Nearly one in four children report symptoms of screen addiction. If your child spends excessive time on screens, has difficulty pulling away from them, and experiences withdrawal symptoms like anger or anxiety, your child may be addicted. 

Even without a clinical diagnosis, many parents are concerned about their child’s screen-related behaviors, wondering if they’re on a downward trajectory that could lead to eventual addiction.

“We’re not all addicted,” Self Ctrl’s Ian McCready stated during a school convocation in which he shared with high schoolers about his own former gaming addiction. But “we’re all somewhere between neutral and bad habits,” he continued soberly, “and we need to course correct.”

How do we “course correct” screen addiction?

After recognition of the problem, Ian suggests three steps: 

1. Take an extended break

At a minimum, Ian suggests taking a two to three-week break from technology to allow your child’s brain to reset from the dopamine overload. 

As a former high school track and field coach, I agree. I passed on to my athletes the same wisdom my high school coach had shared with me: he said it takes 28 days to build a habit and only two to three days to break it. Recent research by Dr. Caroline Leaf suggests it takes even longer for new habits to replace old ones: 63 days to be exact. 

So, consistency matters if you’re looking for your child to develop healthier screen time habits. In dealing with addiction, being occasionally lenient with screens on the road to recovery won’t help your child develop the new habit. 

Your child’s brain needs time to rewire itself.

Buy-in is equally essential. As with my above-mentioned athletes, those who set goals for themselves experienced the most success. This is the beauty of intrinsic motivation. So, get your kids involved in the process. Ask them questions like:

• What do they love about technology? Gaming? Social media?
• What benefit does their online activity have on their life?
• What negative impact might it be having?
• What do they want their long-term relationship with technology to look like? Why?
• What might need to change?

Answering these questions isn’t easy, but your kid will be more motivated to participate in the change if they’ve identified a vision for their own future. 

What can you do instead?

To stop participating in a negative behavior, you must replace it. It’s much easier for your child to say “no” to a temptation if they can say “yes” to something better. (Romans 12:2 and Philippians 4:8 reinforce this concept.)

Kids who have relied too heavily on tech for entertainment tend to think the alternative to their current screen-heavy habits is staring at a wall. Show them how untrue this is. Children need a little guidance here, which means offering screen time alternatives.

Make screen-free activities easier to say “yes” to by making them highly available. We’ve compiled a list of ideas to get you started:

Get outside

When I noticed my teenage son relying too heavily on technology, I instituted some good ‘ol-fashioned time outside. At first, he complained, but then something magical happened.

The next time I looked out the window, my near-14-year-old was peeking out from behind a tree while his younger sister and an army of her neighbor friends were approaching him with loaded Nerf guns. 

My teenage son hadn’t engaged in this kind of self-directed play in years. It had been stifled by technology. And now he was smiling as he ran for cover from neon styrofoam bullets. 

Facilitate peer interaction

In my own family, we benefit from living in a neighborhood full of kids. If that’s not your living situation, help your child identify a friend from school with whom they would like to spend extra time. Then, schedule a technology-free playdate.

My friend Amy is great at making playdates fun. She lets them bake, takes them on adventures, and has epic snacks waiting for them. But kids are made for play, and, most of the time, no additional planning is required for your kids to enjoy being with other kids and keep themselves occupied. 

Craft a Free-Play Environment

Our brain is a muscle, so we need to exercise our creativity for it to grow stronger. As Andy Crouch put it in The Tech-Wise Family, our screens “ask too little of us.” So, in our efforts to combat this uphill battle with tech, one of the best things we can do is make our homes a haven conducive to self-directed free play. 

You don’t have to put on your teacher hat and spend a ton of time and energy to help your child play well; just create an environment where creative expression and development can happen.

Spend a little extra time thinking of activities you can “have available” in plain sight for your kids to participate in that don’t involve their faces glued to a screen. This can be implemented for children of any age, including teenagers.

Ideas include:

• Regularly switch out your home library with “new” books by renting from the public library or finding and trading out free gems from the Little Libraries scattered throughout your town. *Did you know that simply engaging with print media reduces mental health challenges often associated with iGen’s tech-saturated lives? 
• Supply your kitchen with easy-to-use baking mixes or, even better, from-scratch ingredients. Spend ten dollars at the store and grab a cake mix, frosting, and sprinkles. Set it on the counter for whenever your kids’ baking inspo (or boredom bug) hits.
• My neighbor friend, Tricia, has an epic crafting supply closet. I wouldn’t be surprised if cotton balls, glue, and popsicle sticks were on her weekly store list. She keeps supplies on hand that she knows foster her son’s natural creativity. The neighbor kids benefit as well. She lays down a vinyl tablecloth and lets the mess ensue, knowing she’s made the cleanup easier and that it’ll be worth the time spent together around the kitchen table. 
• Stock the board games and strategically leave some in plain sight rather than tucking them away in a closet or cabinet.

Support their interests and hobbies

Allowing your child to engage in special interests, hobbies, and extracurricular activities sacrifices your time, energy, and financial resources. But the benefits are many. It is statistically proven that participating in an extracurricular activity, such as a sport or music lesson, increases a child’s in-person social interactions, mental health, sleep patterns, and brain development— areas that excessive online activity often disrupts.

Belonging to a team provides additional motivation for your child to dedicate time toward improving their sport. When they know their teammates are counting on them to hit a couple of RBIs in the big game, the backyard becomes their practice field. The same goes for the performing arts: as your child’s show or recital nears, that instrument or script will encourage your child away from screens. 

On the flip side, it’s also likely that your child views their gaming and online play as a worthy hobby. When you reintroduce screen time activities, show interest in that as well. Your kids are less likely to push against your rules when they know you value what they value.

Don’t give up 

As with substance-use addiction, your child is likely to experience withdrawal symptoms initially. That’s because an addict’s brain is significantly challenged in adjusting to no longer receiving the input that caused the addiction.

During this initial period of setting new screen limitations, turning back or giving up will be tempting (aka: it will feel easier to hand them the screen than to push through). 

Ian’s final two steps of course correcting screen addiction are:

2. Accountability, and 

3. Recognize you’re not alone. 

Your kids will successfully adjust to new screen boundaries if they don’t go it alone. Perhaps they can get a friend to go screen-free for a period of time with them. Equally, don’t enforce what you aren’t willing to do yourself. Walk the walk with them. Be willing to examine your screen time practices, too. When you do, you’ll be a grace-filled, open book, able to engage in back-and-forth conversation about their struggles and your own.

It’s important that your kids feel they can come to you to discuss how things are going with the changes to their screen time. Allow them to lament the difficulty they are experiencing in letting go of their unhealthy relationship with tech. When they do, help them name their emotions and validate them.

Name your struggles with it, too, but recognize their struggle may feel different than your squabbles with tech. As kids, they have less autonomy to control their own situation. (This is why allowing your kids to create their own goals for healthier tech use is more effective than unquestioningly enforcing ones they had no say in.) 

Your whole family will reap the benefits when you approach the road to healthier screen habits with compassion, buy-in, and a firm commitment to sticking with it.

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