gemma Johnson generating media coverage of over 30 million people across TV, Radio and national press. Three years on and TimeTokens is pledging to get every family across the UK match fit and ready for the big Unplug on the 25th. We all know too much techtime is not a good thing for us or our children, you don’t need us to tell you.  We hear about...

At 1pm today we’ll be switching off to celebrate World Earth Day.  Today might be the first day the UK have survived without burning coal to make electricity since the beginning of the industrial revolution which would be an amazing achievement.  So I was thinking what can we do to have some family fun and help the environment at the same time?  Here are our top Time Token ING’s we’ve been doing. Plant ING You could and get a small tree from a local garden centre, or buy some seeds to plant.  The Boys grandfather planted an acorn when each of them...

Lorranie Candy's brilliant piece "Parenting and the Empathy Gap" about teen disconnection and lack of compassion sent shivers down my spine.  Harry is only 9 so not quite there yet but, I did have any early glimpse of what it can be like.  Two years ago during a very wet February half term break at my parents, Harry had complete overload of tech.  The rain poured, I was looking after Wilfy, a very active toddler, and Harry quietly and cleverly rotated a circuit from Ipad to TV to computer and back.  He kept out of everyone's way, didn't make a squeak and no-one...

When I read this brilliantly written article by Ben Machell in The Times Magazine this weekend, it completely resonated with me. My 7 year old son Harry and I invented TimeTokens to give us some "stopping rules" out of desperation. I was fed up with him spending hour after hour on screens inevitably ending in a huge row and neither of us having any control. As Ben recalls, when we were young, we had the natural screentime breaks of the news or something equally dull that made you do something else... Sunday afternoon football results were my instant turn off! No such boredom exists today....