Hide the chargers!
It’s time for a family digital detox
Do you feel concerned about the amount of time your children spend online? Do you find technology causes friction as you wrench their screens off them at the dinner table and bedtime? Rare is the parent who will answer “no” to either of those questions. But then ask yourself this: Do you also endlessly check your own smartphone? How often do you iparent and deploy tablets as babysitters, to keep your digital darlings quiet when you need to get on with things?
It’s hands up to every one of these things from me, and I know many other parents who are struggling to find balance in this era of hyper-connectedness.
We are the first generation of parents who are encountering this as a problem and, until now, there has been no blueprint as to what we should and shouldn’t be doing. But that is set to change with Unplugged Parenting, a hard-hitting new book by leading clinical psychologist Elizabeth Kilbey, who argues that if we don’t tackle the problem of screen addiction early, then we are in grave danger of damaging our kids’ development.
“If we, as parents, leave our children unchecked, we are going to make their lives a lot tougher in the long run,” says Kilbey, who is best known for her role on the hugely watchable Channel 4 series The Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds. Kilbey’s clarion call for change could not come soon enough. Just this week, the National Association of Head Teachers revealed that alarming numbers of four-year-olds are starting school unable to speak properly because their language skills are delayed.
The British Heart Foundation has reported that sedentary children who amuse themselves online are growing up with all the attendant risks. And a 2015 poll carried out for Channel 4 News found that 43 per cent of parents believed their children were “emotionally dependent” on technology. Many reported that attempts to restrict usage were met with hostility and sometimes aggression. Screen time – games and social media affirmation – stimulates the reward centres in young brains which makes kids crave ever more hits, hence some commentators have taken to using the term “digital heroin”.
But Kilbey is less damning, arguing there is a middle way and that breaking our kids’ screen addiction doesn’t mean turning them into playground pariahs unable to relate to the modern world.
A mother of three (aged 16, 14 and nine), she even confesses that her youngest child, Elliot, was given his own tablet at the age of four. “It was an entirely pragmatic decision made to preserve family harmony,” she says. “I need my tablet for work but he would keep taking it, so I bought him one.
“But I made it clear from the outset that there were rules about when and for how long he could use it. If he objected, he wouldn’t be given it next time he asked.”
Figures from Ofcom show that children aged four and under spend eight hours a week using technology, compared to 14 hours a week watching television. The figure for five- to 15-year-olds is 15 hours online versus 13 hours watching TV.
But although it is teenagers who appear fixated on screens, Kilbey believes that children between the ages of five and 12 who are most vulnerable. As the mother of a 15-year-old and an eight-year-old, I admit that I am far more likely to police my elder daughter. It turns out her little sister is the one who needs to be diverted.
“This is the stage that we call ‘latency’,” says Kilbey. “I use the analogy of a garden in winter. To the visible eye there doesn’t seem to be much happening, but beneath the surface there’s a tremendous amount going on preparing the plants for spring.”
Once a child reaches primary school, deep inside the brain crucial connections are being made that shape a child’s identity and lay the groundwork for social interaction and emotional resilience.
“Children take in so much at this stage; they observe and copy,” says Kilbey. “They learn how the world works and observe the emotional compromises necessary in daily life.
“A child who spends their free time upstairs alone and online is missing out on testing their own physical boundaries.”
By coincidence, I took my family on holiday to the Isle of Skye this year, where we stayed in cottage without Wi-fi or 3G or a mobile signal. This digital detox wasn’t intentional – the lochside location of the house was what swung it – but, freed from the pressures of social media and the lure of online games, it truly felt like a holiday within a holiday. Yes, there were moments of ennui, but we played games, read books, talked and quite simply enjoyed each other’s company. Would we do it again? Absolutely. Would we live like that permanently? Absolutely not.
“I’m not naive, I don’t think ditching all the devices in the house is a viable option,” stresses Kilbey. “But I see the friction screen time causes: children concentrate so hard it induces a state of hyper-focus where they are oblivious of everything around them.
“So when you call them, they can’t hear you and so you call them again and again until you are right up
next to them and furious, yelling at them to switch off their computer. They have no idea about the lead up, so, to them, you are unhinged and behaving unreasonably.”
Kilbey suggests a number of practical strategies to cut back on screen time, the most ingenious being the centralisation of chargers so that children have to hand over smartphones at bedtime. Another useful piece of advice is encouraging screen time in family areas so children are not isolated for long stretches of time.
“Technology is great as a learning tool, but it doesn’t teach emotional regulation or conversational skills,” says Kilbey. “Your child may excel at gaming but without a solid grounding in human behaviour, adolescence will be very difficult indeed.”
But parental mindsets need to alter before real change can take effect. And that means not just pulling the proverbial plug on our children, but our own behaviours, too, and holding our nerve.
“Modern parents feel obliged to entertain their children which they really don’t need to do,” reassures Kilbey. “Being bored is part of life and children are predisposed to amuse themselves.
“Stick with it and you will not only be doing your kids a great service, you will transform your family’s life.”