Polly and the Screen Time Overload

This story is based on 1 Corinthians 10:23: “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up.”Ever since Polly can remember she spends the week of her birthday on her grandparents farm. She loves everything about it; gathering eggs, milking the cows, riding the horse, and playing with her cousins who live next door.When she arrives at the farm there’s a surprise from her Aunt Patty waiting for her. It’s an iTab!!!! She is so excited and can’t wait to download games. Before her mother leaves she instructs her to not spend too much time on the iTab. Polly barely hears her and spends the whole day and night playing on it! She doesn’t play with her cousins. She doesn’t feed the pigs. She doesn’t gather the eggs.The next day Polly gets bored waiting for her iTab to charge so she decides to visit the barn. Grandpa tells her he is happy to see her outside, but Polly is quick to defend her iTab: “I really love my iTab. It’s not wrong to play on my iTab.”“No, it’s not wrong,” grandpa tells her. “But sometimes things that are good can make us miss out on something even better. God has given us many good gifts, but he says we can only truly enjoy them when they don’t take over our lives.“Will Polly learn an important lesson about technology? Or will she miss out on helping around the farm and playing with her cousins?This book speaks such important truths about technology while still being entertaining and fun for kids. I love that it takes place on a farm. I think most people struggle with setting boundaries on screen time and how to enjoy it in moderation. I like that the author doesn’t make it seem like technology is evil, just that we need to learn self-control. What a great book with a very important lesson, especially for this generation. Highly recommend.

It's a great example to kids about how you need to moderate screen time. If you have Arlo and the Great big coverup, they written by the same person, and your kids will like this one too.I will say there's some phrasing that probably wouldn't come from a kid naturally but besides that it's a nice lesson.

Read it to my 4 1/2 year-old granddaughter at bedtime one night. She wanted to read it for the next four nights in a row!

This was a helpful resource for my 9 and 10 year olds to read as they live in a world with a lot of screens

This book starts with 1 Cor 10:23, a verse from Paul saying everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial. What an excellent verse to use!!The basic plot is a little girl dreams of all the things she's going to see and do on her grandparents farm. But when she gets there, she's given an iTab for her birthday and cannot put it down. No adults give her any rules about it. She stays up too late. She ignores cousins and animals. But when the battery is charging, she heads out to see animals. She has a talk with Grandpa about how some good things make us miss out on even better things and he likens it to if he gave his horse too many sugar cubes, all he'd want would be more sugar and no healthy hay. What a good analogy and opportunity to talk about other things we indulge in that can be detrimental if not used in moderation.By the end of the book, Polly has a healthy relationship with cousins, animals and tech. It's like a 30min sitcom where all the problems are solved in 30min. That's not realistic BUT its still a really good, moralistic story.It's meant for younger kids (maybe 4-8) but I would 100% read this in earshot of older kids, too. The lessons are true and powerful.At the very end of the book, the authors offer a handful of practical ideas to help manage the tech in your child's life.Great book. Biblically based BUT only the first page and the parent tips have Bible verses. The story itself could be read in any setting without the heaters knowing it's a Christian book.