Our unique Tech-Free Gift Guide offers a refreshing escape from digital overload, presenting a handpicked selection of imaginative gifts. From culinary adventures and creative arts to educational magazines and physical activities, we emphasize experiences that foster family bonding, creativity, and healthy habits. The guide includes community-building ideas like mural painting and beekeeping, encouraging children and teens to engage in enriching, screen-free activities while creating lasting memories and developing new skills.
Dinner Party Delight: Pick a fun food-themed dinner party where they make the food for and with their friends. Then, gift them the gadgets needed to prepare the meal, and offer to buy them the food AND do the clean-up. Imagine their excitement hosting a dinner with friends!
For the basket and bow enthusiasts, why not wrap these experiences in beautifully adorned baskets? It adds charm and excitement.
Cooking gifts has the bonus of helping our kids get a sense of pride in knowing how to cook things from scratch. Here are some cooking basket ideas:
Spring Roll Feast. Give them rice paper and this wonderful julienne peeler. I love that it cuts carrots and zucchini into just the right shapes. A delightful and healthy cooking adventure!
Sushi Extravaganza: If you can’t get raw fish or don’t want raw fish, that’s okay. Vegetables and avocados work great, too. There is an abundance of sushi-making kits on amazon.com.
Fun with Fondue. Gift them a little fondue set, then give them cheese and some chocolate to get their cooking ideas going.
Dig into Dumplings. My daughter loves making homemade dough for dumplings, and then we all get to choose what to put in them. These stacked baskets make the steaming process extra special. Of course, one can always fry the dumplings instead. This comic-style cookbook is a fun addition to the set.
I love The Week, Junior, so much that I recently subscribed to it myself. No joke, I sometimes read it to get ideas to include in the Screenagers Podcast and for this blog. But truth be told, I just love to fall asleep reading it. There are many inspirational things in it — like shout-outs to amazing teachers and learning about wonderful things youth are doing. The magazine's subtitle is “Helping Kids Make Sense of the World,” it is meant for kids 8 to 14 (or parents who want a light, upbeat read to fall asleep to).
Fold-up stationery was such a big part of my life. A Milk and Cookies Foldover Card packet of stationary or other ones with a cool pen is one of my favorite things to gift to my kids as they grow up.
Almost every year, my kids have asked for one. They use them to write at the end of the day, to sketch, and so on.
To tack up drawings torn from that journal, you can gift them cute push pins. Here are some I found: A little cup with pretend hot chocolate and marshmallow-shaped push pins, and these cute succulent plant-shaped push pins are adorable.
Want to end the debate that the phone has to be in your kids’ room at night because they use it as an alarm clock and music? How about gifting them an AM/FM radio alarm clock?
I have never offered this category in the seven years of sharing holiday gift ideas with you. This may seem out there, but it is completely doable to plan with another family to create a joint gift experience to build a stronger bond as families together.
Here are some ideas:
Paint a mural with your community. My family did this! We had such fun with neighbors and friends who came to paint a mural on the side of our garage. We hired a muralist who created the concept of what we wanted and sketched it out on the wall. Then, together, neighbors filled in the lines with paint. It spruced up the neighborhood, and we have an incredible shared memory. As a gift, you could give some paint to kids with a sketch pad and a card saying that this is for creating street art or a mural.
Pickleball Party. Go in with another family to get a Pickle Ball net set up. Maybe one family opens the net, and the other kids open the paddle and balls. Then, schedule times to play. You can even start a friendly tournament.
Karaoke machine. One family could get the mics, and the other could get the set and then have a date on the books for the holiday week to get all the families together to sing. You could throw in some props as well. Think cowboy hat or glittery boa wrap.
A Beehive. This is a wild idea, but what if you join another family in your area to buy a beehive and experiment with keeping bees? You will need two beekeeping outfits and a few other pieces of gear. Then, in March, you buy bees with a queen. Our family did this in the heart of Seattle for many years, and then our friends down the street took one of our extra hives and did the same thing. We had such fun bonding over all the learning and adventures and the delicious honey that ensued. Check out if where you live has a which
Here are links to all 6 of our past year’s blogs with many tech-free ideas:
2021 Mostly Non-Tech Gift Guide
With new videos posted every Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel! Here are today's videos:
Our unique Tech-Free Gift Guide offers a refreshing escape from digital overload, presenting a handpicked selection of imaginative gifts. From culinary adventures and creative arts to educational magazines and physical activities, we emphasize experiences that foster family bonding, creativity, and healthy habits. The guide includes community-building ideas like mural painting and beekeeping, encouraging children and teens to engage in enriching, screen-free activities while creating lasting memories and developing new skills.
Dinner Party Delight: Pick a fun food-themed dinner party where they make the food for and with their friends. Then, gift them the gadgets needed to prepare the meal, and offer to buy them the food AND do the clean-up. Imagine their excitement hosting a dinner with friends!
For the basket and bow enthusiasts, why not wrap these experiences in beautifully adorned baskets? It adds charm and excitement.
Cooking gifts has the bonus of helping our kids get a sense of pride in knowing how to cook things from scratch. Here are some cooking basket ideas:
Spring Roll Feast. Give them rice paper and this wonderful julienne peeler. I love that it cuts carrots and zucchini into just the right shapes. A delightful and healthy cooking adventure!
Sushi Extravaganza: If you can’t get raw fish or don’t want raw fish, that’s okay. Vegetables and avocados work great, too. There is an abundance of sushi-making kits on amazon.com.
Fun with Fondue. Gift them a little fondue set, then give them cheese and some chocolate to get their cooking ideas going.
Dig into Dumplings. My daughter loves making homemade dough for dumplings, and then we all get to choose what to put in them. These stacked baskets make the steaming process extra special. Of course, one can always fry the dumplings instead. This comic-style cookbook is a fun addition to the set.
I love The Week, Junior, so much that I recently subscribed to it myself. No joke, I sometimes read it to get ideas to include in the Screenagers Podcast and for this blog. But truth be told, I just love to fall asleep reading it. There are many inspirational things in it — like shout-outs to amazing teachers and learning about wonderful things youth are doing. The magazine's subtitle is “Helping Kids Make Sense of the World,” it is meant for kids 8 to 14 (or parents who want a light, upbeat read to fall asleep to).
My team and I have been bustling behind the scenes, thinking up new episodes for the Screenagers Podcast and new posts for my weekly Tech Talk Tuesday Blog. Your input at this time would be FANTASTIC! What topics do you want covered? Do your kids have ideas for topics?
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Cooking creates self-confidence, self-efficacy and is a great offline activity. Today, I have some food moves to help inspire your child to up their cooking game — whether they are naysayers or Chez Panisse wannabes, I think they’ll like these.
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Plain and simple, there is one thing I recommend doing during the holidays for love and laughter. Bring out old photo albums and put them in a high-trafficked spot in your home — be it the kitchen table or a table in a living room. I predict we won’t have photo albums in the future, but we do right now.
READ MORE >for more like this, DR. DELANEY RUSTON'S NEW BOOK, PARENTING IN THE SCREEN AGE, IS THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE FOR TODAY’S PARENTS. WITH INSIGHTS ON SCREEN TIME FROM RESEARCHERS, INPUT FROM KIDS & TEENS, THIS BOOK IS PACKED WITH SOLUTIONS FOR HOW TO START AND SUSTAIN PRODUCTIVE FAMILY TALKS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND IT’S IMPACT ON OUR MENTAL WELLBEING.
