The Screen-Free Toddler: 200 Creative Activities to Spark Imagination Without Screens

Maggie Lee Goins is a child development researcher and early childhood educator with over fifteen years of experience working with children from birth to age five. She holds a Master's degree in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where her research focused on the impact of screen exposure on language acquisition and executive function development in toddlers.

Goins began her career as a classroom teacher in a Montessori preschool, where she observed firsthand the profound difference between children who arrived with well-developed play skills and those whose attention and imagination had been shaped by screen time. This experience led her to pursue graduate research on screen use in early childhood and to develop community-based parent education programs on screen-free play. She has since trained hundreds of early childhood educators and spoken at national conferences on the importance of unstructured play in the digital age.

In addition to her work in early childhood development, Goins is the mother of two young children, and she writes from the trenches of real parenting. *The Screen-Free Toddler* is her first book, born from the conviction that parents need practical, specific, and non-judgmental support in navigating the challenges of raising children in a screen-saturated world. She believes that every family can find their own balance, and that the most powerful tool in any parent's arsenal is their own attention, freely given.

Goins lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children, where she can often be found digging for worms in the backyard, building elaborate block towers that will inevitably topple, and trying to drink her coffee while it's still hot.