Teach your child to unplug

The nature of blogging is that we often write and post about problems we solve in our daily lives - or hot topics that get us excited. Here's one that happened in our house that got me all riled up!

I once posted Missy Keenan's 10 Tips for Helping Your Kids Get a Better Balance with Technology on my Facebook page. With my tech-loving fiancé and his teenage son in my family, we're always looking for ways to balance tech time with real human relationships.

In unglamorous terms, this means teens + freedom + video games + pew pew pew + phone calls = countless hours of staring at screen cutaways, accompanied by whimsical chaos and fights. Oh, those boys. They're great. When they're tired, and we're tired, we all just need someone to turn off those screens for us, shelve the protests, and send us all to our bedrooms for an early night.

This uninterrupted technology time that kids crave is usually not feasible in our lives (read: exhausting) for several reasons, and by the sounds of it, many of you are too. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, kids spend an average of 7 hours a day on entertainment media like TV, computers, and cell phones, which is kind of scary when you consider the weekly stats - an average of about 50 hours a week! I'm guessing many of you are probably doing a mental statistic to figure out how much lower than that total your kids might go to feel better. We did that too - and you know what? That's right. Confirmation.

I've witnessed firsthand requests to turn off the TV or put down the phone after hours of use that eventually evolved into hours-long protests and tears, conflicts that are supported by studies that show a statistically significant positive association between behavior problems and behavior problems media time. I have also seen the serious effects of late-night television and video games on healthy sleep patterns (theirs and, in turn, ours). Late at night, the boys were both exhausted and fully awake, wishing they could spend more time on the Playstation. This is not surprising, as late-night TV, screen watching, and phone calls can lead to decreased physical activity, increased physical and mental arousal, and chemicals that may inhibit proper brain patterns and effective sleep.

The bottom line is that this technology battle is a losing proposition for everyone if parents/step-parents/guardians don't stay the course. And it really isn't a battle-able technological demon; this generation is growing up seamlessly with technology and media that most of us didn't grow up with and shows no signs of stopping. This is a parenting issue.

As a friend and I discussed this topic, we quickly turned to the frustration of parenting styles and how to raise and set up structures for kids based on their particular personalities and needs. Should we do what parents do, do other things, or helicopter parenting, free-range parenting, tiger parenting, attachment parenting, etc.? How do we give them the freedom and time to relax through passive activities (TV, video games) and take those activities away when needed without harming them mentally or disrupting their lives? Really, how do we not harm our children?

The good news and bad news are...... I don't have any official answers for you because my parenting manual got lost in the mail like all of you did, too. What I can tell you is that science shows that children need time to connect, with their parents and their world to develop critical social skills and instill curiosity and interest in their lives.

The Top Ten Tips provide some great starting points for changing the relationship between kids and technology, and they come a week before this year's International Screen-Free Week, a celebration of families giving up digital entertainment and spending time together.

In our home, we are currently moving away from technology-intensive activities and gravitating toward things that bring us face-to-face. We put a table far enough away from the TV that we can't see it from the it-an incompatible behavioral technique we learned from what Shamu taught me about happy marriages. We ate dinner there, we did our homework there, we had fun and ate our latest snack experiment there.

We created phone-free zones and created video games as they saw fit to "relax" with time limits. Micromanagement was everyone's pit. We made sure that physical activities like sports, karate classes, and 4-person living room dances took precedence over screen time.

It doesn't stop all the fighting. But I guess if they don't argue with you and sometimes complain about you, then you're probably not doing it right. After all, we generally want to raise independent, capable, thoughtful people who can live their lives well.

Therefore, I urge that the battle of technology is a battle worth fighting. Our job is to make sure their brains and bodies have the best possible chance at these critical developmental stages. That means unplugging while learning how to connect.