Parents’ Role in Teen Screen Addiction

Parents’ Role

in Teen Screen Addiction

Written by Evan Center

Recently, a parent of a middle schooler told me that her amazing daughter who loved reading and spending time with family had turned into an addict. She had become irritable, angry and reclusive. She no longer read. She didn’t want to spend time with family. Her sleep was off. And she’d taken to screaming at her parents. No, this wasn’t hormones. And it wasn’t her “just being a teen.” This was addiction. And much to the dismay of the mother, it was an addiction she herself had unleashed on her daughter just months before.

It is important for parents of tweens and teens to understand that the adolescent brain is wired to learn. This is why they can learn a new sport or instrument, why they can absorb AP Biology facts and why they question everything their parents say. What any of us learns in high school stays with us into adulthood – and that includes study habits, exercise practices, how to manage anxiety, how to let off steam and have fun, even what music to listen to. During adolescence the prefrontal cortex is still in the process of developing executive functioning skills including the ability to think ahead, plan and work through steps to complete something, or choose a path to avoid negative long-term consequences despite possible immediate social consequences. With this sponge-like ability to absorb new patterns and habits, teens are particularly susceptible to addiction, socially driven decision making and impulsive choices. On some level, parents already know this. We don’t hand our teen a bottle of vodka and suggest they just go at it. We scaffold learning to drive by staying in the car with them, rather than simply handing over the keys to a sports car when they turn 16. And yet we often forget that the sleek communication device that many of us parents have become dependent on is designed to grab and keep our attention. We hand our teen last year’s model when we upgrade and cross our fingers that it will keep them connected to peers (in a positive way) and not lead them down a path of forgoing sleep in favor of YouTube, Snapchat, watching porn or opening them up to becoming vulnerable to cyber bullying. And yet this is the equivalent of handing a kid with a learner’s permit and a still developing pre-frontal cortex the keys to last year’s Porsche and hoping it goes OK (spoiler: it won’t).

App and phone designers know that engagement is the goal. And they have thrown all the money, expertise and technology they can over the last decade at learning how to get, and keep, smartphone users’ attention. As an adult, parents have the (slight) advantage of executive functioning skills to help them regulate their phone use. Teens don’t have that going for them. So, when I hear from a parent that they cannot take the smartphone away from their teen because they will throw a fit or even threaten suicide, I recognize that we not only have a problem, but a problem that cannot be solved by any one parent alone. Teens are, by their nature, oriented toward their peers. What this means is that when “all the other kids” are communicating via Snapchat, taking away a smartphone can be social murder. While as a parent and counselor, I can say that this is not the end of the world and your teen will get through it, it is in fact very, very difficult for a teen. But what if parents banded together to commit to scaffolding the learning for their teens as a community? Programs like “Wait Until 8th” have sought to help parents band together and commit to having their children learn appropriate phone use on nonsmartphones first before jumping into the deep end with their parent’s hand-me-down iPhone. When parents stick together, they can create a social norm that is conducive to developing healthy minds and healthy habits that will stick with children into adulthood. Bozeman, like many other affluent communities, has a smartphone problem. And it is not going to get better until parents start that group chat and downgrade their children’s phones… together.

Evan Center, LCPC is the clinical director of Center Counseling, a group practice in Bozeman specializing in supporting families, parents, couples, teens and individuals. She is also co-founder of Bozeman Field School, where the students’ phones get dropped off to the front office during the school day so 9-12th graders can focus on learning and face-to-face engagement.