If your family looks anything like the average American family, you’re probably on your screens too much and can use some help. We all want our families to be as healthy as possible. Overuse of our devices can have a negative effect, not only on our health, but on our family dynamic. Our gadgets are causing us to sit rather than move, and swipe rather than speak. Cutting back isn’t easy but has huge benefits. How much screen time is too much, and what can our families do to reduce time spent on devices?
Screen Time Guidelines
In Dr. Bennett’s book, Screen Time in the Mean Time: A Parent’s Guide to Get Kids and Teens Internet Safe, she provides recommendations for kids of different ages, toddlers through teens as well as for adults. When asked about time guidelines, she stresses that, although useful as a guide, time limits are less important than the quality and format of viewed content.
Especially for young children, fast-moving, light-flashing content can be overly arousing to the developing nervous system which can lead to stress and effect brain wiring long term. Compulsive and addictive use patterns driven by notifications and rewarding images and sounds can also have detrimental brain and behavior impact. Sexuality and violence are particularly potent to capture our attention, which means lots of exposure to ads and big profit. For children, inappropriate content can lead to stress, anxiety, fear, and depression. She says, for the first time in 23 years of practice, she is seeing young children with panic disorder. She attributes some of these cases to poorly managed screen use.
Dr. Bennett wrote Screen Time in the Mean Time because simple guidelines aren’t enough to protect healthy development and relationships. Each family member has different communication and information access needs. Personalized content and use patterns matter. Rather than set a hard time guideline and leave it at that, she says parents can teach sensible screen programming, choice, and use strategies for smart screen use. Kids need to know why rules exist and be able to negotiate for reasonable access. Just taking screens away overlooks critical learning opportunities. Our screens provide enormous benefits in entertainment, access to information, communication, skill-building, storage, and safety. Knowing how our screen devices affect us and how to manage them are critical first steps to smart screen use.
Risks of Excess Device Use
Recent studies have shown that too much time on your devices can lead to health problems such as:
Obesity
Watching television for more than 1.5 hours per day is a risk factor of obesity for children who are between the ages of 4 and 9. You are more likely to watch more TV when having one in the bedroom. Teens and children are 5 times more likely to be obese if they watch 5 or more hours of TV per day, than those who watch 0-2 hours per day (Why to limit your child’s media use, 2016).
Sleep Problems
A high exposure to screen media and sleeping with a phone in your bedroom puts you at a greater risk for sleep interference. The light that emits from your phone, blue light, is particularly harmful to your child’s sleep quality, because it triggers a dip in your sleep regulating hormone, melatonin. Poor quality of sleep can then lead to memory problems, loss of initiative, an inability to prioritized tasks, mood and anxiety symptoms, and poor academic performance overall (Bennett, 2018; Why to limit your child’s media use, 2016). Without sufficient sleep, the brain is unable to do its housekeeping duties, which includes memory consolidation and removal of toxins, Chronic sleep deprivation can lead to learning deficits, cardiovascular risks, buildup of toxic proteins that can lead to increased risk for Alzheimers, and an impoverished immune system. This is why Dr. Bennett believes that sleep deprivation is the number one risk to mental health today.
Poor Learning and School Performance
Children and teens tend to divide their attention between homework, TV, and smartphones. Dr. Bennett calls this “multitasking.” Multitasking can lead to poor quality work, wasted time, and mental brownout, which is irritability, fatigue, and depression (Bennett, 2018).
Tips on how to reduce screen time:
Be a role model and be consistent.
Achieving lifestyle changes as a family brings comradery, accountability, and a greater chance of success.
Get honest, set a goal, and reach it.
Have a clear vision of what you want your lifestyle to look like and plan the steps to get there. Time management apps are helpful to track and manage. screen use. Bennett’s home staging tips can also be life altering. Starting sooner rather than later will help everyone build positive habit with less resistance. The GKIS Family Living Agreement is a comprehensive and easy0-to-use tool that helps with education, goal setting, and learning family values.
No screens in the bedroom, bathroom, or behind closed doors.
Don’t even use your phone as an alarm clock. If you glance at it during the night, you’ll get distracted by social media and lose critical rejuvenating sleep. This can become a habit and lead to long-term sleep problems. Use a GKIS Family Docking Station to resist temptation.
Build screen-free dinners into the schedule.
Make meal time family time. The dinner table is a great place to bond with your family, catch up on how school or work went, and talk about plans for the week. This is the perfect opportunity to pay compliments and give thanks. Let your family know how grateful you are to have them in your life, it is these precious moments that we let slip by looking at our phones rather than truly engaging in our loved ones.
Modify your phones to be less appealing.
Delete apps. Grayscale. Turn off notifications. Put apps with notifications on a backpage of your smartphone. The world won’t end, you’ll be fine. Making your phone less attractive will cut your screen time and transform your phone from entertainment, to utility; the way it was intended.Cut your social media contacts to Dunbar’s number, 150. Research shows that we have a limited amount of friend slots in our brain, which adds up to about 150. After that, relationship quality deteriorates to acquaintance contact. If you’re hemorrhaging time on relationships that don’t bring something special to your life, trim your friend lists.
Improve the quality of your screen content.
Cut down to one social media app, unfollow fake news sources, and reduce your exposure to ad-rich content like beauty guru videos and celebrity news.
Screen-free times and activities leads to creativity and enriching three-dimensional play.
Bennett practiced #NoTechTuesday and #NoTechThursday with her family. She says these were her favorite days, because her kids played with their pets, built forts, climbed trees, and got creative. Now that her kids are teens, they sometimes elect screen free leisure activities, which she says is a longterm payoff they’ll always value.
Don’t use screens as a punishment or reward.
It’s important that you become your child’s advocate with screen use rather than their punisher. Although it’s easy to use screens as leverage, don’t do it. If they see you as a screen hater, they’ll quit talking to you about their screen activities. Instead, use practical, smaller consequences like 15 minutes earlier bedtime or an extra chore to do. This is especially important with young children.
As with any lifestyle change, time and practice is necessary for success. Trimming screen time may be difficult, especially for teens. They need you to negotiate slow improvements over time rather than demand lots of changes at once. Don’t expect them to agree at first. The benefits will be revealed over time. That is all part of learning healthy habits, which is not an innate skills and is easier with age. Likes and comments are great, but real connections start with true contact and conversation. Thanks to chad Flores for the valuable information in this article. If these tips were helpful, you can find more in Screen Time in the Mean Time: A Parenting Guide to Get Kids and Teens Internet Safe
Parents know that screen use carries risk, whether it’s sleep deprivation, texting while driving, online sexuality and aggression, or addiction. But what can we do about it? Pandora’s box has been opened. Yes, there are powerful parenting strategies that should be happening to limit risk, but who wants to deal with toxic teen fallout? Tweens and teens can put up a fight and workaround most rules anyway. And what if you have been monitoring on the sly and see something alarming, then what? If they find out you’ve been spying, it will damage an already difficult relationship. What can parents do to kick in and do a better job without starting World War III?
I work with teens every day in practice and have two at home. I agree they can be pretty scary. But I also know that without us, they’re capable of getting into real danger. There are sensible techniques you can use to implement real change without damaging your relationship. Believe it or not, teens even welcome limits sometimes, as long as they’re justified and introduced with a sincere offer for respectful negotiation. If that wasn’t the case, I’d be getting fired by session three most of the time by my teen clients. Instead, I often have to push them to graduate from therapy. Like us, they love fun connection and will accept adult influence more than you think.
Here are some parenting hacks for managing screen use even with the most independent teens:
DON’T AMBUSH
Sprinkle in your intent and justification over time rather than in one aggressive attack. Intervention doesn’t have to happen all at once (even though you may be anxious to get it over with). Introduce your ideas over time to give teens a chance to digest the information. Start with a discussion, then a meeting, then the implementation in doable steps. It’s unlikely you’ll ever get their full buy-in, but gradual tweaks will be accepted far better than a hostile takeover. For example, rather than take away Instagram due to a transgression, talk to them with warmth and acceptance acknowledging that ALL teens make mistakes online. No big deal. Just fix this one and maybe pare back to Dunbar’s number on their friends list. This is the number of friends our brains seem to have slots for, 150. By paring back, they reduce risk and still get to keep connecting with friends. All-or-nothing interventions can drive a wedge, but gradual and reasonable tweaks provide learning opportunity and you get cred for being reasonable.
PREPARE FOR PUSH-BACK
When I work with families, I often start with coping skills long before I suggest parenting strategies. Listening, assertiveness, negotiation, and relaxation skills are key. It also helps if you are prepared. These push-back possibilities are offered so you won’t be surprised when they arise and will stay calm and strategic and avoid getting pulled in and manipulated. If it gets too heated, walk away (eyes off the behavior you don’t want) and return to the issue another time (eyes on the behavior you want). Most important, don’t let them see you sweat. Maintain your credibility with calm authority.
Typical teen push-backs:
Act like they don’t care with plans to sneak later
Justify, lie, or make excuses
“I didn’t do it”
“Everybody does it”
“My teacher says I have to”
“You don’t know what it’s like now [I know everything about everything]””
Deflect and distract
By triggering you with real-time bad behavior, you may forget to follow through (“Look squirrel!”). I call this “throwing a fireball into the room.” While the parent is running around putting out fires, the issue at hand gets lost and the kid wins. Fireballs can be:
Eye-rolling
Talking back or cussing
Pulling out a list of grievances with absolutes (“You never let me” “This always happens”)
Tantrum
Name calling (“You suck”)
Self-deprecation (“I’m a terrible kid”)
Emotional extortion: Threaten to hurt you or themselves
Physically aggress (throwing, slamming, hitting)
Defy you and do it anyway
LISTEN AND VALIDATE
Although maddening, it’s healthy for teens to push back and manipulate. You want your kids to test things out on you, their safe person. Don’t take oppositionality personally. Manipulative kids are simply smart, strategic kids. Your job isn’t to squash their spirits, it’s to manage it and coach them to success.
For kids to engage in a discussion, you’ll need to listen as much as you talk. Lectures turn them off immediately. No engagement means you’ve lost any hope of influence. Once your child has responded and you’ve confirmed that you understand their position (whether you disagree with it or not, their position is legitimate), firmly state your intent to establish sensible rules. Remember that screen use is their lifeline to learning and socialization. Compulsive screen use happens, because it has real meaning and benefit. If you tell them to “turn it off,” they get anxious. Anxious kids are the most defiant, because they will endure almost anything to avoid the feelings from anxious rebound. Making a non-negotiable announcement will make for hard-going later and interfere with the opportunity for teens to take accountability for positive change. There’s big payoff for giving in a little rather than demanding full obedience. Modeling, mentorship, and teamwork are keys to success.
NEGOTIATE THE RULES
How does one negotiate without losing authority? Let’s take the example of trying to get your child off their phone during homework time, called multitasking. First, keep in mind this is not a black and white issue. Sometimes multitasking contributes to learning, other times it interferes.
Multitasking is beneficial when generating ideas, acculturating oneself to vocabulary and ideas around a particular topic, identifying experts and networking with community, enriching understanding using multimodal formats (reading, listening, viewing video), and when browsing for entertainment. Multitasking activities that have performance costs include screen activities that interrupt demanding cognitive learning tasks like reading, homework, or studying. Perhaps pulling back on bad habits rather than eradicating them entirely is a good start for now. For best success, outline goals, commit to honest learning objectives, and download time management and tracking apps. Let them try out their ideas, then swing around later to discuss outcome. Tweak, repeat.
There you have it, a plan! Remember to set an expectation for success and prepare for follow-through. If you capitulate to teen freak outs, it will be far harder next time because you’ve taught them you’ll cave in the face of tantrums. If you follow through, they’ll eventually respect your authority. Staying firm, consistent, and emotionally neutral is also important. You’re empowered and so are they. Small consequences (one night when devices are docked early) are usually just as impactful as big ones (taking their phone for a week), and you are less likely to cave because it’s doable. Don’t forget to remind them that you will lighten up as they get close to graduating. High school seniors need more independence to build resilience and prep them for success in college.
