Breaking the Trance: A Practical Guide for Parenting the Screen-Dependent Child

By George T. Lynn and Cynthia C. Johnson

An easy-to-follow guide that will help parents understand screen dependence at home.

Recreational screen media use is quickly replacing family time, by no fault of parents. They are doing the best they can based on the information available to them, which claims nothing can be done to stop their children's screen dependence.

Parents seeking change need a new framework for action. Breaking the Trance does not blame parents or vilify technology, but it does give parents clear and effective strategies to implement immediately. The results will restore a sense of care and connection within the family.

George T. Lynn, MA, LMHC, is a psychotherapist from Bellevue, Washington, who has pioneered the use of psychotherapy for adults and children with neuropsychological issues. George is author of the Survival Strategies for Parenting series, Genius! Nurturing the Spirit of the Wild Oppositional Child and The Asperger Plus Child.

Cynthia C Johnson, MA, utilizes in-home individualized therapeutic tutoring to help unique K–12 learners reach their full potential. She is the founding director of the Venture Program at Bellevue College in Washington, the first degree program in the nation designed for students challenged with learning and intellectual disabilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Central Recovery Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942094272

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Why Taking Charge Is Easier Said Than Done

If you are the parent of a child who has an unhealthy relationship with his cell phone, video games, and other screen media, you are in the company of millions of parents who feel confused and out of control when it comes to managing their children’s screen media use.

This book has been written for the parents of children who used to be seen on playgrounds. Go to your nearest city park or public playground. With the exception of mothers with very young children, you will not see many kids of elementary or middle school age. No boys and girls hanging out, teasing and chasing each other or doing kid things. None of that. The older children who happen to be there are probably sitting on a bench, heads bowed over their cell phones. Even outside on the grass and in the sun, life is virtual.

I am a psychotherapist who has written books on parenting children with neuropsychiatric challenges such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Asperger’s syndrome, and bipolar disorder. My coauthor, Cynthia Johnson, is an educator. We are both parents.

When I first went into practice as a psychotherapist thirty years ago, I worked with families in distress as well as adults and children individually. My training in family dynamics and counseling psychology served me well. Children came to my practice motivated to work on some torment in their lives, some suffering. I was chosen to hear their stories about a particular issue and help them get some resolution.

I almost never see this sort of presenting issue in my practice now. Fully 80 percent of the children, teens, and young adults I serve now have some problem that is directly or indirectly a result of screen dependence. Usually the child is failing at school and blaming everything and everyone else for his failure without ever mentioning the fact that he only gets four hours of sleep each night. It may take several meetings for it to become clear that the anxiety disorder or depression a child is experiencing is a direct result of a screen dependency, because children with screen dependence tend to be clever at not mentioning the issue.

Concurrently, Cynthia was running into more children in her tutoring work whose lives were plagued by screen dependence. She suggested we write this book to highlight the scope and severity of the issue and to provide practical strategies to deal with it because we were hearing and seeing a pattern in what the parents whose families we serve had to say.

It is so confusing. How can we put limits on something that makes our child so obviously happy? Maybe there are educational benefits: his hand-eye coordination may improve, and perhaps his ability to think quickly will help him on his driver’s exam.

Yes, his grades are declining, and he tells us he does not care about school, or that it is boring, and he is smarter than his teachers. But his grades don’t reflect that explanation.

Yes, most of the friends he had before he got into gaming are either gamers or gone in his life. He really doesn’t seem to have any social confidence or ability to decide things for himself. He seems very immature in these regards for his age. And yes, we are concerned about his physical health and development. His sleeping habits are horrible, and all he eats is junk food. He doesn’t move much and he just looks physically weak!

Oh yes, he is also very manipulative and will do anything to avoid homework, studying, or any kind of hard work, but you know, that’s just the way kids are. They lie to you.

At this point, Cynthia or I might inquire of the parents, So, if you are seeing a variety of detrimental effects as a result of his screen media use, why don’t you put a stop to it? After all, you’re in charge.

Many parents answer this query with the following response: "It may seem that we are in control, but we are not. First, we do not have the time to ride herd on him all the time. Second, he needs to be more responsible. Third, he is trying, really. Fourth, all his friends are gamers or spend a lot of time with YouTube and social media. We have very little control over what he does at their homes. And finally, we would do something if we could, but what can we do? We cannot go back to the nineteenth century."

We cannot go backward in time and make digital media go away, but ironically, in allowing our children unlimited access to it, we are seeing them regress intellectually, emotionally, and morally—a bold statement. In the chapters that follow, we will provide data to back up our assertions, as well as ways for you to assess and measure screen media use practices in your family. We will show you how to implement a screen control plan based on your own definition of your family’s values that works and is enforceable. And we will provide specific and practical ways to assess the degree of your child’s screen media use problem and take action to correct it.

The importance of parental trance-formation

It is commonly believed that children abuse screen media because parents are absent. To some extent this is true, but it is important to point out that parents have always had to be absent for one reason or another: one parent, or both, was in the military; career demands required a lot of away-from-home travel; or a parent had to leave to work one or several jobs to make ends meet.

All of this being true, it is imperative to note that it is the screen media and the indoctrination everyone has had in the inevitability of its influence in our lives that make this a problem greater than absent parenting. In fact, many parents spend as much time using recreational screen media as their children do. So we need to look deeper at the problem of why many parents ignore the toxic influence of screen media in their lives as well as their children’s lives.

We do not agree with the pervasive inevitability of screen media taking control. You are in charge. You can take back control. It can be done. You can do things as parents that bring your children back into physical contact with siblings, friends, and others who love them. You can help them remedy their miserable academic achievement so they begin to have intellectual confidence. But you are going to have to get out of the parental trance state you are in to help your children.¹

Your personal beliefs about what it means to be a good parent shape the way you see things. You, I, all of us tend to see things as we are, not as they are. Imagine all of us moving through our lives surrounded by an invisible bubble made up of messages, all our beliefs and expectations. We do not really see the world objectively but always interpret it through the messages written on that invisible bubble, as if in a trance. As a parent, your parental trance state is made up of what your parents taught you, as well as the decisions you made growing up about your parents and how they treated you. You may have the following beliefs:

I, myself (the parent), am on my screen media at work every fifteen minutes or so, all day long. There’s really nothing wrong with that—it’s just the way things are these days.

The best parents are best friends with their children. If my children do not like me, it is my fault!

My kids trust me, and I trust them. Why should I track their screen media use? That is a violation of the way we are as a family.

If my child does not want to do something, there is no way I can make him do it.

If I am too strict, I will traumatize him and alienate him from me for life.

It is my job to protect him from pain and make things easier for him in his life.

There is no way I will ever understand all the technology. I just need to make sure he has every advantage by getting him the stuff that my friends (other parents) get for their children.

The worst thing for my child’s social reputation is for us to look like the weirdos on the block—the only family who doesn’t use a lot of digital media.

There is an adage from psychotherapeutic practice used in the treatment of war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: We do the best we can given the information we have at the time. This pithy statement has been used to nurture self-acceptance for thousands of veterans who blame themselves for things they did in a war.

So, speaking directly now, parent to parent, we urge you to forgive yourself for not knowing what to do when it comes to your children’s screen usage! We are all in this together. We are all making the best decisions we can based on the information we have.

As mentioned earlier, you are in charge; however, there is a second part to that statement: you are in charge, but you don’t know it! In fact, just as digital media have entranced your son or daughter with some particular form of screen delight, you are entranced within your idea of what it means to be a good parent, and that trance is held in place by all the beliefs you have about worthiness that you learned from your parents and society.

A fish does not know it is breathing water. As modern parents, it is difficult to understand how the digital medium that we swim in has taken hold and shaped our expectations and beliefs about what a good parent is.

Many parents feel like hypocrites when it comes to putting tighter screen controls on their children. In the morning, the first thing they do is look at their cell phones to determine their priorities for the next few hours. Then they check their phones again. And again. And when returning from work or school, the first thing most parents do is go to their computers, not to each other.

If you are going to have a positive effect in your children’s lives, the trance state circumscribed with the beliefs noted above needs to be replaced with another trance state that gives you a new range of options:

I am a parent. I am in charge. I do the best I can and put the rest in my personal ‘God Box,’ a symbolic container that holds things I would like to change but cannot change without God’s help.

I cannot spare my child his trouble (the consequences of his behavior) or his suffering—the pain he experiences from boredom, isolation, or frustration. His troubles become his teacher. I have no right to deprive him of it.

"If I die tomorrow, I want him to remember me as a person who put my relationships with people first. I do not want to be remembered as an isolated person who only had online friends. I want him to see me having healthy relationships with real people, which are messy at times."

I am not a victim of the Internet. My child is not a victim of incompetent schooling. No victims here. I face life and teach him to face life in terms of challenge, not in terms of curse or blessing.

"Strict parenting can definitely be loving parenting. If I have to have tighter oversight in my home, I accept that responsibility. Someone’s got to do it. I can’t be a nice guy all the time."

When you start living these values, changing your child’s behavior at home and school becomes what you do. And it is actually not that difficult to turn things around once you are committed. Here is what we have observed in families led by parents who have successfully implemented screen controls in their homes.

People actually talk with each other about important things. They come from the heart and are honest.

Children may not like all of school, but they value some of it and continue to study and do homework. They understand that their primary job is to develop themselves intellectually. This may not be easy, but that is what they do.

Family members enjoy each other’s company. They laugh together, eat together, play together, work together, and occasionally argue passionately with each other about things that are important.

There is a sense of vibrancy, sassiness, and connection in the home. You can feel the spirit when walking in the door.

How often do you experience this kind of emotional contact in your own household? If you do not get enough of this kind of energy, consider making some changes in how people prioritize their time in your home. Give it a try. Jump out of your comfort zone as your child’s best friend and create a new zone for both of you in which you assume responsibility for stewardship of his potential.

Why screen dependent instead of addicted?

In the news, we hear a lot about children who are addicted to recreational screen media and the Internet. Addicts are typically people who have a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual reaction to the use of mind- or mood-altering chemicals or certain behaviors. They do not think it through and behave compulsively and impulsively. Addicts protect their impulsive behavior with lies, excuses, and manipulation, and their substance use or practice creates a significant barrier to achieving ordinary life goals. A person with an addiction has one priority in life—satisfying that addiction.²

In terms of psychological dynamics, research shows that addictive behavior is pushed by shame. The addict enacts his addictive practice or takes his addictive drug and feels ashamed, using it again to soothe his shame. This is where there is a big difference between shame-based addicts and children who are screen dependent. Typically the latter do not experience shame for excessive screen media use because society has not assigned the label of shameful to this practice. The absence of shame or guilt and the presence of personal pride in the degree of overuse create the necessity for finding a term other than addiction to describe obsessive use of digital media.³

Rather than the term addicted, the preferred term is screen dependent (SD). By this we mean the child or young adult is accessing more than an hour a day of recreational screen media (this does not include using digital media for homework), and he is only marginally interested in anything other than his screen avocations. The degree of screen dependence can be measured by the degree of difficulty the child has at home and school achieving ordinary life goals as well as the degree of regression in the social, emotional, and cognitive domains of his personality.

Screen dependent is a more appropriate term because children who use recreational screen media can be grouped, using a range of dependence from mild to severe. This cannot be done if addiction terminology is used. You are either an addict or you are not. In our client research we find many variations, so the use of screen dependent as a term makes more sense.

Our client research suggests that most children do not experience the severity of psychological dependence that those with true addictive states experience. Yes, the child may be flunking all his classes at school or be miserably depressed and anxious, unsure of who he is and totally unable to organize himself toward any goal, but he is not drooling, shaking, passing out in a pool of vomit, or getting arrested. He is most likely not stealing to fund his screen dependence. He is not living on the streets; he is not driving in his car under the influence. He is just in his room with the lights turned low, the place where he goes unless he is required to be somewhere else.

So let’s look at the range of severity for a moment. At the least extreme of the range, we see children tethered to their cell phones and texting, but they can put the devices away at night and get a good night’s sleep. And they have other interests, such as the robotics club, soccer, tennis, lacrosse, swimming, music, or church activities.

At the greatest extreme of the range, there are the children who have manipulated their parents into submission and use recreational screen media more than eleven hours a day. These children tend to show a physical growth pattern that lags in developmental milestones. They are vulnerable to the development of neurological issues evocative of a severe case of ADHD, anxiety disorder, or pediatric bipolar disorder with its chronic and aggressive mood states.

Children with severe screen dependence may refuse to go to school and may carry failing grades in most of their classes. Their screen activities may border on the delusional—they make up props for their game play, such as using labeled colored water as a power potent to give them strength through some mythical combat adventure in their video games. Currently there is no research that looks at correlations between chronic recreational screen media use and severe dependence and the development of psychosis, but the analysis of my adolescent client population suggests that a very powerful unipolar depression, which does not have the bipolar highs, can result from severe screen dependence and the sleep deprivation attendant to that dependence.

In terms of measurement of severity, we set the norm of our continuum based on current research that suggests that, on the average, American children in the eight-to-ten-year-old range use screen media of all kinds nearly eight hours a day, with older children typically logging eleven hours a day. This includes television, but the time spent watching television is gradually being overtaken by media on cell phones and tablets and, in a third to a half of households, children are now accessing television on their cell phones, iPods, and computers. On the average, children in all age groups split their recreational screen media time among social media, video viewing, gaming, and texting. Teenagers send an average of 3,364 text messages a month. They prefer texting to actual phone conversations and use the phone less than geriatric populations.⁴

Our clinical research confirms that children in grades K–12 spend more time using recreational and social media than most people imagine. The Severity of Screen Dependence continuum gives a capsule view of the amount of time children use screen media. The numbers of children and adolescents who make up the eight-hour average of the screen-dependent population cluster on each side of the moderate range. In terms of hours online, the numbers suggest that about half of the studied population spend eight hours or less on recreational screen media and half spend eight hours or more. We believe that children in the middle of the mild to moderate range are most at risk. These children are compulsive users who fly under the radar. They are greatly at risk because they can hide their dependence for years and, in their devotion to it, not really take on any serious goals or challenges in their lives. They are secluded in their virtual worlds and avoid all the stress, trials, errors, and other learning experiences that move a child through his or her development to adulthood.

Recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics for safe daily recreational screen media use

In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released their revised recommendations for pediatricians to guide their patient-parents in home management of recreational screen media.⁵ These recommendations call for

limiting all recreational screen media use to less than two hours each day, with less than one hour per day being an optimal choice;

disallowing screen media use altogether for children under the age of two;

keeping televisions, computers, and interconnected digital devices out of children’s bedrooms;

monitoring closely children’s online use, including social media sites;

coviewing recreational and educational programs to promote discussion of family values concerning screen media use;

establishing household screen controls, including rules for use of all recreational screen media, social media, and texting, along with enforcement of nightly media curfews.

The

Reviews for Breaking the Trance

[salsabrarian · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found the tone a bit alarmist, but the authors present good arguments for reducing children's screen dependence, discussing the negative impacts of chronic use on brain development and structure, developmental stages, and moral development. They also outline the differences in symptoms and onset of chronic screen dependence vs. mental illnesses and disabilities such as bipolar disorder and dyslexia, positing that screen dependence in the absence of other psychiatric issues needs to be addressed differently. The authors' proposed family program for breaking screen dependence will require a lot of work, emotional stamina and all hands on deck, but they offer hope for light at the end of the tunnel, that early intervention is best. I would also recommend that early parents and parents-to-be read this book now and save themselves a lot of pain later!