Why You Should Manage Your Kids’ Screen Time This Summer and How to Do it
(Spoiler . . . it’s all about the dopamine!)
Ahhhhhh. Summer. Time to slow things down. To reconnect with the fam during long walks in the woods and afternoons on the beach or evenings around a bonfire. To really savor one another and make those memories that will become the inside jokes and half-true stories and embarrassing nicknames that will split sides and bond you as a family for generations to come.
Or, it could be the frenzied twelve week peak of this year’s battle of the screens. When everything you wanted the family to do over the summer is thwarted by your kids’ desire to know everything everyone else is doing over the summer. TikTok. Instagram. YouTube. Snapchat. And, of course, the ever-tempting video games. You know, screens.
Just to be clear, I am not anti-screen. Our gadgets, especially the little ones in our pockets, are incredibly useful and fun and absolutely necessary in modern life and it’s good and important that our kids learn how to use them. Responsibly. In service of their happiness. In ways that make their lives better.
Also, to be clear, I don’t think all screens are the same. I don’t consider family movie nights or all your kids playing an epic game of Super Smash Bros or binge watching Ted Lasso together on a rainy afternoon to be part of the “screen problem.” Anything that pulls the family together is kinda ok in my book. In fact, favorite movies are so fundamental to the Mirabella family lexicon that my kids have been known to ask their significant others to pre-watch them just to be able to follow dinner conversation.
(I mean, who doesn’t occasionally need to be reminded that There’s more to life than being really really really ridiculously good looking or that Nothing in the world will keep the Count from his beloved bride. Nothing. Nothing!)
When I talk about screen time, I’m talking about time that encroaches on what should be family time. I’m talking about time spent looking at or engaging with a screen and not interacting, in person, with another human being. To me, watching an educational video in biology class, followed by group or teacher lead discussion is not problematic screen time. A bunch of kids sitting together on the beach texting is.
Screens Have an Almost Irresistible Pull on Our Brains
When I was a kid, “problematic screentime” consisted of me and my friends compulsively rewatching Grease in my parent’s family room for an entire summer until we could exactly replicate every song and dance move together on the back patio for our dazzled and delighted parents.
But anyone who’s dragged themselves away from their smartphone long enough to do so can tell you that today’s screens are not only portable and ubiquitous (unlike the console TV in my parents’ family room), they’re a lot more adept at stealing and sequestering our attention than maybe anything the human species has ever seen before. Steve Jobs and his intellectual progeny are gunning for our attention, aimed at drawing us away from 3D life and deep into the recesses of our laptops, our social media, our video games, our tablets, and, of course our phones. Not just us, our kids, too.
Their weapon of choice in this attention war: dopamine.
Dopamine is a primal and powerful part of our neural pathway entrusted with the noble task of keeping us alive. It does this by kidnapping our attention and siccing it on the things we need to have to survive. Food. Water. Other people.
Scientists once believed that the power of dopamine lies in its ability to give us pleasure, that it prompts us to seek out chocolate cake and sweet tea and friends because we like them. But more recent research shows that dopamine does not generate pleasure; it generates desire. A surge of dopamine in the brain makes you want something. And it makes you pay especially close attention to whatever triggered that surge of wanting. Whether you ultimately take pleasure in that something is a different issue entirely. In fact, dopamine and pleasure are so fundamentally disconnected that you may end up wanting something that you don’t even actually enjoy.
Remember that time you were at a kid’s birthday party and you accepted a piece of cake because cake is good and you like cake, but then you tasted it and it was really dry and the frosting was kind of disgustingly sweet. And you finished it anyway. All want. No joy. Dopamine doesn’t care.
Here we come to the point of our little science lesson. Guess what’s all hopped up on dopamine triggers. Apps! Apps that are beckoning to us from nearly every screen in our lives. Every ping and like and cartoon bubble full of floating dots screams to our primal, life sustaining neural pathway, Look over here! I’ve got something you want! No, seriously, over here!
And what do we all ultimately want? Connection.
But We Need to Resist — and Teach our Kids to Resist — that Pull if We Want Happier, More Connected Lives
So what’s so bad about that, you might wonder. We all want to connect. Apps help my kids connect with other kids. Where’s the problem?
It’s a good question, and one scientists have been struggling to answer since around 2012, when iPhones became the norm. While they struggled, the rest of the world watched in horror as our kids’ screen time soared, but their real life, in person time with friends took a nosedive. The nature of their connections fundamentally changed, and the change showed up in their headspace. Young people grew anxious and depressed. Eating disorders increased. So did feelings of jealousy and envy. Rates of loneliness shot through the roof. Mental health plummeted. In the years since, they haven’t recovered, and now our kids’ are exposed to more screens, and at younger ages, than ever before.
Now science has evidence to confirm what so many of us could see right in front of our eyes: social media — via smartphones or other screens — is a key contributor to the mental health issues our kids are grappling with. Researchers were able to establish this connection by studying the gradual rollout of Facebook to over 300 colleges and found that, almost immediately after Facebook showed up, rates of depression and anxiety shot up on campus. It’s not hard to extrapolate these findings to other social media apps.
Oh, and in case you’re thinking Facebook is a little passé these days, or confined to the wrinkle ranch crowd, meet Mr. Zuckerberg’s latest social media offering: Threads. It launched on July 5, 2023 and had 112 million users within its first ten days.
Given the risks associated with our kids using screens, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry recommends that children under the age of two only use screens to chat with adults or to watch educational programming with adults. Between two and five, non-educational screen time should be limited to one hour on weekdays and three hours on weekend days. For children ages six and older, they recommend that families develop a screen-time plan and offer specific recommendations about what should be included.
Of course, your family’s screen plan will be unique to you. But, hopefully, I’ve convinced you that you do need a plan to manage your family’s screen time and, to that end, I offer these suggestions.
Set an Example
OK, so everything starts with the example, right? I know it’s super hard to do, but pay careful attention to what you’re actually doing online. Believe it or not, scrolling through images of filtered supermodels and parties you weren’t invited to isn’t doing you any favors, either. So, as best you can, avoid exposing yourself to apps that make you feel bad so that when you give your kids this stunningly obvious bit of advice, you have street creds.
Part of setting a good example is also being explicit with your kids about what you’re doing online. Sending a few work texts is vastly different from scrolling through Instagram. Let them see you monitor and limit your own entertainment media use as often as possible.
Work or task related screen use is a little trickier, since we need to be on our phones and laptops so much more than our kids do. But we can still model a healthy relationship with our screens the way we model a healthy relationship with ice cream. Again, I recommend being explicit about it, setting rules and, as best you can following the rules yourself. No ice cream during dinner. Ice cream is served in reasonable portions and the carton is put away as soon as we’ve finished. We don’t eat ice cream in bed. Eating too much ice cream would be unhealthy and make us feel bad. (If you desperately need to break your screen rules do what you do with the ice cream rules: break them when your kids aren’t looking.)
Delay Their Exposure to and Definitely Their Ownership of Screens as Long as Possible
Emily Cherkin is a screen-time consultant who coaches parents about digital technology. (I find the fact that there is now such a profession as a screen-time consultant super chilling.) She, other experts in the field, and experienced, exhausted parents all over the country offer the same advice when it comes to giving a child a smartphone or access to social media: Delay, delay, delay.
It’s about the dopamine again. Kids brains just aren’t neurologically ready to manage the magnetic pull of these devices, and they haven’t acquired the level of self-control necessary to limit their exposure to them. Once you give your child a smartphone, Cherkin cautions, you’ve set yourself up for a constant struggle. It’s really with dopamine, but that dopamine is going to be disguised as your kid.
Cherkin also recommends “right-sizing” your parenting fears when it comes to phones. When we’re debating whether our kids should have one, the image that floats across our minds is our precious innocent ten-year-old, alone on a dark and deserted soccer field, all the other parents having tucked their kids safely back home, as a shifty and deranged serial killer creeps up on him from behind brandishing a chainsaw. What we don’t imagine is him being catfished by a perfectly lovely looking kid claiming to be another ten-year-old. We don’t imagine TikTok’s algorithms bombarding our beautiful twelve-year-old with messages that she’s not thin enough or not pretty enough or not . . . enough. We don’t imagine how sexualized some of this content is.
Cherkin has two specific recommendations when it comes to offering your kids access to social media via phones, both of which I think are super helpful. Before you give your child access to the wild world of the internet, set up a test account in one of the apps they’d likely use, setting the age of the user to your child’s age. Use it for a few weeks. See what they’ll see. Make your decision after that.
Or, and this one’s genius, give them a “dumb phone.” You can buy ones that look like smart phones but only allow texting and calling. No internet. No social media. No one needs to know. So much less conflict. So much less drama. So much less to worry about.
Limit Screen Use to Certain Places and/or Times
This one is straightforward and relatively easy to enforce, as long as you stick to your guns. Ideally, screen use should be limited to a set period of time and to common spaces, where you can monitor what’s going on.
Reality is often less than ideal. Kids often do schoolwork in their rooms, beyond your watchful eyes, sometimes using multiple devices at once. Unless you’re religious about removing screens 30–60 minutes before bed, as doctors recommend, and hiding them away where they can’t be accessed, it is possible your child could be scrolling late into the night without you realizing it, missing sleep.
Sleep is ridiculously important, especially for growing minds and bodies. Leaving aside the risks associated with too much screen time, sleep deprivation — on its own — can cause serious mental health issues, and is itself a major risk factor for anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Monitor your kids’ sleep closely, and if they seem especially tired dial back the screens for a while. Buy them old fashioned alarm clocks. Most importantly, start talking to them now about the importance of sleep and the risks associated with having too little of it. Sooner than you think, they’ll be in college and you want them to have learned great screen hygiene before then.
When Enforcing those Limits, Stay Strong, Give it a Minute, and Hide What You Don’t Want Your Kids to Crave
In my experience, this is the hardest and most important thing a mom has to do. Hands down. And not just when it comes to screens. When it comes to everything. Saying no, and meaning it. Who doesn’t want to live in that beautiful, friction-free, fictional place where our children only want things that are good for them and we never, ever have to say no?
Dopamine, that’s who. But good news, friends: understanding how it works could help you outsmart it.
While your kids are scrolling through TikTok or binging on Baby Shark, their little brains are getting hit after hit of dopamine, making them want more TikTok or Baby Shark. When you say, time’s up, pal, that same little brain is still swimming in oceans of dopamine. You’re taking away something that dopamine is telling them that they need. For survival. Of course they’re going to pitch a fit.
Expect it, and stay strong, mom.
Here’s where the inside scoop on dopamine can give you a leg up. Dopamine is not a distance runner. It’s powerful, but short-lived. If you take away the dopamine trigger, the chemical itself is usually out of your child’s brain within five minutes or so. The key, though, is to immediately put the trigger away. Out of sight. Out of reach. Otherwise you risk starting a whole new dopamine cycle.
After five Instagram-free minutes, your child may still be sad or mad or whatever, but at least now you’re dealing with your own sweet kid again, not a brain hijacked by dopamine. And if you’re dealing with a teen, don’t be surprised if they’re actually (but silently) grateful to you for doing it. Studies show that many teens are themselves recognizing the harm that screens pose to their mental health; they just don’t know how to stop.
Make 3D Life as Fun and Engaging as Possible
The risks of too much screen time aren’t limited to mood disorders and FOMO. They include weight problems, body image issues, sleep problems, more tenuous connections with family and friends, and lost opportunities to learn new ways to relax and connect. If we want to counterbalance these risks, we need to do more than limit screen time; we need to amp up 3D time.
I noticed with my kids that the times when I was most likely to look up and realize that we were all sitting around the kitchen table together separately glued to our phones and laptops was when we had no other plans together. To make that less likely, one thing that I’ve found helpful is to have a “fun things to do” list on hand for unexpected family free time. Every couple of months or so, we’d sit at dinner with the kids and ask, “What are some of the fun things you’d like to do or try this [whatever season was coming up]?”
We mostly leaned into things we could do last minute, things that didn’t cost too much or require a lot of preparation. Cornhole. Kayaking at Peace Valley Park. Philadelphia history day. Giant Jenga. Hiking. Exploring a new town. A baseball game. A backyard tent. A scavenger hunt. Make your own pizza night (a.k.a. Friday). We’d write them down, and kept them handy (not on my phone) and always had a list of activities — other than video games or snapchat — right at our fingertips. And because my kids were actively involved in making the list, everyone was invested in making it happen.
Embrace the Rich Possibilities of Boredom
Let’s face it. Many of us — way too many of us — reach for our phones automatically, compulsively, because we’re bored. The same can easily become true for our kids. They’re lolling in the back of the car for an eternity of Saturday morning errands and they’re bored and it’s too tempting to empathize and think, I’ll just let them play with my phone.
Don’t do it.
First of all, why start them on a mindless habit that you yourself probably wish you didn’t have?
Second, and way more importantly, when did boredom become our archnemesis? I know I’ve talked about this before, but I think a healthy amount of boredom is absolutely essential to a happy childhood. Boredom is creativity’s waiting room. It’s an idea incubator. It’s where daydreams live. It’s the space where new games and songs and plays and stories and wishes are born, where our kids begin to develop the rich inner life and deep self-awareness that will ultimately make them the whole human being we want them to become.
It’s where they remember the inside jokes and half-true stories and embarrassing nicknames from last summer’s evenings around a crackling backyard barbeque and ask, Hey mom! Can we do a bonfire tonight?
By Maureen Mirabella. To see more of her musings, go to Momsraisingmoms.com.
