Parents wrestling with screens at home have four National Library Board sessions to pick from between Wednesday 21 and Sunday 25 October, covering teenagers’ phone use, gaming tension and how preschoolers name their feelings. All four sit on NLB’s GoLibrary programme calendar, need registration through an NLB account, and carry no registration fee.
Each ticket admits one person, and attendance is taken by scanning a QR code with the NLB Mobile app. Late arrivals can lose their seats to walk-ins, so the libraries ask parents to come 10 to 15 minutes early.
Wednesday 21 October: a research talk on screen time
Education Exchange, a public talk series by the National Institute of Education and NLB, turns this season to screen time. Its Wednesday session, Beyond Scrolling: Meaningful Screen Time in a Distracted World, runs from 7.15pm to 8.45pm in Programme Room 1 at Basement 1 of the National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street.
Associate Professor Loh Chin Ee of NIE, who researches adolescent reading and school libraries, speaks alongside Associate Professor Jean Liu of the Singapore Institute of Technology, lead author of the interagency Positive Use Guide on digital devices for young users. Dr Munirah Shaik Kadir of NIE moderates. The talk looks at how screen activities help or hurt attention and learning, and where e-books and longform reading fit. It is pitched at adults, with 100 seats.
Saturday 24 October: your teen’s screen time
Managing Your Teen’s Screen Time & Mobile Use runs from 2pm to 3.15pm at Harbourfront Library, Programme Zone 2 on Level 3. The workshop explains how popular platforms are built to hold attention, and how heavy use can affect sleep, well-being and learning. It then moves to setting boundaries that respect a teenager’s growing independence, without simply taking the phone away. The room holds 40.
It comes after the National Day Rally announcement of a planned minimum age of 13 for social media, with implementation details still to come.
Sunday 25 October: gaming, and feelings for under-sixes
Staying Connected with your Gaming Child while Letting Go is a parents-only workshop from 2pm to 4pm, again at Harbourfront Library, in Programme Zone 1 on Level 3. A parenting coach leads group discussion on giving children more independence when gaming has become a flashpoint at home. It caps at 30 parents, the smallest room of the four.
At the same hour across town, Let’s Talk about Feelings! runs from 2pm to 3pm in Programme Room 1 at the National Library Building. It is for children aged 3 to 6, each with a parent, and is part of the lead-up to NLB’s Early READ Fiesta. Wei Wei, a senior counsellor at Montfort Care, and Samuel, a parenting coach, guide each pair through a feelings and emotions chart to take home. This one needs the child’s profile added to the parent’s NLB Mobile app before arrival so both are counted.
The Fiesta itself opens at Woodlands Library on 13 November, the same library that hosted NLB’s folk songs workshop for parents and toddlers on Saturday. Families who need step-free routes can find wheelchair-friendly bus and MRT directions and social stories for each library at go.gov.sg/wheelchair-friendly-routes-social-stories.
