Is your family’s screen time out of control? Discover effective strategies to improve family interactions.
As a parent of teens, I confess that I have mixed feelings about summer. On one hand, there are fewer extracurricular activities. I don’t have to metaphorically dynamite my kids out of bed in the morning. There’s no nagging about homework necessary. All in all, a break from school feels like a merciful thing.
But by the time dog days of summer arrive, another thought begins to percolate: “It’s time for them to go back to school.” Siblings get on one another’s nerves. Too much time on their hands starts to feel more like a punishment than an invitation to creativity. And as the blazing heat of July and August beat down on us, it’s easy to want to just stay curled up in an air-conditioned house with … a phone. All. Day. Long.
In moments like these, we might realize that our kids’ tech habits (and maybe ours, too, as parents) have spiraled a bit out of control, necessitating a screen time reset. Or, maybe a lot out of control. And we realize it’s time for a screen time reset—especially with school lurking just around the corner.
But how do we effectively reset our habits with our smartphones as a family? How do we make those changes stick? Let me offer a few thoughts on effectively embracing a screen time reset.
So, let’s start with a definition of what I’m talking about. What, exactly, do I mean when I use the phrase screen time reset?
Resetting involves a renewed commitment to examining and adjusting tech habits. A reset promotes health and avoid compulsive and potentially addictive screentime consumption. There’s no one “right” way to achieve a screen time reset (though I’ll offer a few concrete suggestions). But it does require admitting when our family’s habits in this area have gotten out of control. It also means revisiting what a healthy relationship with our screens can look like through a screen time reset.
But even if we realize that we need to make changes in this area, it can be hard to do so. Why is that? Changing our habits, especially those where we’re overconsuming, is difficult because it involves acknowledging our unhealthiness and the need for change. It’s never an overnight process, whether we’re talking about reigning in our screentime, or our overeating or overspending. All of these behaviors feel pleasurable and fulfilling in the moment. But in the end, they leave us with destructive consequences.
Making healthy changes stick involves more than just ramping up our willpower. We’ve got to realize that our screen habits condition our brains in a very real way to want more of the stimulation that all those colorful flickering pixels promise.
We need to understand that when our brains experience something pleasurable, we get a little hit of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Our brains like it. And they want more. It’s a biological reality at the heart of any addiction.
That’s why making changes can feel painful at first: It involves restricting our appetite for more stimulation in the pursuit of a bigger goal with a much longer payoff. Depending on the expert, it can take several weeks to move through the painful adjustment stage until we see the hoped-for changes begin to stick and deepen their roots.
Screentime overload is often described as a problem that “the kids” have. But the reality is often a bit less convenient. Parents may have overuse issues in this area, too. And if we hope to make lasting changes, it has to start with us.
So, Mom and Dad, let’s take a deep breath and then take a look in the proverbial mirror. What habits and changes do you need to make before you ask your kids to do the same? It may seem like their bad habits are, well, worse. But if you’re trying to get them off their screens and they see you on yours?
It’s not impossible to make changes right in the middle of your normal schedule. Like, say, starting this Wednesday morning. But in my family’s experience, it’s a bit easier to do that when there’s a natural reset point.
A screen time reset can be as simple as the next weekend, the next break from school (fall break, Christmas break, spring break, or the beginning of summer). These sorts of breaks offer natural transition points where reintegrating renewed boundaries feels less jarring.
So if things are starting to feel a bit frazzled, you can get out your calendar right now and ask, “What’s the next best spot for our family to reset our media habits?”
Some of us have what I’d describe as “all or nothing” personalities. When we make changes in our lives, we go all in—no matter how hard or extreme. But the flip side is often not good: When “all in” starts to erode, to feel too difficult, we can collapse back to our old ways. Personally, this is a cycle I’ve seen at work over and over again in my life, even as I strive to move toward a healthier assessment of realistic, sustainable change.
When I see an issue that needs to be addressed, like Paul Bunyan, I want to pick up the biggest axe I can find and chop it down in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, most of the time complex problems—especially those that have become habits woven into our daily patterns—aren’t quite that simple to solve.
Others among us lean toward a similar tendency: perfectionism. If we’re going to do it all, we’re going to do it perfectly. But when it comes to changing the trajectory of established habits, that approach can just create more stress for our kids—as well as inadvertently tempting our kids to hide what’s really going on for fear of punishment.
So what do we do instead? Instead of muscling up to all-or-nothing thinking or perfectionism, we need a realistic attitude toward making changes in our lives—such as new boundaries for screen time in our families. The goal isn’t absolute perfection. The goal is movement toward what is healthy and good for us. Sometimes we blow it—just like with a diet, or a budget. We don’t quit, but we do reset, regroup and try again.
Perfectionism is a heavy burden for everyone involved, both parents and children. In my 2014 Plugged In Blog entry “Rebooting Your Family’s Media Habits,” I wrote:
“Our family’s goal isn’t perfection when it comes to media and technology. Rather, our goal is to be engaged and aware of our habits, and to periodically reset them when discipline wanes (because we’re tired or sick or had a bad day … or week), as it naturally tends to do.
It can feel like a losing battle sometimes—a battle that gets even tougher as kids move into their teen years. That said, I believe that if we stay engaged relationally, keep setting healthy limits and keep hitting the reset button when we drift outside those boundaries, it gives our kids a model for relating to others and technology.”
When I’m trying to make changes, I often get very intense about what I intend to give up, to cut out. But my wise wife always asks the corollary question: What are you going to fill that empty space with? That’s a great question. Because the truth is, it’s hard to eliminate anything we like without a concrete plan for replacing it with something that offers a different kind of satisfaction.
For parents, resetting our kids’ screen-time limits demands something more than just a parental edict that they’re not going to do “X” anymore. When we remove something from our children’s lives that they enjoy and are used to doing, it’s going to create a vacuum that we have a responsibility to help them fill. That requires planning and intentionality.
For our family, we’ve tried to find things that we like to do together. There are several games that all of us enjoy (or, well, most of us), as well as certain shared activities. So if I say, “It’s time to get off your Switch,” that instruction is much easier for my son to take if I have a replacement activity in mind: “So let’s go play guitar together,” for instance. My son and I enjoy making music with each other, whereas my wife and daughters are more likely to enjoy doing puzzles, drawings, and various “crafty” things together. Increasingly, they’re cooking together, too, which my daughters absolutely love.
We also sometimes have contests, especially on breaks. Who can read the most pages and/or books over a break? Or, let’s have a drawing contest where each family member comes up with a category to sketch out.
Your family’s replacement strategies may look very different than our family’s. But the point is, we’re not just dropping screen-time regulations on our kids and expecting them to naturally know what to do with the empty space we’ve just created. Instead, we’re actively and intentionally engaged as parents, brainstorming and modeling non-screen-related activities. And the more we help our children to choose those activities, over time the more likely they become to make those choices without our close guidance and encouragement to do so.
It’s not impossible to implement a big change on, say, a normal Tuesday afternoon. But I think it is harder.
Instead, keep an eye out for a moment that represents a natural reset point. It can be as close as a weekend—or the end of the summer. Breaks of all kinds offer natural moments for change too, whether we’re talking Christmas break, Spring break, or some other moment where your basic life rhythm gets adjusted for you.
These moments represent natural inflection points where relaunching new boundaries doesn’t feel quite as jarring. So if things feel a bit frazzled, break out your calendar and ask, “What’s the next natural break where we can hit the reset button together as a family?”
Remember how I talked a bit earlier about all-or-nothing tactics for change? What’s needed here is exactly the opposite: small, measured changes that you can begin to integrate into the fabric of your family’s life together. Instead of one fell swoop, real change might mean making four or five adjustments to your habits together as a family, slowly integrating one change before adding another. These can include:
Buying an alarm clock. Yeah, really. Why, you ask? Because if you or your kids use a phone for a clock, the very first conscious act of every day is reaching for your smartphone. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve turned off my alarm, it’s a natural instinct to want to check any number of things—the temperature, the news, your social media feed. And before you know it, you’ve already started the day reinforcing that screentime habit, and likely wasting a bit of time to boot.
Committing to Bible reading before you look at your phone. Back when I was in college in the pre-internet days, I had a guy who helped me grow spiritually who made a commitment not to look at the news before he’d read Scripture each day. The point here isn’t to be legalistic. But this goal helps us focus on spiritual truth before we immediately get siphoned off by the internet’s black hole of content.
No phone zones. These zones can include both physical and chronological spaces: no phones at dinner. No phones in the car. No phones in bedrooms at night (a big one to keep kids safe and secure in many ways online). Phones off an hour before bed (which will help your brain “cool down” so that you and/or your kids can get to sleep more quickly.
The two-hour challenge. Many social scientists suggest a two-hour screentime limit daily for younger kids. At the same time, still other research shows that tween and teens often spend on average six to eight hours a day on discretionary screen time. The gap between reality and what should ideally be happening can seem daunting. If so, consider what I call the two-hour challenge: not engaging with your phone at all for two hours every day.
The world of screens that permeates our lives today isn’t going to go away (well, not short of one of those apocalyptic events we see in dystopian sci-fi movies, that is.) It’s a reality that anyone raising kids today has to grapple with. We don’t always get it right or perfect. Sometimes our habits slip out of control.
But there’s always an opportunity for a reset, a chance to start over and to keep working on growing and developing healthy boundaries and limits over the long haul. The goal isn’t perfection. Rather, our ongoing goal is to be engaged in this area as parents and to periodically hit the reset button when things drift out of control.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of PluggedIn’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
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