3 Unexpected Tips On Taming Screen Time In Your Household

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TK BROADER LEDE ABOUT THE TIMES PIECE AND HOW TECH/SCREEN TIME IS A FAMILY STRUGGLE. AND THEN LET'S END ON A NOTE ABOUT HOW PEOPLE ARE WORRIED ITS AN ADDICTION.

 

Is It An Addiction?

Scientists are debating whether our attachment to technology -- and specifically, to the internet and our smartphones -- should be considered a formal addiction. At the heart of that debate is a disagreement over whether people can be physiologically dependent on behaviors, as opposed to substances like drugs and alcohol. In this sense, technology or internet “addiction” is in the same boat as behavioral issues like sex addiction, exercise addiction, food addiction and tanning addiction — there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that these activities, taken to an extreme, can interfere with a person’s health and happiness, but not enough research demonstrates a physiological need for such behaviors. You don’t, for instance, have a spell of seizures when you’re trying to quit Facebook, the way an alcoholic would if he or she abstained from drinking for a day. 

 

Currently, gambling is the only behavioral addiction disorder accepted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the industry guideline for psychiatrists. 

 

But everyday people, and especially parents with school-age children, don’t need to wait for academic consensus to recognize that our devices have in many ways transformed our lives and family dynamic in an upsetting way. 

 


James A. Roberts, a professor of marketing at Baylor University, agrees. In his forthcoming book "Too Much Of A Good Thing: Are You Addicted To Your Smartphone?” Roberts reveals where he falls on the debate (spoiler: he thinks it can be an addiction), but acknowledges that for most, our use of smartphones or the internet don’t have to rise to the level of an “addiction” to disrupt our relationships and our lives.



 

"It’s an interesting question about whether we’re addicted or just overly attached,” said Roberts in a phone call to the Huffington Post. “But is our cellphone use getting in the way of our relationships with our children or our work or family affairs? That’s the real $64,000 question."

 

To get to the bottom of that question, you may be interested in these questionnaires that scientists are using in an attempt to quantify degrees of addiction, and you could also check out recommendations from esteemed organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics to see if your kids are getting too much screen time for their age. But if you feel like you can’t capture your spouse’s attention as much as his tablet, or that your once-bubbly teen has been rendered silent now that she has a smartphone in hand, you already know that something isn’t quite right.

 

Check out these recommendations on how to regain control over technology from these three experts in the field. You may be surprised at how diverse their approach is at figuring out just the right ways to re-calibrating your family’s technology use. 

  

1. Forget about time limits.


The internet is here to stay, as are smartphones, tablets, text messages and computer games. There’s no use in pretending that these tools aren’t an integral part of modern life, says Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital.

 

A former Hollywood screenwriter turned pediatrician and Harvard professor, Rich thinks that setting hard screen time limits will only make devices “forbidden fruit” and set the stage for nightly battles between parent and child. 

 

Case in point: a recent study from researchers in Lebanon found that children whose parents used screen time to discipline them had significantly more of it compared to kids whose parents didn’t use screen time to punish or reward. 

 

“This is completely consisted with what we at the Center on Media and Child Health have been recommending for a long time,” said Rich about the Lebanon research. “[Don’t] end up using it as a reward or punishment, because that ends up making it forbidden fruit, and makes it something special.” While he doesn’t dispute that there are different levels of exposure that are appropriate for different ages, Rich calls specific time limits a hold-over from the days when all screens did was deliver passive entertainment. Now, of course, children are expected to do homework assignments on a computer, keep in touch with others over email and text and even (gasp!) use technology to express themselves creatively through art, music and other projects. Through it all, he stresses that parents should emphasize technology’s status as a tool — a way to accomplish your goals — and not an end in and of itself. 

 

Of course, Rich did concede that tech can become a problem if it begins to replace other meaningful and creative activities in a child’s life. For instance, if a parent arrives home from work and finds that her child has spent yet another day playing a computer game for 10 hours, there might be a problem a problem, he said. To tackle the issue of too-much-tech, try to approach it from the other side. In other words, instead of pointing the finger at computer games as a mindless time-suck, ask your kids to help you come up with a list of responsibilities, expectations and goals that you can both agree on. Now that it’s summer time, that list may include sleeping eight hours every night, a 45-minute block of time for family dinner and kitchen clean up, and hanging out with friends at the beach. Set family expectations and figure out what your child really wants to accomplish over vacation. Afterwards, figure out how much time they realistically have left over to veg out in front of a computer screen — and then let them have it, Rich advised. 

 

“What you’re doing is re-prioritizing their life, and reminding them that they have a number of things that not only they need to do, but that they want to do in the space of a day,” said Rich. “Screen media can sometimes seduce them away from all that.” Trials that demonstrate the effectiveness of Rich’s approach are still underway, he explained. 

 


2. Take a look at yourself

“More is caught than taught,” said Roberts. "We can talk a blue streak about the proper use of a cellphone, but when we’re using it to drive or when we’re using it during family time or dinner, you bet the kids are going to pick up on that faster than everything you’re going to say to them.”

 

Roberts is a firm believer in tech-free zones of the house and times of the day -- for everyone. For instance, he’s a proponent of keeping devices out of bedrooms, off the dining table and away during family activities. 

 

He’s also attuned to the signs of problematic technology use. If, for example, a parent has ever tried to set limits on tech use and then finds their child secretly texting in the bathroom, there’s a problem. Counterintuitively, Roberts espouses a tactic for tech monitoring that he calls “Hair Of The Dog.” To help you and your children monitor and restrict time on your smartphones, use certain apps that keep a record of how long you scrolled that day, or apps that let parents restrict the amount of time a child spends on their phone. 

 

But most importantly, he concluded, parents who are disturbed at the way their kids are using tech had better take a long look at themselves before trying to lay down some rules. 



 

3. Get to the root of the issue. 

 

Studies show that kids who used the internet in a “pathological” way were more likely to also be depressed, have hyperactivity and have self-jurious and suicidal behavior. But to Jamie Howard, a clinical psychologist and spokeswoman for the Child Mind Institute, that doesn’t necessarily mean the internet caused these psychological problems. What’s more likely, she said, is that these underlying issues manifest themselves in problematic technology use.

 

“Day to day in my practice, I see a lot of kids who have trouble tolerating separation from social media, but it’s not their primary problem,” said Howard to HuffPost. "Usually their primary problem is anxiety, depression or bullying.” She brought up the example of parents who came to her, incensed that their teen daughter couldn’t spend 20 minutes without her phone. It turned out that a group of girls had been bullying the daughter and posting mean things about her online, which is why she was checking every few minutes to see what they had said next. 

 

Even if your child isn’t faced with such conflict, said Howard, it’s important for parents to understand that the spirit behind, say, obsessive social media check-ins, is simply teens wanting to find out what their friends are up to, and wanting to know what’s going on in the world. 

 

“You want to understand what’s going on for the kid, as you’re trying to set limits,” said Howard. "The internet and social media is just a new world for the same type of teenage issues to play out."

 

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