When speaking with a lot of parents, most tell me that they feel like they’re losing the fight with tech. They see their kids recoiling from any real world engagements. No more swim teams or soccer practice. One parent recently said her daughter didn’t want to go shopping with her on the weekend. Parents see their kids spending more and more time playing online games, hanging digitally on social media, and just living more and more on tech. The mere observation is distressing, because quite frankly, parents don’t really know what’s happening on the social media platforms, but they don’t like this trend. In spite of their best efforts, the parents say, they’re losing this battle with tech as kids grow consumed with it all.
Whenever someone says they’re losing the fight against tech, my first thought is, “how do you mean?” Yes, I know what they mean, technically, but if you dig deeper into the statement, you see a bigger problem. When someone says they’re losing the fight against tech, what they generally mean is that their kids are being sucked into what the parents feel is a bad life. Parents have tried to entice them with more interesting tasks, like going to the mall. They have signed them up for engagements that the kids blow off, like sports. They have tried to hang out with the kids personally, like playing board games or something 1-1, and kids aren’t interested. From there, the parents arrive at the idea that they have just lost the fight against tech. Yes, they’ve tried a few things, and yes, it shouldn’t take that much to get kids off of a small phone, but was what I described really a battle? No.
If you speak with any pediatric neurologist, what he or she will tell you is the kids are in the throes of real, meaningful, gripping addiction. I know, here we go again with the same mantra: kids are addicted to tech. That phrase, however, is used in a more familiar sense, meaning the word addiction is not seen as the same as when we say someone is addicted to heroin. Addicted to tech and addicted to heroin just hit differently in a parent’s head, but in reality, they’re a lot closer in meaning than people know. People addicted to heroin will likely not give it up when given the option to go to the mall. People addicted to marijuana will not likely stop their practice if a parent asks to play Monopoly. Soccer practice or swim practice aren’t really that enticing if you’re an alcoholic. If drugs and alcohol were the offending culprit, the “war” parents would be waging would look a lot different. The problem right now is parents treat tech addiction by asking kids if they want to participate.
If your kid was addicted to hard drugs, you may ask them if they wanted to quick, but you would also likely take immediate and swift action whether or not your child agreed. You’d immediately try to stop the supply of the drug. You’d get them professional help. You’d likely escalate things if the child continued to gain access to drugs. You’d run down a whole slew of consequences and boundaries until you may even consider kicking them out of the house. You would move mountains to get your kid back, but is that what parents do with tech addiction? Most likely not, but they should get ready to because this only gets worse.
The good news is that all you have to do to immediately choke the supply of tech is kill the power. Turn off the console. Kill the wifi to your house. Take away charging cords for devices. Take away the device itself, obviously, but start by taking swift and decisive action to stop the drug. Yes, your kid will kick and scream, but so what? If your kid was a drug addict, he’d probably kick and scream then, too, right? From there you set up barriers to entry. Lock up old tech. Change your wifi passwords. Have your wifi router on a timer so it dies after 8pm. These last two seem redundant but kids can get burner phones from friends easily. Everyone has an old iphone sitting around that no one will miss. Stop thinking that school administered devices are safe. They’re not. My sixth grader was able to jump on his chrome book and show me how to get to “sexy anime boobs” on Bing in under 20 seconds. You can imagine where he could go if left unchecked. Apps like Google Docs are not just for writing papers. They easily become a texting platform when a google doc is shared. This list goes on and on.
I realize this seems like a long and annoying list and it’ll likely spark fights, but that’s the point. These are the steps you take to actually get in the FIGHT for your kids. This is what you do to actually battle the tech addiction.
