Indistractable

When it comes to helping our kids manage distraction, it’s important to make the conversation about people rather than tech. That’s according to Lori Getz, the founder of Cyber Education Consultants, which hosts internet safety workshops in schools—it’s a lesson she learned in her own childhood.

Getz got her first phone (a corded one for her room) as a teenager. The moment she got it, she closed the door and spent the entire weekend locked in her room, talking with friends instead of spending time with her family. When she got home from school the next Monday, her door had been taken off the hinges. “It’s not the phone’s fault you’re behaving like an a-hole,” her father chided her. “You closed the door and you closed all of us out.”

While Getz doesn’t recommend her father’s aggressive tactics or tone, his focus on the effect her behavior had on others rather than the phone itself proved instructive. “Make [the conversation] about how you’re treating and interacting with the people around you,” she advises, as opposed to blaming the tool.

When it comes to how we spend time together as a family, the important thing is to define what constitutes traction versus distraction. A recent Getz family vacation put her theory to the test. Her six- and eleven-year-old daughters asked if they could use their phones during the two-hour ride from Sacramento to Truckee. Motivated by a desire to ease the monotony of the ride as well as the opportunity for a quiet conversation with her husband, Getz agreed. The device time made the long drive easier, but later in the vacation, Getz noticed her daughters started turning to their devices a bit too much.

The girls’ tech overuse came to a head when Getz returned from a run to find her kids glued to their screens. Neither was ready to leave for their family outing, as had been agreed upon. Rather than losing her cool and punitively announcing strict house rules around the kids’ use of devices, Getz decided it was time for a family talk.

During the family huddle, they all confirmed their desire to spend quality time together (aka traction). By agreeing upon how they wanted to spend their time and what needed to get done, it became clear that doing anything else was a distraction interfering with their plans. They decided as a family that they could use their devices only after they were 100 percent ready to go.

Getz acknowledges that admitting you don’t have all the answers is a great way to involve the kids in finding new solutions. “We’re all figuring it out as we go along,” she says. Getz wants her daughters to continue to ask themselves questions to self-monitor and self-regulate their behavior: “Is my behavior working for me? Am I proud of myself, in the way I’m behaving?” she asks them to ask themselves. “I work with a lot of teenagers who will often tell me that they don’t want to be distracted, they don’t want to be sucked into all this stuff, but they just don’t know how to stop.”

To help children learn self-regulation, we must teach them how to make time for traction. We can encourage regular discussions about our values and theirs, and teach them how to set aside time to be the people they want to be. Keep in mind that while it’s easy for us to think, “Kids have all the time in the world,” it’s important to remember they have their own priorities within each of their life domains.

Working with our kids to create a values-based schedule can help them make time for their personal health and wellness domain, ensuring ample time for rest, hygiene, exercise, and proper nourishment. For example, while my wife and I don’t enforce a strict bedtime for our daughter, we made it a point to expose her to research findings showing the importance of ample sleep during adolescent years. After she realized that sleep was important to her well-being, it didn’t take much for her to conclude that screen time after 9 pm on a school night was a bad idea—a distraction from her value of staying healthy. As you guessed, she timeboxed periods of rest in her day. While she may occasionally find herself deviating from this evening appointment with her pillow, having it in her schedule provides her with a self-imposed guideline to self-monitor, self-regulate, and, ultimately, live out her values.

When it comes to the “work” domain in kids’ lives, for the typical American child, work is synonymous with school-related responsibilities and household chores. While school schedules provide a timetable for a child’s daytime hours, how they spend their time after school can be a source of disagreement and frustration.

Without a clear plan, many kids are left to make impulsive decisions that often involve digital distraction.

I recently had coffee with a friend who is the mother of twin teenage boys. She bemoaned the mind-altering influence of her kids’ obsession with the latest techno-villain: the online game Fortnite. “They can’t stop!” she told me. She was convinced the game was addictive and her kids were junkies. Every evening involved fights to get them to stop playing and finish their homework. Exasperated, she asked me what I thought she should do.

My advice involved a few unorthodox ideas. First, I advised her to have a conversation with her sons and to listen to them without judgment. Potential questions to ask included the following: Is keeping up with their schoolwork consistent with their values? Do they know why they are asked to do their homework? What are the consequences of not doing their assignments? Are they OK with those consequences, both short term (getting a bad grade) and long term (settling for a low-skilled job)?

Without their agreement that schoolwork mattered to them, forcing them to do something they didn’t want to do amounted to coercion and would only breed resentment.

“But if I don’t hound my kids, they’ll fail,” she objected.

“So?” I asked. “If the only reason they study is to get you off their backs, what will they do when they get to college or start a job and you’re not around? Maybe they need to know what failure feels like sooner rather than later.” I advised her that teenagers are generally old enough to make decisions about how they spend their time. If that means flunking a test, then so be it. Coercion may be a band-aid solution, but it is certainly not a remedy.

Next, I proposed she ask them to suggest how much time they’d like to spend on various activities such as studying, being with family or friends, or playing Fortnite. I warned that while she may not like her kids’ answers, it’s important to honor their input. The goal here is to teach them to spend their time mindfully by reserving a place for important activities on their weekly schedules. Remember, their schedules (like ours) should be assessed and adjusted weekly to ensure that their time is spent living out their values.

Playing Fortnite, for instance, is fine if the time has been allocated to it in advance. With a timeboxed schedule that includes time for digital devices, kids know that they’ll have time to do the things they enjoy. I advised her to change the context of their family conversations around tech—from her screaming “No!” to teaching her kids to tell themselves, “Not yet.”

Empowering children with the autonomy to control their own time is a tremendous gift. Even if they fail from time to time, failure is part of the learning process.

Last, I advised her to make sure her kids’ days include plenty of time for play, both with their friends and with their parents. Her boys were using Fortnite to have fun with their buddies, and would continue to play online without an offline alternative. If we want our kids to fulfill their need for relatedness offline, they need time to build face-to-face friendships outside school. These relationships should be free from the pressure of coaches, teachers, and parents telling them what to do. Unfortunately, for the typical child these days, playtime won’t happen unless it’s scheduled.

Conscious parents can bring back playtime for kids of all ages by deliberately making time for it in their weekly schedules and seeking out other parents who understand the importance of unstructured play and schedule regular get-togethers to let the kids hang out, just as you would make time for a jog in the park or a jam session in the garage. Research studies overwhelmingly support the importance of unstructured playtime on kids’ ability to focus and to develop capacity for social interactions. Given that, unstructured play is arguably their most important extracurricular activity.

In addition to helping kids make time for unstructured play, we also need to carve out time for them to spend time with us, their parents. For example, scheduling family meals is perhaps the single most important thing parents and kids can do together. Studies demonstrate that children who eat regularly with their families show lower rates of drug use, depression, school problems, and eating disorders. Unfortunately, many families miss meals together because they “play it by ear,” a strategy that often leaves everyone eating alone on their own schedules. Hence, it’s better to set aside an evening, even if only once a week, for a device-free family meal. As our kids develop, we can invite them to shape these family meal experiences by suggesting menu themes like “Finger-Food Fridays,” cooking together, or contributing conversation topics.

As a family, play can and should extend beyond mealtimes. In my household, we’ve established a weekly “Sunday Funday,” where we rotate the responsibility to plan a three-hour activity. When it’s my turn, I might take the family to the park for a long conversation while we walk. My daughter typically requests to play a board game when it’s her turn to pick. My wife often proposes a trip to a local farmers’ market to discover and sample new foods. Whatever the choice, the idea is to regularly set aside time together to feed our need for relatedness.

While we must be prepared to make adjustments to our family schedule, we need to involve our kids in setting our routines and honoring our commitments to each other. Teaching them to make their own schedules and being indistractable together helps us pass on our values.

REMEMBER THIS

• Teach traction. With so many potential distractions in kids’ lives, teaching them how to make time for traction is critical.

• Just as with our own timeboxed schedules, kids can learn how to make time for what’s important to them. If they don’t learn to make their own plans in advance, kids will turn to distractions.

• It’s OK to let your kids fail. Failure is how we learn. Show kids how to adjust their schedules to make time to live up to their values.