Hi, I’m Megan Orton.

I started Mindful Media because in my years as a teacher, I was seeing more and more thoughtful, conscientious parents struggling to regulate screen time in their families. Every year, I watched as more and more kids gave up healthy pastimes to spend hours on a screen.

In my first career as a Suzuki Violin teacher, I spent 25 years working with hundreds of children and their families here in the Pacific Northwest. The Suzuki method starts children playing as young as 3 yrs. old, so I would often see my students once or twice a week from preschool until they left for college, affording me the unique opportunity of working with them for their entire childhoods. My long-term presence in their lives enabled me to see the effects of the tech revolution firsthand. All this technology was bringing us so many conveniences and opportunities, but it seemed to be coming at a price. It was clear that childhood was changing fast and not all the changes were positive.

When I became a parent myself, I was as confused about how to regulate screen time in my home as everyone else. I had so many questions and concerns but nowhere to turn for answers. I started reading every book I could find on the subject, looking for the answer to what I thought was such a fundamental question: “What’s a healthy amount of screen time for a kid?”

This search soon became my passion. It changed everything about my family’s relationship to screens, and ultimately led me to change my career. I delved into the research, took every class I could find, studied with experts in the field, and became certified by The Digital Wellness Institute.

Through my studies, I discovered a strong correlation between my teaching methods and what it takes to create healthy tech-habits in a family. In both cases, it’s all about the little things you do every day, and it works best when parents and kids are working together as a team.

The Suzuki method requires that parents practice with their children every day – it’s the reason children are able to start playing so young. This meant that a big part of my job was showing parents how to work well with their kids at home.

Every day, I helped parents strengthen skills like positive communication, avoiding power struggles, creating new habits, setting goals and expectations, and motivating their kids so that practicing was fun. These same skills are central to my approach to helping families regulate technology.

Decades of Experience

With Mindful Media, I bring decades of experience helping families work together to achieve a difficult goal, along with what I’ve learned from 17 years as a mom managing screen time in my own home.

In the 7 years I’ve devoted to studying kids and screens, I’ve learned that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for healthy technology use. Every child is different, every family is different, and not all screen time is equal. 

My passion is helping parents find screen time solutions that work for their unique families. I’ve helped so many families find a healthy balance between screen time and real life, and I look forward to helping your family find that balance too!