How to Break Your Kid’s Pandemic-Induced Screen Addiction…and What to Expect When You Do

I couldn’t believe it was happening, but it was. There, flying straight toward me, like an arrow toward its target, was a giant, thick, mucousy spit wad. My oldest daughter had just launched it from her mouth and, although it seemed surreal, I was a full-grown, 39-year-old woman cowering in full terror from it.

We weren’t playing a gross game, she was spitting at me because she was furious — face red, fists clenched, eyes squinted in a look of pure hatred. Her mouth almost frothed as she geared up for another assault and I tried to keep my cool and keep my distance.

“No!” I screamed, “What on earth are you doing? You spit in my eye!”

She stopped, snapping out of her rage, suddenly realizing how out of control she’d gotten in the parking lot of a grocery store with a crowd starting to gather.

“Mommy, I’m so sorry,” she wailed, collapsing onto me.

It was as if the sorceress had finally released her from an evil spell. My daughter collapsed into my arms, spit covering my shirt as she buried her head into my chest and heaved big, heavy, regretful tears.

My child, I realized a week later looking back on that horrific day, was in a state of detox. No, there weren’t some hidden pills I discovered in her dresser drawer but, like a substance of abuse, she was fully addicted to screens. Video games, YouTube toy unboxings, Netflix, you name it — she had been using day in and day out as we weathered the pandemic. She has neuro-developmental differences—including severe anxiety and a sensory processing disorder — and our normal tools for dealing with it were all used up by about two months into this whole worldwide disaster.

My husband and I definitely played a part in her dependency development. We’re both healthcare providers. There were times we needed the distraction of a show so we could see our patients or run our businesses. But my daughters’ extreme attachment to devices was also rooted in her anxiety disorder. The shows and games acted like soothing security blankets during a time she felt scared, angry, and out of control. Her sister, on the other hand, loved a good Disney princess flick like the next four-year-old, but didn’t require one to be content.

We knew she was addicted when she started coming into our bedroom first thing in the morning with a screen time request and when she reminded us over and over again that she was “due” at least 1 hour per day. With the stress we were under as a family and the changes we’d gone through in the early COVID-19 days, we made a conscious decision to let it go. There was hardly anything else we could say “yes” to in the world. The parks were closed, playdates were off-limits, her school was all online. She acted out as a result, often attacking her little sister first, sometimes even physically. It felt like too much for her and for us to say no to screens, too. All we were focused on was keeping the peace.

As the world opened up though, and the fog of a 14-month marathon slog began to lift, we knew we had to make a change. That change did not go well.

Enter me, in the grocery store parking lot, spit all over my shirt, my neck hot with my detoxing daughter’s tears as she came down from a simple answer to a simple question.

“Can I watch a show, Mom?”

“No honey. Not today. Remember what we talked about. Wednesday nights and Friday nights only for now.”

Her detox lasted a week. By the end of it, I had a few more bruises on my arms as she used her body to fight against our decision. I also had a very high tolerance for spit and mean words.

Once it was over, I took some time to reflect on what I could have done better to prevent her from falling into such a nasty trap, and from the intense 7 days it took to get her out of it. Of course, hindsight was 20/20: Her needs and behaviors made me give her more screens, which caused worse behavior when she didn’t get the screens, which made me give them to her over and over again. With a lack of other activities and distractions to offer her during lockdowns and with school online, I had understandably, been less strict. Even though I’m a pediatrician and counsel other families all the time, in my own house, things were pretty loosey-goosey for awhile.

Screen use has always been a hot topic issue in my family. It’s easy and tempting to turn to screens throughout the week. In the evenings, I’m tired. On the weekends, I’m always hoping for reduced stress, but with 2 little ones in tow, that’s hardly ever the case. Even when there’s not a pandemic underfoot, nothing is worse than coming home from an exhausting day at work only to be inundated with tears and squabbling and strife. It’s extremely hard for modern, stressed-out families to “just say no” to letting screens parent our kids in the name of peace and harmony, but I firmly believe that we have to be fully aware of our choices (and make some tough decisions that might result in temporary detox moments) — mid and post-pandemic — if we want our children to be resilient and our parenting to be successful. That’s why, spit and all, I kept at it to get my kiddo and our house back on track.

How Can You Break Your Kid’s Pandemic-Induced Screen Addiction?

Model Good Screen Use Behavior Yourself

Kids do what they see. That includes teenagers. If mom and dad are texting and scrolling all day, their kids will want to too. Sometimes we have to be on our devices, but, when we can, we should limit our own use.

Deepen Your Connection With Your Kids

In this modern world, we have to create space to more deeply connect with our kids. It’s not going to happen on its own. We have to be intentional about it. Mealtimes, bedtimes, outings, holiday rituals — when we focus on using these moments as ways to build community and connection, we glean their true value. Connectedness helps with emotional regulation, self-soothing, and other skills that are lacking from our children’s digital experience.

Help Your Children Build a Network of People Who Know Them, Including Their Weaknesses

“True relationship and intimacy come from vulnerably failing and then reconciling, not from being fake or perfect all the time,” says Dr. Kristin Valerius of Sundstrom Clinic. “When you let your kids experience that kind of transparent connection with others, they learn that they have value no matter what, that they don’t have to be perfect to be loved.”

Learn to Value Negative Emotions and Failure in Your Kids and in Yourself

It’s not our job to make sure our kids are always happy or even to make sure they’re perfectly well-behaved. It is our job to make sure we teach them to trust they will be OK when happiness comes and goes. How do we do that? We let our kids be bored and uncertain about how to fill their free time. The creativity and problem-solving that happen in that bored space are crucial for the sort of coping that they will have to do throughout their adolescence.

We let our kids be upset occasionally, we let them work through disappointments (à la my lemonade fiasco), we allow them to experience things not going their way early on so that, years down the road, they can handle life’s curveballs with more grace and perspective.

Limit Tech Use and Expect a Detox Period

Of course, letting our kids be bored — given that we could instantly take it away — means that their whining and pes- tering also fills that space. Constantly. And any good modern mommy has times that they cave just to have a moment of peace. That’s where the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations come in on the subject.

Feeling defeated already as you read this? Don’t. First, realize that the way modern moms are often tempted to deal with their kids’ incessant begging to have whatever they need is not some type of character flaw — it’s a product of our kids’ environments: a world where personalization, convenience, and entitlement surrounds them.

“I truly believe the begging is harder to withstand for us than it was for our mothers because they couldn’t say yes and we can,” says Dr. Valerius. “Standing firm seems to be an impossible task sometimes for the parents of patients I see — and for myself at times. If we don’t get connected with the task and the emotions it stirs up in us, it doesn’t matter what tech limits we know we should have…we will take a path of lesser resistance.”

Limiting Our Own Distractions

Our kids’ device use is one thing, but what about our own? As more and more studies emerge about the dangerous outcomes associated with screen usage, parental screen time is coming further and further to the forefront. As we learn more about the physical dangers linked to parenting with a smartphone in front of our faces at all times, the research on how parental addiction to screens affects children’s cog- nitive development has lagged behind. In the last few years, we’re starting to see more rigorous studies show just how important it is to set our phones down in the presence of our children. Erika Christakis put the dangers of parental screen time well in a 2018 article in The Atlantic, “The Dangers of Distracted Parenting.”

Occasional parental inattention is not catastrophic (and may even build resilience), but chronic distraction is another story. Smartphone use has been associated with a familiar sign of addiction: Distracted adults grow irritable when their phone use is interrupted; they not only miss emotional cues but actually misread them. A tuned-out parent may be quicker to anger than an engaged one, assuming that a child is trying to be manipulative when, in reality, she just wants attention. Short, deliberate separations can of course be harmless, even healthy, for parent and child alike (especially as children get older and require more independence).

But that sort of separation is different than the inattention that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for the next half hour — these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable — always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.

Our screen time dilemmas are not going away anytime soon. The pandemic brought them front and center, but they’ve always been there and they’ll continue to be. Devices are here to stay — for us and for our kids — but we don’t have to let them break into our homes every other second, invading our lives. The dog days of the pandemic are hopefully behind us, and with them the lack of alternative activities that brought so many of us to our knees when it came to screen use. With your eyes on the future, make a commitment to using screens (as much as possible) as tools instead of trespassers, no matter what the short-term consequences to limiting their use.

This is a modified excerpt from The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Ourselves(American Academy of Pediatrics, May 2021)