Episode 79: Get UnStuck from the Phone battle: Correct This Mistake!

Free Workshop: 7 Steps to Clearing Out Your Emotional Baggage (So You don’t pass it on to your kids!) 

Do you feel like you are always battling with your kids to get them off their phones, to shut down the video games or to step away  from the screen? Do you have battles that result in meltdowns when you just want a device free dinner once in a while? 

Then chances are you have made one of these mistakes! 

Good news, there are easy fixes for this and I am sharing the process to get you device free with ease in no time! 

While WHAT you are doing is easy, how you are doing it will take some practice! So jump in and let us know how it goes!

And here’s to a decide free Holiday & New Years!! 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the peaceful home podcast. My name is Pam and I am your host. And today we are talking all about how to clear out those pesky little device addictions. So if you have a kid. Or a spouse or yourself who is really struggling with attachment with their phones, their tablets or gaming systems or the television. We're going to dive into how to break those patterns and what is causing them. So if you don't have a kid that this is the story, and you are worried about that, you're worried you're having these conversations about, do I get them a phone? Do I not get them a phone? What is that going to create? This is gold for you. So let's say then, As parents, we really just want our kids to be okay. We really just want them to be happy and healthy and resilient have success in life. And this is why we do what we do as parents, right? This is why we do the work. This is why we worry. This is why we obsess. And this is why. We take what we know from parenting. And we apply it across the board. That means that we take what we learned most often from our parents, or maybe from something specific that we've gone out into the world to learn how to do, like we've gone and taken a parenting class or have been a part of a program or have been in therapy to change. These parenting relationships. But if you're still struggling with devices, if you're still worried or obsessing over devices, you're probably making one of these mistakes. So the funny thing about devices is that yes, our phones, our tablets, our television, our gaming systems, they all give us hits of dopamine. So when you're scrolling on Instagram and somebody liked your video or commented on something that you've done. Or said, or, um, you've gotten more followers or you're winning or upleveling on a game or you're moving through a television series that you've been bingeing, right? When these things happen. What happens is your brain goes yay. And you get a little hit of dopamine and that's great. However. That's not the only problem. One of the things that we've done in parenting is we've taken this understanding that kids respond. When you have some sort of reward or consequence. That's important to them. I can't tell you how many moms I've worked with over the years who have said to me, Yeah, but my kid just doesn't care about anything. You don't understand. Or they're just so entitled that doesn't matter. Have you ever tried to take a phone away from your adolescent and they're like, you can't take my phone. That's my phone. Or they try to keep it away from you. Or when you say you want to look through their phone, they're like, that's an invasion of my privacy. Or you ask them to shut down their phone there. Their tablet. They're gaming system and there's a meltdown or a battle, or they sneak to use it more afterwards. These are all indications that your kid or whoever you're examining in this conversation. Might have a problem and the mistakes that we make as parents is that we give the power to the device. And this is what that looks like. Maybe we say. When you're done with your chores, you can have more time on your iPad. When you clean up your room, you can have another hour playing video games. When you help out with this thing that I've been asking you to help out with, I'll give you back your phone. Or maybe you're like, no, I understand. I need to limit their screen time, which is one of the things we're going to talk about. So you put limits on their screen time. And then you let them earn more screen time. You say if you do these things and jump through these hoops and behave in this way, then you get extra time. Or maybe you're like, that's a bad behavior. I don't like it. I'm taking away. One of these devices. Now I understand because the devices hold power, why you would do these things. It makes perfect sense. But what you're doing is you're giving the devices more power from an emotional and a mental and a physiological sense, like from a biological place. Of neuroscience. You're giving your heightening the value of these things by taking them away by limiting them, by letting them earn more. Now, I'm not saying, let it be a free for all and let your adolescent beyond their phone. 24 hours a day. But what I am saying is that you stop using the phone as a reward. And as a punishment. Because those things are causing you problems. Now here's the problem with the devices in general, the blue light and the dopamine hits that we get from these devices and from the behavior on these devices. So playing a game, winning, getting the look, your little tokens or your rewards, or getting likes and follows, or, killing somebody in a video game or whatever it is. I don't play video games. I have no idea. The last video game I played in my life was super Mario when I was in like, I don't know, seventh grade or something. But this. Attachment, and I'm not going to call it addiction because addiction is a clinical differential, but this attachment that we have and that our kids are developing to these devices and that a lot of us also have to these devices just mindlessly scrolling our phones or Instagram or news apps, whatever other things we're doing. The result from a neuro-biological place is an increase in anxiety, an increase in depression and a decrease in attention span. Our devices are neural disruptors. What the hell does that mean? It means that the brain is efficient. And when our brain is wiring for something and our brain is constantly rewiring. We understand this now from research. You can rewire your brain. You could decide right now to start rewiring your brain. But our brain is always being rewired and it's being rewired by what we consume. So it, maybe you've noticed this we're in, like when COVID first happened and you were checking the news every day to look at numbers. And, or multiple times a day, or like on the regular, you had notifications popping up on your device to tell you what the numbers were. And. If we were trending up or down because we didn't have a lot of information and a lot of us were doing this right. And what that. Likely created was more anxiety around COVID. For you for me and for everybody else, I know that's what happens when there's wars going on and we're constantly in our newsfeed to see what's going on, not only is the information we're receiving. Causing us problems. It's rewiring the brain. So now, instead of just being anxious about the thing that we're reading about, we're experiencing this anxiety on a regular basis. We're experiencing was depression on a when you're, when you don't have your device scenario, when you've decided I need a break and you shut it down, we take a break. I'm not on Facebook or I'm getting off Instagram for a while to take a break. But you're still on your device for other things. It's wiring your brain. What you consume. Is what your brain gets wired as now, this is for, in general for us as adults. And, as we grow. There are two times in life where there's lots of new neural connections being made. And those times are early childhood. Like the first two years of life. And adolescents. It's when the brain is growing and neuropathways are being developed. When we are developing pathways and adolescents. The brain will look at what you're consuming. What's being stimulated. And it will prune the things that are not being stimulated because the brain is really efficient and it doesn't want to have to do extra work. And it assumes that anything that you want to know. Your giving attention to. So for instance, if you want to learn to play an instrument, if you want to learn algebra, if you want to understand something about, the world history in your world, history class. If you. Want to build social relationships and connections. If you're working on a physical. Skill like swimming or running or some specific sport. Your brain assumes. If you want to do those things, you're doing them. And everything else. Is extra. One of the largest growth times for brain development is adolescence. So if your adolescent is going to school and spending their time outside of school on devices, those are the neuropathways that are developing and. And they're not developing in areas of social interaction and relationships. Physical interactions and real. Learning and growth, right? We need we need balance. We need all of these things. And we need downtime as well. When the times away from devices. The crazy thing is oftentimes what happens is we go, my kid's a little bit more responsible now they've had a device for a while. I don't feel the need to limit their time on their phone. They're talking to their friends, blah, blah, blah. Here's the problem with that. When they're talking to their friends on their devices, instead of in-person. They are not nurturing their social and relational interaction. Neuropathways they're nurturing their electronic device, stimuli, dopamine pathways. That's what they're re that's. What is getting activated? Not the. Oh they're talking to their friends and they're having a conversation and they're making plans or whatever. So it's really important that these other things are happening outside of device time. And a lot of our kids are going into high school using computers and have a computer that they're working on all day long in middle school. My daughter needed to have her phone so that they could play games. Or like quizzes or reviews in the classroom with their device. And so it's not just you might be thinking, oh, they're not using their devices at school. I promise you. They're using their devices at school and they're using all sorts of devices at school. They're looking at screens for a lot more than you think they are in their day to day at, in the school and learning environment. And they need to have time away from that. ANd so here's a couple of things that you can do. First and foremost, you can limit the time on a device. And quite honestly, and I get this because I want to watch TV before I go to bed too. But limiting screens. For the developing brain. Two hours before bed and at the bare minimum, like if you're watching a show or something as a family at the bare minimum, removing handheld devices. We are removing phones, iPads little gaming consoles and devices. And for sure, shutting down the video games and the because the video games are designed for dopamine hits, they're designed to get you drawn in and attached. And so when that happens, In the two hour window before bed. You're stimulating areas of the brain that are then going to result in struggles with sleep. And even if your child's not getting up, even if I'm not saying I'm having a hard time sleeping. We're talking about quality of sleep. So if your kid is waking up tired, they're not getting the rest that they need. Period. And we know that they're tired because either it's hard to get them out of bed. Or they're struggling during the day or they're grouchy when they get home from school or having meltdowns. All of those are indications. They're not getting enough rest. So limiting screen time or device time is really valuable. And like I said, don't use it as a bargaining chip. Don't say you can earn more and here's how you can earn more. Just simply say here's the limit on screen time. The and M just so you know, when you stop using the phone or the device as a bargaining chip, when you stop giving the device so much power. What starts to happen is they don't need or want as much time. Most often our kids just want to spend time with us. Yes. Even your teenagers, they just want to be able to interact. And so they're hopping on their phone or getting on their video game because your distracted and busy. And that leads us. To number two. And number three. Number two is phone for your device free zones. And sometimes people will say to me, oh yeah, we have no devices at the dinner table. That's fine. But having timeframes and times during the day and spaces in the house where they are free of devices. So maybe it's, you're sitting at the kitchen table. In the evening after dinner and building a puzzle together or playing a board game and we don't have our devices for that. There's nothing in the world. Nothing in the world that is so important that you need to have your device on you. Unless of course you're working here, you're a doctor or you're a medical provider, or you work in a field where you're on call and you happen to be on call. Like I get it right. There's. There's always those limitations, but if you wouldn't take your device into. yOur yoga class, which I know from teaching yoga, it was one of the things we were like, except for that exception I just gave you. Or put your devices, keep your devices outside the room, turn them off, turn the ringer off, put them on, do not disturb. Put them in your shoe. I don't care what you do with them. Just don't bring them in here. And don't be on them while we're in practice. If you can give that much attention to a practice like yoga, or even like your gym. Workout or whatever, then you can do that for your kids as well. So creating zones, places timeframes that are device-free and then require a pre-conversation right. That might require oh, Thanksgiving, dinner or Christmas dinner or times with the family, or you're going to somebody's birthday. And you're saying to your kid, Hey, this is the expectation. And I expect you to be. In interacting, engaging and not on your device, not on your phone. And I will tell you, I have a 14 year old, and that is a timeframe where they're like, I want to be on my phone. And I have a 2 21 year old nephews. And a 24 year old niece and we were at my mom's house for her birthday last month. And everybody was there. And my two nephews. We're both air pods in, on their devices, ignoring people. And one of them had his girlfriend there. And my 14 year old never took out her phone. We were there for the day. She never took out her. Like I, she has a cupcake business and I said, did you take pictures or you going to take, I need you to take pictures of the cupcakes. And she's I don't know if I even brought my phone. Oh, it could be in your car. I think I had it in the car. I'm like, okay. Okay. Here's the truth of the matter, right? We have decreased the power of the phone in our house and she could care less. There are times that she's like, can you hear, I'm going to say, to give you my phone for the weekend because people keep texting me and I don't want to, I don't want to, I just need a break. And so I'm like, okay, let's we power it down. And we literally we'll stick it on my desk or something in my office. It's not like a, I don't take it away from her and she knows she can go grab it and hop on it if she wants to, but she doesn't want to. And it's not because there's something magic and she's just an amazing kid and oh, isn't she so amazing? No. She's got a kid with ADHD that very easily can get sucked into her device, but we've taken the power away from it. And so it's not really that big of a deal to her. She's like, yeah, yeah, it's a phone, whatever. And the final thing, and this is really important and I don't care who you are, how old you are. I don't care how old your kids are. Modeling is so important, especially with devices. And I hear people say all the time oh, I can't believe that family was sitting over there with their phones at dinner. And they're teaching this to their kids or they're just handing their two year old their phone, so they don't have to listen to them and all of that stuff. I get we're going to pass judgment. I'm not passing judgment here. What I'm saying is it's really important that you challenge yourself to put down the device. And then talk about that with your kids. Talk about the harm of being on your phone all the time. Say it out loud. Oh man, there I am. I'm like scrolling news again, or I'm just mindlessly scrolling through Instagram or Tik TOK. And I don't even know what I'm doing here. This is so wild that this device has such a pull on me. And part of it's because we've integrated it into our worlds. We've got our calendars, we've got our reminders, we've got our, everything we have to do. We've got our to-do lists. And we've got, everything we could possibly, I have apps on my phone. I could watch. Netflix and Disney plus, I can listen to music. I can. I can access anything on YouTube. I have. Access to everything at my fingertips. And yeah, that's a real compelling reason to want to have my phone on me, to start scrolling through and look at things and, Get entrenched in things and my. We have a rule in my house that. When we sit down to watch a movie together as a family, there's no phones. And my 14 year old will be like dead. Put your phone away. And I think it's amazing. He doesn't think it's amazing. But, and she'll do the same thing to me if I have my note, but it's okay. If you say like sometimes he'll say, oh, I was just looking to see who that actress was because she looked so familiar and she's oh, okay. Okay. And she doesn't give, continue to give him crap about it, but there's an important component of having a conversation and it's not, I'm the adult. I can do what I want. You're the kid you're supposed to do what I say. That's not it because that doesn't fly. That's not going to work. The only way that you're going to get your kid. To stop the attachment or the attraction to the phone. The only way you're going to get them to be able to put the device down and leave it and not really care if they have it on them or not. Is if you're modeling. That same behavior. And, if you see them wanting to be on their phone or drawn to their phone or going back to their phone or going back to their device or wanting to play on the video games. Have a conversation with them, like what's going on? Are you experiencing boredom? What does boredom feel like? What can you do when you're bored? What are some things that you can come up with when you're bored? When we were kids. We had to figure out what to do when we had nothing to do. And you couldn't Google search it. And yes, like I said, the phone is an amazing tool. And with a kid with ADHD, she uses it as a resource. And she doesn't use it as a, like I'm gonna screw around and yes, she has games on it and she plays those games. Like when she used to ride the bus, she would play games on her phone while she was on the bus. She doesn't ride the bus anymore, but and so she'll have free time and she'll have downtime and she'll say, Hey, can I can I load this game or whatever? And I'm like, yeah, that's fine. But there's no tied to, you got A's on your report card or you got F's on your report card or whatever other things. There's not linked to anything. It's its own separate thing. As you have to start recognizing your own thinking around the devices and put them down. Put them down yourself. Talk about it. And look at what you truly want for your kids. If you want your kids brains to be nurturing, social connections and relationships, so those can be healthy. Then they need to practice that if you want them to have strong physical, like development, that's happening in their brain, I E coordination and whatever other things, maybe it's a skill or a task of some sort. And it could be something Lula. I'm not even talking about sports. Okay. My kid is a baker. And she's a musician and she's in theater and all that kind of stuff. But. One of the things that we talk about is the muscle memory. Like in her hands, she was just making cupcakes for Thanksgiving. And while she makes cupcakes all the time, she gets big orders at Christmas and Thanksgiving that all come at once. And she says yes to them. She does about 10 dozen for each holiday. And by the time she gets through decorating them all, she's oh my God, my hand is killing me. And I'm like, yeah, Of course it is because it hasn't had that much muscle stimulation, it's muscle memory. And if she hasn't picked up her violin in a really long time, which isn't really the case anymore because she practices so regularly, but there were timeframes where she'll be like, oh, my back hurts and my hands are cramping. And my shoulder hurts and whatever other things, because she's not nurturing that area of her brain. If you want a well-rounded adult, you need a well-rounded kid. And that doesn't mean a million activities. It means simply challenging yourself and them to do things. That are outside of what devices offer us. It's really that simple. And if you're looking to break the habit yourself, Challenging yourself to put down the phone is a great place to start and then exploring what's going on. What do I feel? What do I think? What's the experience on the inside? When I put this down? And. And no putting down your phone for one day is not going to decrease your anxiety or decrease your depression. But when you start to detox from what you start to clear it out of your system, when you start to turn off the automatic reaction, Of picking up your phone and scrolling through it because it's there. And instead. You force yourself to do something else to read an actual physical book. To make a puzzle to build Legos. Did play a board game. When you decide to put the effort and energy into the relationship with your kids. Their need for devices starts to go away. Because all they're seeking is connection. And you're filling your downtime with things other than devices. And if your argument is yeah, but I just scroll my phone. To help myself. Relax. I need you to understand from a neurological perspective, that is not what's happening. You're not relaxing. You might be hyper-focusing or quote unquote vegging by looking at your phone, but you're actually stimulating your brain. Way more than what your regular normal day is offering you. So if you're somebody that experiences or feels overstimulated a lot, Honestly, I would say, get rid of devices, give yourself a 30 day detox. I only use devices when you absolutely have to for communication. And clear out everything else. I know it's a tough one. It's not an easy challenge to engage in, but it is worth it. And it works. So give it a try and let me know how that goes. So that is your challenge. That is it for today. And I would love to hear from you, how has this challenge going? How is it going? Getting your kids. Non attached or detached from devices and getting yourself on intwined from devices. And how is this information landing for you? The best way to get ahold of us is to send us a DM on Instagram and let us know that you listened to this episode. Thanks and take care.