Replacing the Negative Effects of Screen-Time
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I was in the airport the other day near the gates, and there's a wide walkway, and people are going back and forth, and some people walk in the middle and others walk on the edge. And coming toward me was this dad right in the middle of kind of the hallway there between gates, and he had a little four-year-old in front of him holding a phone. This four-year-old was walking and holding a phone. Wow.

We've all seen distracted adults with phones. What's a four or five-year-old doing with a phone at an airport? What if there were better ways maybe to help that child understand situational awareness, not running into people and look at all this and see the people? I don't know. I'm on a rant, so I'm going to just say, hey, I'm John. Don't send your hate mail to me. Dr. Danny Huerta is the host of this show. Yeah.

No, really. Danny's in charge of our parenting team, and we're going to hear now about kids and tech and appropriate boundaries from Arlene Pelican. She was on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and she offered Jim some pretty sobering stats and reasons about screen time and why too much of it is a bad thing.

Let's talk about the digital norm. I don't even know what that is. What is digital norm and how does it affect our children? Yeah, so look around you, whether it's at a restaurant, in your own home, in the schools, kids are distracted. They are sleep deprived. They are looking for amusement and they're not happy and they're not happy and they don't have purpose. And that's why you see all these different things from let's say the average child is on social media. You know, many of them say most of the day,

So what I mean that once that seven hours, I think. Yeah. So it's it's a lot of hours in the day that kids are spending. You know, by 2023, 95 percent of kids are saying they're on social media. So this is a lot of kids, a lot of teenagers. And they're also saying that they feel better when they're not with their phone. So they did a survey. Pew did a survey of kids saying.

And 75% of them are saying, I feel happier. I feel more peaceful when I am not with my device. And 44% report, I have anxiety when I have my phone. But it is this feeling of being trapped that there is no other way. Like everyone is on the phone. Everyone is using the phone. So I have to use the phone too. And then as parents, we think, oh, we need that digital norm as well because everybody else has one. But we have to also step back

and say, what are the results of this? And is it okay to be different so that I can have a different result? Yeah, social norms are not always the way you want to go. They're not always the way to go. Progress, if it's in the wrong direction, is not progress. Now, we're going to talk about a whole host of things related to this, but let's talk about what kids need. And one of the things you say in the book is they need to be able to fail and be able to recover from that failure. And you say that

Screen time and phones and social media tend to reduce a child's introduction to failure because they can just keep moving, right? They didn't play the game well. Oh, well, move on. But describe what you're getting at and the benefit, again, for limiting it. Yeah. How do we get resilient? How do we develop perseverance? By failing. And then realizing I failed first.

But I recovered. That's the thing. It's like I tried out for the team and I didn't make it. And that was hard. But hey, I found another sport I liked or I found something else and I recovered. I did really poorly on that test. But then I got a tutor and I studied and I did better. So it's all these real world experiences. And it could be as little as I didn't want to order a hamburger at the restaurant, but my parent made me order. And I was terrified because I didn't want to speak to the adult. You had the interaction of ordering. I have to order.

or something. Can I do this on my phone? And I did it. But then I realized, you know, oh, maybe I totally failed. Like I mumbled and they couldn't hear me. But then I realized that's not a big deal. Kids need that over and over and over again so that they can solve their own problems, that they can see that failure is not fatal, that I can move on from this. And if we as parents are

are just either overprotecting, right? Like, oh, I don't want them to fail. Or just think of it, if they're just sitting in their room with their phone, if they fail, it's really not a big deal. They just start over. If they fail, let's say in a relationship, fine, we'll just get in the relationship, out of the relationship, and we'll make a new relationship. And that's the trouble with social media is it's so shallow, like super shallow. It's super easy to jump into a

and super easy to jump out of a group. So if you have a failure in communication, you make someone mad, something, you just get out. Versus if you have a failure with a friend that you've had since kindergarten, you try to mend that relationship in real life and it teaches you something. Yeah, no, it's good. The other component of that is the direct correlation when you look at empathy and the development of empathy and how when screen use goes up, empathy goes down. It certainly does.

I mean, describe that, what you're looking at in the data. Think about it. If you are on a screen and you just make a comment, you're trying to get as much reaction. That's how social media works is you're trying to get people to react to you. So you might say something very cruel to someone. You might jump on a bandwagon of people bullying someone else. But in real life, if you were face-to-face with that kid, you would never face-to-face to a kid be like, "You're really ugly and you should go die." You would never ever do that.

And so for kids and for teens, as they're getting used to just communicating online, it's disembodied. It's just on a machine. And that is very dangerous because you lose empathy for who you're looking at. You lose the skill, the know-how of looking at someone and just by even their body language,

Right.

And they need those empathy kinds of skills. And those skills are only used in real life. You cannot learn that online. Oh, Dani, it's so vital for us to help our children not make the phone the center of their life.

So you've been very intentional as a parent, and now you've got adult kids. So what are some of the better activities that you employed, and how do you encourage parents to help their children understand it doesn't have to be all about the screen? Right. And at the beginning of the show, John, you mentioned the four-year-old at the airport. Oh, man, John, I remember going to the grocery store and seeing this

mom shopping and this maybe two-year-old with a phone and just engrossed on the phone. And I've seen this multiple times and I get it. I get the why. Because it certainly lets you read the labels, think carefully, is this on sale or not? Because you have to be fully concentrated. You're not having the interruption of a child. Right. And then you're not there for two, three hours. Yes. So again, it's more efficient.

But that's one activity. For a child to shop with you is an experience. And for them to learn how to do that

is a life skill that you're teaching them, even from an early age. And you can have a child that you can be speaking to them out loud. And I saw a dad do this the other day, and I told him, man, you're doing a fantastic job. Because he was talking about, this was just with his maybe one-year-old, he was reading what he was looking at and just verbally giving those words to this child as he was going through the aisle. And that was engaging and stimulating and then let the child touch the

The product that he was going to get probably took him forever to get through there. But you could see the child was engaged. With my kids, when they were little, I'd take them to, for short periods of time, to the grocery store. And I'd say, hey, we need to get these items. And we were like on a mission. And we'd cross them off. And I'd give them a pen. And, okay, you cross that off. We found it. It was like an adventure. Yeah.

And now my daughter and I actually do father-daughter dates going to the grocery store sometimes. We'll say, hey, mom has a list. You want to go together? And she loves it. We have a kombucha at the end. And so that's one. Now, other activities that are fantastic are drawing, painting, getting messy with painting, just playing in general. We've lost the art of playing. Yes. And that can be...

So creative. Have your kids give you some ideas on how to play. Yeah, and I'm just thinking parents, you have to lead with some of that. I was not an overly fun parent for a season or two or three or four in our home because the kids kept multiplying, if you will. And we had three and then we had four kids and then it's just managed the chaos. I did do some fun things, but I didn't lead with as much fun as I could have. Yeah.

And so if I could have a redo, I'd go back and do that, especially if we had phones because my children weren't raised with phones for the most part. Yeah, and there's so much opportunity, yet parents, I get it, we all are tired.

There are a lot of demands on us. And so finding what you can begin to do just starting today, starting this weekend. It can even be music. Put music in the house. Do a dance party together as a family. Hike, work out. Maybe look for board games that your kids can help pick out. And then you play those on a consistent basis. Be patient with it. If you've had phones in the house and you're saying, hey, we're changing it around. We're taking back the time.

then know that your kids may emotionally not like it. That's okay. Those emotions will catch up as you're consistent with it and they see, yeah, this is truly a change in our home. Excellent stuff. And we want to help your children develop good habits, both tech-related and non-tech-related. And

Arlene's book is a terrific resource. She co-wrote it with Dr. Gary Chapman, so a lot of wisdom and insight in this. It's called Screen Kids, and you can get a copy from us here at the ministry. Make a one-time gift or a monthly donation, and we'll send the book to you, and you can find out how in the show notes.

And then, Danny, you wrote an article called When Should Your Child Get a Cell Phone? This is a pretty heavily viewed article, and it's something you have to decide as the parent. But check it out, especially if you've got a child who doesn't have a phone yet and you're wondering, is it time?

Check it out. It's called When Should Your Child Get a Cell Phone? The link is in the notes. Way to create the curiosity, John. Good job. Never is the answer. Next time, we're going to hear more from Arlene about how your child's brain develops when they're little and what you can do about that. For now, on behalf of Dr. Danny Huerta and the entire team, I'm John Fuller, and thanks for listening to the Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast.

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