Ninety-eight percent of American homes with kids under eight years old have a mobile screen device.[1] Often children as young as three years old have their own! These bright, glowing, pieces of technology are incredibly attractive for the developing mind, so it’s no wonder kids may feel agitated, bored, or stressed when they must put it down and get to homework. Tantrums at the end of screen time may be a sign of screen addiction. If you worry your child has the potential for screen addiction, empower yourself with the knowledge and expertise provided through Dr. Bennett’s Screen Safety Essentials Course. This program offers weekly parent and family-oriented coaching videos designed to provide you with the information, tips, and tricks that the modern family needs to use screens while staying safe and connected. Today’s article offers 3 GKIS recommended tips to effectively deal with these symptoms.
Hyperarousal & Screen Addiction
Immersing oneself with a screen device is associated with hyperarousal of our nervous system.[2] This type of arousal is associated with irritability in adults and tantrums in children.
Following hyperarousal, the brain attempts to return to balance with an opposite response. Sometimes this results in fatigue and low energy – as in “what goes up must come down.” Some consider this crash to be evidence of addictive withdrawal.
If your child is allowed too much screen time, especially with intense content, expect a tantrum followed by fatigue. Further, if a child repeatedly undergoes this neurological rollercoaster unchecked, excessive screen time can result in chronic mental health conditions.
A study by Anita Restrepo and colleagues analyzed 564 children and their screen usage. They found that the children with problematic internet use suffered from higher rates of sleep disturbance, depressive episodes, and a reduction in healthy behavior.[3] Gaming addiction symptoms, such as feelings of loss of control and play despite negative consequences to school and relationships, can also result from unchecked screen time.
Dr. Tracy Bennett developed the Social Media Readiness Course to empower tweens and teens to employ wellness strategies themselves. Utilizing these techniques backed by research and experience by Dr. B’s 25+ years in the field will aid in retraining your kid’s brain. Our course not only teaches screen use moderation but also offers important information about potential sources of digital injury and critical psychological wellness tools.
Validation and Support
If your child is demonstrating severe meltdowns after screen time, yelling at them will only escalate the situation. Instead, coach emotional stabilization by validating their experience (“You must feel really out of control right now”) and coaching them to calm down. Supportive teamwork teaches important wellness skills, builds problem-solving and resilience, and ultimately results in greater autonomy and less conflict and resentment.
Psychologists Shin and Kim analyzed two types of parenting approaches with screen use among 303 parents. Active mediation emphasizes family discussions about screen use. Restrictive mediation emphasizes one-sided rule-setting for screen devices. Families that use active mediation demonstrated better outcomes than those who preferred restrictive mediation.[4]
When a child is involved in family decision-making, they are given a greater sense of confidence and autonomy. As a result, they have a lower chance of developing resentment.[5] Completing a digital contract, like our free GKIS Connected Family Screen Agreement, is an awesome way to get started with cooperative dialogue and accountability!
Providing Incentive
Following through with priorities and practicing work before play are important life skills. This can be challenging for children when online work feels tedious, boring, and lacks a clear payoff. If your child seems to lose steam and get distracted with online work, rewarding effort with incentives can be helpful.
A study by Radhakrishnan and colleagues looking at 201 students found that giving incentives to complete homework increased their performance and completion rates.[6] Incentives can be material like a new toy, or experiential like a family picnic.
Material incentives are great occasionally but try not to let this be the only motivator that keeps your kid going. Dr. Bennett finds that kids habituate quickly from material rewards and they fail to work overtime. She says family activities celebrating your kid’s hard work well-done ends up working far better, especially when utilizing reward charts and checklists like the Bennett Boxes technique found in her book Screen Time in the Mean Time.
Don’t Give In
Children are incredibly clever at implementing pester power. Pester power wears us down until we cave and give in to their demands for toys, games, and screen time. Sometimes we might simply be exhausted and give them a “fine, 30 more minutes.” But what just happened there is a learning moment for your child. They learn that by bugging you incessantly, they will be rewarded
This parent-child dynamic exemplifies intermittent reinforcement, which means that a behavior that is rewarded occasionally will dramatically increase that behavior—just like with gambling. Once a behavior has been reinforced in this way, it’s more difficult to “undo” it later.[7]
To avoid this trap, stick to your rules with consistency and follow-through. This teaches your child that they can trust your word, and it’s not worth the fight to argue.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Avery Flower for researching effective ways to deal with behavioral issues, and for co-authoring this article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
[1] Common Sense Media. (2017). The Common Sense Census: Media Use By Kids Age Zero to Eight. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/uploads/research/csm_zerotoeight_fullreport_release_2.pdf
[3] Restrepo, A., Scheininger, T., Clucas, J., Alexander, L., Salum, G. A., Georgiades, K., Paksarian, D., Merikangas, K. R., & Milham, M. P. (2020). Problematic internet use in children and adolescents: Associations with psychiatric disorders and impairment. BMC Psychiatry, 20. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csuci.edu/10.1186/s12888-020-02640-x
[4] Shin, W., & Kim, H. K. (2019). What motivates parents to mediate children’s use of smartphones? An application of the theory of planned behavior. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 63(1), 144–159. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csuci.edu/10.1080/08838151.2019.1576263
[5] Roth, G., Assor, A., Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2009). The emotional and academic consequences of parental conditional regard: Comparing conditional positive regard, conditional negative regard, and autonomy support as parenting practices. Developmental Psychology, 45(4), 1119–1142. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csuci.edu/10.1037/a0015272
[6] Radhakrishnan, P., Lam, D., & Ho, G. (2009). Giving university students incentives to do homework improves their performance. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 36(3), 219–225.
In a time of online learning your child’s safety is vital, and GKIS is needed more than ever. Enjoy a highlight of Dr. B’s News Reels! With over 25 years in private practice, Dr. Bennett is seeing more families in crisis due to internet safety problems. To prevent digital injury, she developed GetKidsInternetSafe.com! When it’s your kids ON-the-LINE GetKidsInternetSafe.com
Join us in a special Vlog style episode where Dr. Tracy Bennett visits her CSUCI office after a year of in-home schooling due to COVID-19. Tune in and get to know more about Cal State Channel Islands. www.GetKidsInternetSafe.com In over 25 years of practice, Dr. Bennett is seeing more families in crisis due to Internet safety problems. To help families prevent digital injury, she developed GetKidsInternetSafe.com! When it’s your kids ON-the-LINE GetKidsInternetSafe.com
COVID-19 has been an unprecedented moment for all of us. Join Dr. Tracy Bennett as she works from home and reminisces about why she founded GetKidsInternetSafe. You’ll see the passion she has for helping children and families avoid risks from the dark web and screen addiction. In over 25 years of practice, Dr. Bennett is seeing more families in crisis due to Internet safety problems. To help families prevent digital injuries, she developed GetKidsInternetSafe.com!
When it’s your kids ON-the-LINE GetKidsInternetSafe.com Link to Screen Safety Essentials Course 👇 https://getkidsinternetsafe.com/essentials-course/
COVID-19 has been an unprecedented moment for all of us. Join Dr. Tracy Bennett as she works from home and reminisces about why she founded GetKidsInternetSafe. You’ll see the passion she has for helping children and families avoid risks from the dark web and screen addiction. In over 25 years of practice, Dr. Bennett is seeing more families in crisis due to Internet safety problems. To help families prevent digital injuries, she developed GetKidsInternetSafe.com! When it’s your kids ON-the-LINE GetKidsInternetSafe.com
It’s easy to think that only people who make a series of bad choices become addicts. After all, hard work in recovery seems to switch things around for even the most hardcore addict. But brain research is uncovering processes that demonstrate the same areas in the brain for drug addiction are activated when using social media and other addictive behaviors. For some, genetic inheritance makes them particularly susceptible. Psychological research is also showing the environment plays a big role in sustaining addictive behaviors. Further, using an addictive substance can change your brain wiring immediately. With each use, that change becomes even more pronounced. That means that one momentary lapse of decision-making alters the way you experience reward and punishment. That is why experts say addiction is a disease rather than a moral failing. Once bitten, the addictive drug or behavior behaves more like a disease process. Overcoming the symptoms becomes far more difficult than a simple choice. In today’s article find out the brain processes behind addiction to understand how we are all susceptible. Then I explain the importance the environment plays on addictive behaviors and theories from the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. After reading the article, you will know the secret inoculation to online addictions…and it’s not what you’d expect.
What is a behavioral addiction?
Behavioral addictions involve behaviors like gambling, video gaming, shopping, exercise, food, and internet and social media use. “Our brains are made to respond to rewards, which then motivates our actions. Rewards are a brilliant solution to ensure we will do behaviors that are indispensable for the individual and the species.”[1]
For our ancestors, finding foods that tasted sweet meant the food was safe to eat and triggered a rewarding, pleasurable feeling. Once rewarded, we encode a pleasant experience to memory. Now the memory is pleasurable even when the food is nowhere around. In our modern on-demand society, we are surrounded by virtual rewards on our screens, including data about the steps we walk, the calories we eat, and the likes on social media.[2]
Dopamine’s role in reward and punishment has helped us survive.
The neurotransmitter, dopamine, is a primary factor behind reward and punishment. This chemical is released in our brains when we encounter an uncomfortable stimulus, like being chased by a bear, or pleasurable stimulus, like finding berries in the wilderness. Once stimulated, we remember that information for future use. Evolutionarily speaking, these actions helped us identify edible foods, select the right partners, and avoid predators.
Dopamine is also involved in other critical functions, including movement, memory, attention, motivation, arousal, and sleep regulation.[3] Not only is dopamine released when we experience pleasure, but neuroscientists have also found that simply anticipating a reward causes dopamine release. In some circumstances, almost getting the reward is even more reinforcing than actually experiencing the reward. For example, we may be rewarded for posting on social media just by anticipating the “likes” we may receive. Another example was recognized by Netflix producers. They discovered that watching a series cliffhangers is just as satisfying to customers as watching the problem being solved during the following episode.[4]
With periodic dopamine stimulation from experiencing reward, anticipating a reward, and remembering reward, the stage is set to develop behavioral addictions.
The conditioned response of dopamine release makes leaving a rewarding task harder to do. So we seek it, keep on doing it, and miss it when we don’t have it.
How does our evolutionary-based brain wiring lead to behavioral addiction?
In a study conducted at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Volkow found behavioral and substance addicted individuals showed a reduction in dopamine D2 receptors. These receptors regulate the frontal part of our brain that allows us to exert self-control. With repeated and frequent administrations of dopamine, the brain progressively loses these D2 receptors.[5] With the desensitization due to lost receptors, we experience a “ludic loop,” a kind of hypnotic state that occurs when we are hooked in doing something with no real reward. Being in a ludic loop is like being trapped in an empty state of limbo, which is characteristic of addictive behavior.[6] The first high sets the trap, and from then on you are simply going through the motions unable to get out.
Furthermore, these brain patterns tap into the oldest parts of our reptilian brain as well as the newer cerebral cortex that surrounds it. With addiction highjacking the emotional seat of our brain (the limbic system) and our control center (the prefrontal region), we lock into reward pursuit and avoid actions that are less likely to bring a reward.[7] Our wiring is built to lock us into these patterns based on evolutionary principles.
Our environment also makes a difference.
A classic 1950s experiment that illustrates addiction involves rats pushing a lever for water or water laced with cocaine. Rats will choose water laced with cocaine over all other stimuli, resulting in a dead rat. But in the 1970s, a psychologist named Bruce Alexander noticed that these experiments were always done in empty cages. Nothing in the rat’s environment was meaningful but the drug. He wondered if this was because of the appeal of drug or could it be because of the environment they were in?
He tested his theory by building “rat parks,” where the rats had everything that makes a rat’s life worth living. They were equipped with exercise wheels, colored balls, and other rats to socialize and mate with. Then he set up the two kinds of waters. The researcher found that when the experiment was administered in “rat park”, the rats had stopped preferring the water with the drug in it. He took this outcome as an illustration that a meaningful environment can influence the pursuit of addictive behaviors. “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is a sense of meaning and connection with others.”[8]
The brain hacks baked into screen technology and how they are impacting us.
In the digital age, we have multiple real-life and virtual identities where cookies mean very different things. We are motivated by online rewards just as we are offline. Programmers and developers have found ways to continually bombard us with new types of rewards like “likes” on social media and “kills” in video games. The first time these activities brought us pleasure, a path was forged for compulsive reward-seeking online.
It’s not unhealthy to seek pleasure that has meaning and brings you happiness, the problem is that the resulting addictive behaviors rarely provide us with meaning. The passion fades to a dull pursuit of something less than we felt initially. It’s the classic chasing of that first high.
To reverse that process, some must detox from that behavior and cultivate an environment rich in meaning so we do not return to the addictive cycle. Instead of a sterile room with one lever that delivers digital cocaine, we must invest in a room rich with opportunity for creativity, socialization, good food, exercise, rejuvenating sleep, productivity, and play.
Three Paths to Happiness
Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology, studies resilience. He believes there are three paths for the pursuit of happiness, the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. To inoculate oneself from addiction, one must have a good or meaningful life characterized by personal meaning.
The Pleasant Life
Dr. Seligman describes the pleasant life as the pursuit of pleasurable things. This life revolves around the “ludic loops” of social media likes, endless dating, partying, and learning the skills to amplify them. This life is “not very modifiable.” It makes one vulnerable to routine, addictions, and obsession.
Online, people are extrinsically rewarded through the “likes” of other people and “views” they obtained in their profiles, continuing the habit even after knowing they no longer want to.[9] The person becomes unable to reliably predict when the behavior will occur, how long it will go on, and when it will stop. The problem with the life of pleasure is that it’s hedonistic and lacks meaningfulness.
The Good Life
Dr. Seligman describes the good life with having an “engagement to one’s work, where the individual may be so involved in his craft, that time stops for him,” a harmonious passion where the individual works to strive without the need of feeling obligated or forced. [10] There are no positive emotions, instead it is characterized by flow, a concept first identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1990.
Flow is a mental state of intense concentration where the individual is incredibly focused on an enjoyable activity. They are, “in the zone.” This idea has been around for thousands of years and was predominate in eastern cultures. Flow is distinct from pleasure because, during flow, you can’t feel anything.
The Meaningful Life
Dr. Seligman explains the meaningful life as when an individual knows their highest strengths and use them to belong to and be of the service to something larger than themselves.[13] This is important because it provides an individual meaning in life through helping others and having a positive effect in the world, something a life of pleasure cannot provide.
We can’t rely on technology to give us meaning.
Technology is great for instant gratification when we need it. It’s not only the screen itself that is so addictive but the content that is accessible on it. We use technology when we have a psychological need when we feel confused about what to do next, or when we feel we have no effect on the world. Adam Atler describes how these are the moments when we’re most prone to developing behavioral addictions. He analogizes technology as being an “adult pacifier. It soothes and calms our minds by delivering small hits of bottomless entertainment and information.”[14] It characterizes a pleasurable life.
Of course, screens and technology are not all bad. They enable us to be connected with our loved ones and offer apps for health, reading, exercise, meditation, the weather, and education. Technology isn’t the source of meaning, rather it is a bridge to the tasks that bring us meaning, the tasks that allow us to develop a skill and have a positive effect on the world.
Are you using tech as a bridge to a meaningful life, or are you still stuck in the pursuit of pleasure?
Thanks to Andrew Weissmann for writing this important GKIS article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
