Put down screens with your teens
As a wellness professional with two young children, I’m drawn to a recent book by psychology professor Jean Twenge: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy.
From the impact it has on our lives to the developmental challenges it poses for our children, technology is the biggest challenge facing parents today.
And it’s not just teens. Parents are having the same problems with screens and social media as their children.
The pervasive problem of technology comes from social media and the anticipation of a Snap or an Instagram post. The social and psychological triggers that occur after are also damaging. Over the past decade, the number of teenagers reporting suicidal thoughts has doubled, coinciding with growth of social media usage.
Twenge describes the “psychic” cost to children as they grow consumed with screen activity. Does this feel familiar to you as an adult, too?
Those iGens spending less time in front of a screen, though — playing sports, connecting with friends face to face — are less likely to be unhappy.
For parents to take charge of our children’s technology use, we must also take charge of our own relationship to technology — and to social media specifically — in the context of raising a family. Although the reasons may be obvious, it’s helpful to point them out.
Adults and children use technology at the same time, under the same roof. Children learn through imitation. The obsession children have over when they’re getting a phone correlates to watching parents repeatedly get lost in the screen. So it isn’t even that we need to spend more time worrying about how technology is taking our children away from us, it’s that we need to lift our heads and realize we’re also taking ourselves away from them.
We’re modelling this behaviour for our children.
Regularly separating any human body and its mind from a device is essential for mental and physical wellness. This applies mostly to children, because their brains and bodies are still developing. They don’t know how to interpret their feelings of disconnection. They need our help to do so.
The main way to embrace this issue is one step at a time. There’s no one right answer. Every family has its own rhythms and boundaries, and financial and cultural realities and values. Both parents and children must be part of the solution.
Any practice in mindfulness, such as yoga, meditation and basic breathing practices lays the groundwork for change. These practices create an opposite effect on a person to that of a phone. Using a device disconnects you from your immediate environment and awareness of your breath. Meditation and mindfulness, and more simply, one long, deep breath (inhale and exhale), bring you back to awareness of yourself and your surroundings.
Here are five ways to shift the balance by modelling and through teamwork. These steps should be done by parents and children together.
1. Start with yoga, or any physical activity that gets the body and breath moving. Walk around the block, run, cycle — anything. Do any activity that leaves the phone zipped in the pocket. Notice each breath and internalize that at the moment you’re aware and connected to your body. YouTube has hundreds of free yoga channels, and low-cost sites offer online yoga classes. The best option: Walking with your kids outside is free.
2. Learn basic mindfulness techniques. Spend your spiritual time (church, mosque, synagogue) recognizing that you are aware and present, and you’re choosing a nourishing offline activity that feeds your body and brain.
3. Set rules around technology in your home. All devices in a basket until dinner is over. No tech one hour before bed, only educational tech during the week and entertainment tech on weekends. Most of us have tried this, but combined with the simplest mindful activities (Nos. 1 and 2), you’ll be able to better enforce the boundaries and will be more grounded and flexible when they need to be changed (which they will).
4. Be accountable to everyone in your home with the boundaries you’ve set for yourself. Own your part of it and model the behaviour you want to see.
5. Build a community of likeminded parents. Discuss your discoveries to your children. Learn mindful unplugging alongside them, and show them you’re as committed, and as present, as you’re asking them to be.