Parenting tips by smartphone
Victoria Leith has created a new parenting app for smart phones.
WHEN the world watched in horror last year as Britain’s major cities were torn up and looted by rioters – many of them youths – questions started to be asked about the moral grounding of today’s society.
Religion and faith are not the be all and end all of everyone’s lives and many people do live happily without these spiritual aspects, but there was a strong sense that the teaching of right and wrong in today’s society had gone horribly awry.
The finger of blame was pointed at teachers, parents and the Government itself as people sought to find answers for the horrifyingly selfish behaviour they were witnessing.
Of the people who witnessed the criminal activities on their news screens, many decided to take action and start personal projects to try in a small way to address some of the issues. One of them was 37-year-old mother-of-one Victoria Leith, from Queen’s Park, Northampton.
A teacher by profession, she wrote an iPhone and iPod Touch app – now available from the iTunes store – which aims at giving 97 common sense parenting tips.
Simply entitled 97 Parenting Tips, Victoria wrote the app in association with her friend’s company Detox Your World.
She said: “After the riots of last year, everyone was talking about what was going on. We can’t put the finger of blame on someone if they have been raised in a certain way. There were people who had problems and difficulties. I think in general there were young people who felt they did not really belong.”
Speaking about her new app, Victoria is keen not to be seen as a preacher of the right thing to do as she confessed parenting is a “minefield”. But she wants to help, all the same.
She said: “I started writing the app and a lot of the aspects overlooked were spiritual aspects. It can often be that having spirituality in the home, to have something to focus on which is more than the daily grind, can be important as a lot of children don’t feel satisfied with what they have got.”
Using the app, parents can spin a wheel and select cards which hold individual tips. Click on them and more information is revealed.
The tips deal with a huge range of subjects from simple advice about diet to a discussion of the impact of smacking, and tips on how to speak to and discipline children appropriately.
Tips include ‘Hold their hands, don’t smack them’, ‘Teach them to honour women and men’ and ‘Let them stay in the real world as much as possible’.
Victoria said: “I can’t go into a parent’s home and say this is what you should do, but I want more parents to talk about parenting, to be open and honest and say ‘look, I can’t cope’.
“Parents do a fantastic job but something is going wrong and you can’t blame it all on the schools.
“For me it is about conscious parenting, if you don’t think you just ‘do’ and that is when you can start doing things that parents did to you, like hitting your child because you were hit.”
For Victoria, a lot of children’s bad behaviour can come down to too much sugar and additives in their diet.
She said: “ I think food plays a huge part in a child’s development. Omega 3 is very important in brain development.
“We could be having sugar in cereal, in a mid-morning snack and then there is the sugar crash and for a child it is the same, but magnified and we wonder why a child is stroppy and don’t know where the behaviour is coming from. Sugar can be very addictive as well.”
Victoria, who has also recently penned a book called There’s More To Life Than Biscuits, said: “It is about empowering parents to go to the supermarket and buy the right foods. Over Christmas we had too much sugar and I could see the effect.”
One real challenge for modern parents, according to Victoria, is the amount of time children are allowed to spend staring at TVs, computers or other gadgetry.
She said: “A lot of children are logged on to something. My daughter looks at my iPhone some of the time but when you need to start timing a child because they are spending too much time on something, that wouldn’t have happened years ago.
“We did not have mobiles and Facebook which children stare at today. Their whole focus and vision is focused on one element. One parent said to me that it is so good for certain aspects of their development, but they can’t socialise. How can you socialise properly when you are only looking at a screen?”
For more information about Victoria, her books and other apps, log onto www.littleguru.co.uk
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