Life Kit - The Darker Side Of Screen Time

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Emotional outbursts. Lost sleep. These are signs that your kids are spending too much time with digital devices. Here's what you can do about it.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making some fun, bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Jeff and Ellie live in suburban Chicago. Hi, how's it going? Good, how are you? Good, I'm Anya. Hi Anya, nice to meet you.

What a beautiful house. Thank you. They have three kids. Nathan, who's five and super into dinosaur shows. Dino Trek and Dino Dana. Trek's Adventure. Oh, sorry. Trek's Adventure.

Right, sorry. Benji is 11 and really into Nintendo. I also like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and I'm super excited for it to come out. It's the best Smash game, basically, according to everyone. And Abby, who's 14 and pretty into memes. It's a quote that says, use the force, Harry. And it says it's by Gandalf with a picture of Jean-Luc Picard on the side. Jeff and Ellie asked us not to use their last names to protect their privacy.

They've invited us in because they're worried that all three kids are a little too into their devices. Not too long after we meet them, we had a moment that felt really familiar to me, and maybe it also will to you. Ellie, the mom, starts to talk about how it feels to have, you know, all these phones and tablets that our kids are just obsessed with. We're the first generation of parents that has to do this monitoring and figuring out what to do with children and their screens, and we didn't grow up with the screens like this, so we don't even know ourselves.

I talked to my, I was just. And Nathan, her five-year-old, is kind of tugging at her sleeve. He won't give up. He wants the iPad. Can I? Not right now. Please. Not right now.

Please. This is Life Good for Parenting, your screen time guide. I'm Anya Kamenetz, a reporter for NPR and the author of a book for parents called The Art of Screen Time. And if you can wait just a minute, I brought along another parenting expert to meet Jeff, Ellie, and all three kids to give them help Supernanny style. And then I'll wave my magic wand and solve all your problems. Just kidding. I'm so sorry. Probably not.

Our Super Nanny's name is Devorah Heitner. She wrote the book Screenwise. And after the break, you'll hear the advice she gave Jeff and Ellie for stopping the fights and for striking a healthier balance with technology. And you'll hear the amazing difference it made for all three kids. The Indicator is a podcast where daily economic news is about what matters to you. Workers have been feeling the sting of inflation. So as a new administration promises action on the cost of living, taxes, and home prices. The S&P 500 biggest post-election day spike ever.

Follow all the big changes and what they mean for you. Make America affordable again. Listen to The Indicator, the daily economics podcast from NPR. This is Life Kit for Parenting's screen time guide. In our first episode, we focus on the bright side of screens, the positive things that media brings into our kids' lives. And this episode is all about the dark side. Now, we're only about a decade into the smartphone era, but those little machines have already brought so many anxieties to parents. Porn, predators, cyberbullying. In this episode, we'll touch on all of those, but there is one overarching issue that connects them all, and that is the overuse of technology. So tech overuse actually ranked as the number one fear

of parents of teenagers in a national survey last year. That's right, it beat sex, it beat drugs, it beat vaping. But what's the key to knowing if your kids really have a problem? This is our takeaway number one. Pay attention to your children's emotional relationship to screens, not just how much time they're spending. So we know screen media is just incredibly tempting for children. That's almost universal. So how do you tell if your child actually has a problem, if they're really an outlier? Well, there's a questionnaire that doctors are starting to use. It's called the Problematic Media Use Measure. Basically, parents rate each statement from never to sometimes to always.

And here's a selection of the items. Number one, it's hard for my child to stop using screen media. Now, Ellie says when they tell the kids time's up... They're like, see the world, there's nothing to do at all. And that's just exasperating. I can't do anything. What else is there that I could possibly do? And this is so awful. Number two, screen media is the only thing that seems to motivate my child. We basically have one punishment that's meaningful, which is so frustrating.

They don't seem to care much about allowance. They don't seem to care much about allowance. They don't seem to care much about... Dessert. Dessert. Timeouts. Those don't work anymore for the older ones. Three, screen media is all that my child seems to think about. Abby, the oldest, who's 14, told us...

I'm really bad at doing stuff, like actually getting up to do things. So my phone is right there, and it's really easy to just click a couple things and scroll. It's easier to do that than to get up to do things. Four, my child sneaks using screen media. We had the phone time cut off, and then at midnight we see that she's actively using the phone. Number five, the amount of time my child wants to use screen media keeps increasing.

I asked Benji, who's 11. So if it were up to you, would you play 24 hours? Actually, I would just take breaks for meals, do other breaks for stuff, sleep. Definitely, I need sleep. Do you? Do you really need sleep? Well, yeah. everyone needs sleep. Number six, my child's screen media use interferes with family activities. This is something even the kids have noticed.

At one point in our visit, each of the kids are at a different spot on the sectional couch in the family room, each on their own devices. Nathan, the little one, is actually playing with his iPad under a blanket. Even his head is under the blanket. And while I'm talking to Abby, Benji suddenly looks up and says, This is the most I've heard my sister say in a while. What? I've been interviewed.

Do you interview me? I've tried to. I have. Probably the fundamental statement in the problematic media use measure is this one. Everything kind of boils down to this. My child's screen media use causes problems for the family. I lost my daughter when I gave her the cell phone. And that was it.

Done. So I just want to take a moment here to say that, you know, Jeff and Ellie are not lacking in screen time rules. They have lots of rules and lots of fights over the rules. With our 11-year-old, he has certain times that he can go on and he can go off. And we try to restrict that pretty tightly, but he'll fight with that off time. But with the 14-year-old, it's more difficult. She's got her little tiny phone that she can slip anywhere. This is our takeaway number two.

Don't just make those technology rules based on time. Ellie takes us in the kitchen and shows us the schedule that she has posted for each kid on the kitchen cabinet. There's blocks for everything they do all day, including, of course, screen time. We have a big calendar on the wall here. So everybody knows what they're doing on what day and it's color-coded, which is kind of anal, but this is what I have for each kid. So Abby's here, Benji's here, and Nathan is down there. Nathan's is just with pictures because he can't read. This is awesome.

I'm jealous. But Ellie says it's hard to hold the line and be consistent with three kids in a busy life. Dad works full-time, Mom works part-time. I can't monitor and I can't have somebody, you know, or people are coming over and you have to clean the house or something like that, right? You have to bake cookies for the PTA because it's the end of the year. So, right, then you're like, okay, fine, watch the TV or do this, this is special. But that ruins everything, right?

Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Sounds really tiring. It's exhausting. Yeah, I'm sure you hear that. It's absolutely exhausting. Devorah Heitner, our visiting expert, says she hears this kind of thing all the time. In addition to her book,

she's a media scholar with a PhD from Northwestern. And she says parents often get caught up thinking that managing screen time is, well, all about time. All parents are like, can you just tell me how many minutes? Or, you know, like I'll go speak at schools and people will say, can you just tell me the device I can use to fix the problem? Can you just tell me? And my whole mantra is mentoring over monitoring. And parents are like, but can you tell me how to monitor? This is a misconception that comes in part from the media and from big companies, Apple, Google, Amazon.

They're all advertising their parental controls or settings like they're some kind of magic solution. And, you know, we wish, but ultimately nothing is that simple or easy. Now, there are two basic areas where Devorah and other experts say, yes, you should draw a bright line and be a little authoritarian if you have to. Call them hygiene issues. And this is our takeaway number three. Put away the screens for eating and sleeping. In this family, for Nathan, the five-year-old, his parents say he's been in the habit of watching up to 90 minutes of his dinosaur shows at the kitchen counter every day while he snacks. Dino dip!

Treks adventures! Devorah says, just don't do it. He doesn't need it. Read him a book, she says, or if necessary, try a kid's podcast. Research says that more than two hours a day of screen time for young kids doubles the risk of childhood obesity. And Devorah says to go ahead and take away Abby's phone at night. But in general, Devorah is advising this family that they need to shift their approach away from policing their kids' device use, which isn't really working that well,

and to look instead at the bigger picture. And the real lightning bolt of wisdom on this comes from the oldest child, Abby. Taking it away won't eliminate problems because it's not the sole reason that they existed in the first place. And this, in fact, is our takeaway number four. Don't expect taking away the phone to solve your family's problems. Abby really surprised me in this moment. She went from being very quiet and kind of snuggled up in her hoodie to very, very outspoken.

And Abby's mom, Ellie, gave us a little context. I recently showed Abby an article that, I don't remember who it was, they had done all this research about children, teenagers with depression and the screens, and that there's a rise in depression and a rise in suicide along with a rise in screen use. And so what did you think when your parents showed you that article? It acts like it's the only reason. It's the only reason and not stress from school, from other people, from other things happening.

It always acts like the iPhones are the only reason that kids are depressed and can't sleep and have all of these problems. It's never the only reason. So Abby's not just talking to me, right? She's talking to her parents. She's taking a stand. The iPhone is important to her. This is how she makes plans with her friends.

This is how we organize things. We never had plans as kids? You just did it differently. That's right. You can't just walk over to someone's house now. It's not, no you can't. No you can't. Nope, you cannot. You can't just walk over to someone else's house and be like, hey. Being a kid today is stressful for lots of reasons, she says, and it's not just because of the phone. Because people have sports and homework. Because school is harder. You don't even know how to do my math. I do.

No, you don't. You would look at it and be like, I don't know what this is. You'd have to look up the answers to the problems to be able to help me with it. Because it's been 30 years since I've done your math. You don't even know what it is. While we let Abby and her dad take a minute, you may have heard of this research that Ellie showed her daughter. There was a viral article in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago, and it was titled, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

It drew a link between negative trends in teens' mental health and the rise of smartphones and social media. And look, it's understandable. Parents are worried that Internet has porn, the Internet has cyberbullying, it has so many negative things. But Abby has a point too, that the relationship between screens and kids' mental health or their emotional lives, it may not be so simple. More recently, a pair of studies from Oxford University analyzed the same data from that Atlantic article. This is over 350,000 participants in three huge surveys. And they arrived at a very different conclusion. They found the negative relationship between teens' mental health and technology use, it's real, but it's tiny.

How tiny? Well, Amy Orbin at Oxford told me. It is extremely, extremely small. Oftentimes, a teenager's technology use or a teenager's social media use can only predict less than 1% in their variation in a measure of well-being, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wears glasses to school. In other words, Abby is dead on. Despite what we may have been told, nothing is really just about the phones. And Devorah Heitner, too, told Jeff and Ellie,

If you hand a happy kid a phone, they're not going to turn into an unhappy, miserable kid. If you hand a kid who isn't doing a lot in terms of aggression, they're not going to become a bully or a target, right? I mean, it might turn up the volume a little on what's already happening with your kid, but it's not like just automatic, like device equals anxiety and depression. Now we should underline part of what Devorah said. Devices turn up the volume on existing issues. So it does follow in the research that children who have special needs or mental health challenges are also more likely to have problems with screens. So take Benji, the middle child in this family. He's 11. He loves video games. We have a little more complex situation than some. Our son has some emotional disabilities and he can blow up. He has ADHD. He has anxiety. Devorah says,

When you have a kid whose needs are not typical, then it's also helpful to talk to a professional who knows your kid. But there's another side of the story. Some teens who are struggling with their mental or their emotional health may find that zoning out and playing a game helps them regulate their emotions and avoid meltdowns. For this family, for example, they say letting Benji bring his iPad allows him to sit through his big sister's 8th grade graduation, and that's a tradeoff they're willing to make. And there's also ways to use smartphones

to connect with others and therefore even feel better. Vicki Rideout is another media effects researcher who did a nationally representative study of teens and young adults. And she says it's not that teens who use social media are necessarily more depressed. It's that teens who are depressed use social media differently.

One of the things that teens are doing online is searching for information and tools to help promote their own health and well-being. Sometimes it actually helps because when you're really upset, you can use your phone to distract yourself or contact a friend who can help you or something. Or you can just use it to get your mind off of the bad thoughts. Abby likes to follow certain YouTube channels where people share original animations about their lives. She shows me one video that she has saved on her phone. It's got a young woman talking about her self-esteem and her body image. So, hello, I'm Jayden, and I make stupid animations

about my life and stories and stuff. Hopefully they're funny. It can help the people watching the videos just to be like, okay, well, this person got better, so I can too. So this was kind of amazing. Abby opened up, she gave us this look at the teenager's perspective on all of this. But it presented us with a dilemma. I mean, how are we as parents supposed to react to all this? On the one hand, we recognize electronic media has become really important for our kids, for better and for worse.

We also see that being overly dependent on it comes with problems. So how do we help them strike that balance? Well, our fifth takeaway is this. Takeaway number five, mentor your kids. Don't just monitor them. Devorah Heitner says that with her book Screenwise and in her work with schools and families, she really tries to put across one thing, the importance of media mentoring. Monitoring, she says, is the charts and the controls and saying no. And parents have to do that sometimes. That's just our job. But mentoring? Mentoring is a lot more work than monitoring.

Mentoring is knowing the more work than monitoring. Mentoring is knowing the difference between Minecraft and Fortnite. Mentoring is looking at the emotional effects of playing in, you know, a competitive mode versus a collaborative mode. She says, like it or not, our kids' media preferences, they're part of who they are. So if we want to get to know our kids better, we can't just condemn their media use. We have to try to understand it too. It's understanding that what your kids are doing is part of their identity and that they're constructing their identity, whether it's through the kinds of people they follow on Tumblr or the kinds of things they share or their special interests, whether it's dinosaurs or gaming. Having this mentoring relationship is really, really important because it keeps the lines

of communication open as kids get older. So Abby, for example, is following these YouTubers who talk about kind of edgy subjects. Emotions, mental health, body image, self-esteem, like this one. Here we go, right? It's not a secret. I don't think very highly of myself. I joke about it a lot and I'm pretty open about it. It's so key that her parents understand what she is looking at on her phone so they can talk to her about it and share their own values and offer support if it's needed. And this goes double if your kids happen to get into stuff that's more questionable. You know, what if they encounter pornography or vloggers, video bloggers whose

message is hateful? You have to know what's going on, but you can't if you're just trying to take away the phone. If they're hiding their online lives from you, you won't have a chance to intervene. You also want to be there as a mentor if kids are getting into tough social situations, into bullying or drama online. You know, we can't step in and solve all their social problems for them any more than we can tag along in the playground and stop fights, but you can try to be a good listener and a sounding board for advice. Ideally, you lay the groundwork and you gain kids' trust by trying to understand what's good about their media use. How is this landing with our family? Well, when Devorah starts talking about mentoring,

Jeff is like, I can do this. He's a little bit of a gamer himself. He even worked at a video game company at one point. For Ellie, this mentoring thing sounds harder. I don't know any of it. Never played video games. Not interested at all. So I'd have to sit down and play his video games either with him or without to see what they're about. So like to your point, I can't necessarily relate. DeVoy agrees, yes, this is hard work. But she says you have to try. The first time we meet, Benji tells us he wishes his parents understood. Why it's entertaining and why we want to do it. And also for YouTube, why I watch other people

playing games. When you watch sports, you're watching another person playing a game. Why is it different when you're watching someone play a video game? Mom and dad may not totally get it, but they are trying. They acknowledge that Benji's getting positive things from screens too. For example, Benji says he plays Minecraft online with other people, so it's kind of a social space for him. One time I gave someone a mustache, they liked the prank and they kept it. Another time I put a hat on someone else's and someone else expanded the prank and they kept it another time i put a hat on someone else's and

someone else did it expanded the prank and made it a santa hat then someone else put a beard on it and then someone else and then i put the and then i put cookies and milk he says his dream job is designing the visuals for video games. I like drawing and doing art and I do a lot of video game concepts when I draw. It's really fun. You know as kids get older having their own private worlds online, their memes, their jokes, it's kind of the point. There's a language that teenagers have formed through memes. Like it would be really hard to explain it to grandparents. But Jeff, the dad, at least has the ability to joke with her about it. Abby kept saying, do you understand that?

Like, yeah. It was just dances. It was like the randomest dances that kids have from Fortnite and social media. Right, but there are things that I understand, even though I'm super old. So clearly phones are a big way that teenagers connect with peers and escape adults, which is totally developmentally appropriate, even if parents don't love it. I mean, Jeff and Ellie bought Abby her phone in the first place in sixth grade

so she could keep in touch with her friends from summer camp. And Devorah reminds them that the distance that they're feeling from their oldest is also a very normal part of growing up. I mean, you were like, oh, I gave my kid a phone, I lost my kid. She also went to middle school and became, like, first a tween and then a teen, and it's developmentally typical for kids to pull more into their friend group and away from their parents as their sort of primary confidant, and they're, not to say you should never, like, see her in the face again

and always the top of her head, but like. And it's a really important fact. I didn't, you know, it's true. I didn't think of it that way. I just thought of it as it's the phone's fault. So Jeff and Ellie agreed to share their story with us, with listeners, because they're struggling and this struggle is something that is so common. But what we've also heard from the kids themselves

is that smartphones, video games, and social media can be really important to them, socially, even emotionally. I think the challenge is you have three actual kids who all have really different relationships with technology from what we've seen and from what you've described to us. So this is our big super nanny moment. Let's turn to Devorah, our expert. Her suggestions make up our final takeaway.

Takeaway number six, work together as a family to make changes. A few days after we meet, Devorah gets on the phone with Jeff and Ellie. We are sitting in our bedroom. Yeah, I'm up here too. We're sitting next to each other sharing headphones. She tells them to get the devices

out of sight and out of mind. Right now they're on display and so they're always really tempting. And I know for me, like, if I put my phone away in a drawer, it really helps. Even though I'm not locking that drawer, I'm not doing a lot to dissuade myself from getting the phone out of the drawer. Even putting it in my purse versus having it out. Then she suggests, try giving the kids more stuff to do that's not on their screens.

Like chores. Even your five-year-old for things like putting away toys or putting away dishes and certainly your older kids can be probably doing their own laundry and contributing in other ways to the flow of your household. Send the 14-year-old into the grocery store by herself with a list, she says. It's also a source of self-esteem to get things done for the family and to be valued in the family. This is an important tip because as the family heads into the summer, there's going to be a lot of unstructured time. They just need more to do.

For Benji, Devorah says, One goal for him this summer would be to try to both reduce the screen time and add something else in. Ellie's not so sure. They've offered him so many activities in the past, she says, and nothing has worked out. He's hard. He's difficult. We've done archery. We've done swimming lessons. We've done gymnastics. We've done taekwondo.

Devorah suggests that they can help Benji structure his time at home with exercise, like walks or trips to the pool, as well as chores. And she suggests the whole family add in more screen-free activities, like board games, a trip to the water park, or even just a walk after dinner to get ice cream. And Devorah has another idea. Can Benji monitor his own mood after he plays video games? So can he indicate, you know, using either a color chart or anything else, like how am I doing? She says he needs to check in with himself so he can start developing self-regulation.

Instead of always just pushing back against the limits his parents are setting. And so it'd be good for him to start to see, okay, an hour is good, but two hours starts to make me a little crazy. By the way, I asked Benji about his parents' rules, and he said this. I think it's reasonable. Yeah, in general? How come? I do a lot of screen. When you say you do a lot of screen, you feel like it's reasonable for your parents to ask

you to have a balance? Yes. Really? Kind of. In any case, Jeff and Ellie seem ready to give this a shot. That's a good point. And you're right, make it a whole family process, right? So a few weeks after our initial conversation,

we checked back in with Jeff and Ellie and the whole family to see how things were going. Jeff and Ellie said that they sat down all three kids with their favorite ice cream. A little bit of a bribe. Yeah. To talk about making some changes. Nathan, the little one, was pretty easy. He's playing more with his toys now.

Benji, the middle one, is where they've seen the biggest difference. He tells us himself that he's been reading a lot more. I barely ever read. And what book are you on now? Number three, page 206. I'm almost done, only 100 more pages. His parents found him a book series he loves. It's called Wings of Fire. It's about dragons.

And he has advice for parents who might want to help their kids cut back on the screen time. Pay attention to what kids watch, and what they watch probably would influence what books they like. If they watch something with magical fire superhero stuff, sometimes they would like some fantasy things. If they watch more stuff like things about animals, they would like to read realistic fiction maybe. His parents say his mood is so much better.

They are amazed. Abby, the oldest, has been a little bit tougher. She has the ability to just say no and jump into her bed and run in her room and be upset. It's going a little slower, some baby steps. It's going backwards. But she is helping out more around the house, and she says she's finding other fun stuff to do, too.

Yeah, I made cookie dough. Cookie dough that you can eat without cooking it. The family ate it all together and watched Ferris Bueller's day off, which happens to have been shot in their neighborhood. So, some light at the end of the tunnel for this family. How you doing? Are you feeling inspired? Have you been paying attention? Bueller? Bueller? Well, sit up straight, because it's time for the recap. Takeaway number one, pay attention to your kids' emotional relationship to screens, not just how much time they're spending. Takeaway number two, don't make their roles based on screen time alone. Takeaway number three, put away the screens for eating and for sleeping. It's a

hygiene issue. Takeaway number four, don't just take away the phone and expect it to solve all the problems. Takeaway number five, mentor your kids. Don't just monitor them. And takeaway number Work together as a family to make changes. And that's all for this episode of Life Kit for Parenting. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to our experts, Devorah Heitner, Amy Orbin, and Vicki Rideout. And a special thanks go out to Jeff, Ellie, Abby, Benji, and Nathan. For more NPR Life Kit, check out our other episodes in this guide. There's one about how the way you use technology can affect your kids' relationships with screens.

And if you like what you hear, make sure to check out our other Life Kit guides at npr.org slash lifekit. And while you're there, subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss anything. We've got more guides coming every month on all sorts of topics. And here, as always, is a completely random tip. This time from a listener, Crystal Frommer. I once heard that travel is the only thing you spend money on that actually makes you richer. Even if that's true for you, travel is expensive. On family trips, we stop at a grocery store on the way to our hotel to stock up on snacks and breakfast foods. We also buy an eco-friendly reusable grocery bag to keep as a

local souvenir. If you've got a good tip or you want to suggest a topic to us, email us at lifekit at npr.org. I'm Anya Kamenetz. Thanks for listening. is there to tell you what happened. Not to mention we're hitting the road so you can meet all of the 2020 contenders. Oh, NPR is going to drive me completely crazy. The NPR Politics Podcast. Subscribe. of Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly. With top-tier security credentials and 15 years of experience in responsible AI, Grammarly isn't just another AI communication assistant. It's how companies like yours increase productivity while keeping data protected and private.

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