How to Be a Good Parent in a Digitally Addicted World: 9 tips for parenting confident and happy children

I write and speak a lot on digital life, what it’s doing to us psychologically, spiritually, socially and as a society. What we can do to create a sense of wellbeing and freedom in the midst of what often feels like a world gone mad.  Regardless of where I am or to whom I’m speaking however, the question I get most from my audiences is this: How do we raise healthy kids in this tech-addicted society, when we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid and we’re all in on this condoned addiction? 

We the parents of today’s kids are true pioneers.  We’re facing a situation that no other generation of parents has faced.  People often say that previous parents had to deal with the television and telephone, and that every generation struggles with some new invention that changes everything, and that the Smartphone is really no different than anything that came before it. But in fact, where we are now, with the explosion of technology into every aspect of our lives (and our children’s lives) and our complete dependence upon it, is fundamentally different than any other time in history. Technology is a revolution and not like any other previous invention. 

For one thing, the television and telephone didn’t come with us everywhere we went.  We had to be in the world without them; the television and telephone were an addition to our lives, not the center of it.  In addition, the telephone and television were not used for every aspect of our lives, work, social, information, planning etc., as the Smartphone now is.  So too, we didn’t defer our authority and agency to the television, telephone or any other invention, asking it to make decisions for us.  We didn’t hand over our human skills, thinking and tasks to our televisions, rendering us helpless to its knowledge.

Furthermore, the makers of televisions and telephones were not employing neuroscientists and addiction specialists as they are now with the purpose of getting our kids (and all of us) hooked.  Addiction is good for business and our kids are the targets of very smart and strategic plans, by very informed experts, to make them dependent, so they can’t or are too anxious to live without their devices. Never before have our kids had legal access to something so addictive as the substance that is technology.  We’re giving our kids the equivalent of cocaine at a time in their lives when their front brains are not even developed, and they don’t have the skills, discernment or internal resources to be able to manage the drug of technology.

What we know from neuroscience is that using technology floods our brain with the feel-good chemical dopamine. Dopamine delivers pleasure and feeds the reward center in our brain.  This sets up a compulsion loop; we want more of this pleasure and thus want to engage in the activity more. What happens next however, is that each time we have a thought of using or hear or feel a notification come in, our adrenal glands send out a burst of the stress hormone cortisol, which sets off the fight or flight response and we become anxious.  We then opt to get back on our device to calm ourselves down.  Those who are addicted are, therefore, living in a constant state of fight or flight and saturating their bodies with cortisol, which besides causing chronic stress has also been linked to lowered immune function, increased sugar levels and weight gain.  It’s not a good thing.

Today’s moms and dads are stumbling down an untraveled path. More often than not, we don’t know what we’re doing.  How could we know, we’re in new territory, raising addicts in an addicted world.  Day by day we’re trying to understand how to maintain a loving connection with our children when the pull towards technology is so seemingly irresistible. We’re trying to figure out how to do our real job: to help them become happy, confident, grounded people in a society that feels increasingly anxious and untethered. 

First, it is important that we honor our intention to help our children and families stay emotionally connected and intact.  We have to be willing to work hard at this endeavor, to be good parents, because it profoundly matters. In some ways, our society depends upon it.  When the family crumbles, all else crumbles.  But also, because we want to deeply know our children, to spend time with them without a thousand other distractions, look into their eyes without the reflection of the screen inside their pupils.  As families, we don’t want to simply brush past each other at the charging station in the kitchen.

9 Tips for Good Parenting in a Digital World

1. Model It

Live the behavior you’re preaching. If you’re on your device constantly then your guidance is of no value, your rules are irrelevant.  If you don’t walk the walk, your kids won’t either. Limit your time on your device, particularly when you’re with your kids and partner.  Show your kids what it looks like to be engaged in activities that don’t involve technology. And absolutely do not leave your devices on or in sight during family meals. 

2. Make a Plan/Set the Rules Ahead of Time. 

If you want to make God laugh, make plans. If you want to make God roll on the clouds with laughter, make plans with kids and Smartphones.  And yet, we still have to set the rules ahead of time with regard to our kids’ usage. It can be a good idea to do this together as a family.  Write down specifically (and have everyone sign) what hours and under what circumstances device use (and what kind of use) will be acceptable.  For example: first half hour after school: full use including social media.  Next three hours: only computer use for homework, all social notifications off.  Half hour before bed all devices off. Whatever the rules you as parents decide on, make them specific, written down on paper, and hung up where they can be seen.  When the conflict (and screaming) begins, you will be able to point to these established rules without any hesitation or confusion.    

3. Create a Context.

Don’t just tell your kids they can’t use their devices, explain to them the larger intentions behind your rules.  For example, share that you don’t want them anxious all the time, and explain the effect that cortisol has on their growing body. Express that you actually want to know them and that technology gets in the way of that happening. Tell them perhaps that you miss them, miss talking or taking walks with them, and that it’s just that simple. Whatever the larger and more loving intentions are behind your rules, share them with your child. Create an open dialogue so the conversation can go deeper and become more connective, rather than simply arguing over screen time.

4. Ask Your Kids About Their Experience with Technology

Be curious about, specifically, how your kids experience their lives in the midst of this technology.  What it’s like for them to be kids in this kind of environment.  You might ask how it feels to be with a friend who’s constantly texting and snapchatting other people when they’re with them.  Or perhaps to be at a party when everyone is staring into their device and there’s no one there to really talk to. Ask what it’s like to have a boyfriend they text all day but feel incapable of talking to in real life. Whatever the issues that they’re pretending are okay, ask about them.  Turn these difficult experiences into something they question rather than just assume is normal.  Remember, there’s still a young person in there who’s probably feeling lonely, insecure, confused, anxious and overwhelmed by all of it.  Invite that young person to the table and give them your full attention.

5.Get Your Kids into Tech-Free Activities

It’s increasingly important to expose your kids to activities that don’t require technology and also allow them to connect with people and themselves in a different way. We need to show them that they can still enjoy experiences (like sports, music, nature) without their devices, and that there really is life outside their Smartphone. 

6. Emphasize (with Gusto) the Importance of Hard Work and Time Invested

Kids are now growing up in an age of immediacy and ease.  We value the quickest and easiest route to wherever we’re headed.  The problem is that by accepting immediacy and ease, we’re depriving our children of the invaluable rewards of hard work and time invested.  When our child lands on the top of the mountain by helicopter, he doesn’t reap the same confidence or inner strength as when he’s walked and struggled the path to the top.  As a result, he ends up feeling like imposter.  Encourage, again and again, the importance of putting in time and effort for building a confident and strong inner self, so ultimately, they will know that they can rely on themselves.

7. Be Fierce

A lot of parents these days say that the horse is already out of the barn and it’s a losing battle this technology thing.  When these parents give their kids the device, they claim they’re just giving their kid what he wants.  This is not good parenting.  As parents, we often need to take the harder path, the one our child doesn’t want, make the choice that creates more conflict, but ultimately, is better for our kids and our family.  We need to be able to hold our ground when our child is ranting and raging.  We need to dig deep, be fierce, stand our ground, and remember why we’re choosing this harder path, what’s really at stake.

8. Teach Your Kids Basic Meditation Techniques

Every child, no matter the age, can learn basic meditation practices.  Try teaching your kids the following techniques: 1. Breathing. Notice and feel your breath. Don’t control it, just pay attention to it.  Remember to breathe deeply, particularly when you’re anxious.  2. Body scan: bring your attention into each body part, one by one, and notice the sensations inside. As you go through, invite each part to relax.  3. Run a sense loop: bring your attention to each of your senses, one at a time.  Notice what you are hearing, seeing, feeling in your body, smelling, tasting and the sixth sense, thinking.  4. Visualize an elevator ride from your head down into the bottom of your belly.  Feel yourself getting calmer as you descend, floor by floor, into the stillness of your own presence.  5. Ask yourself if you’re actually here, paying attention to where you are. Notice/Feel what your own presence/here-ness feels like.

9. Bribery

As a last resort, never underestimate the power of bribery or more scientifically, cause and effect.  For every hour, afternoon or day your child stays off their device, consider gifting them with a non-tech related reward (it doesn't have to be big). The pleasure or pain they associate with their behavior will affect that behavior. Sometimes it might be the only thing that works and it’s not cheating to use the oldest trick in the book.    

Parenting these days is not for the faint of heart.  Although I don’t think there’s ever been a time that parenting was easy, the presence of these devices in our children’s lives makes now a particularly challenging and frustrating time to raise children. We’re living with addicts and they’re the very people we love the most and most want to be happy and well, the very thing that addiction prevents.

We parents have to be kind to ourselves too.  Sometimes we allow our child the device even when we know we shouldn’t, because we also know that it will make them stop whining or bitching (depending on their age) and because we desperately need peace and don’t have anything left in our own tank.  And that’s okay.  We also have needs and are not perfect. But what’s most important is not that we’re perfect, but that we keep trying.  And, that we stay in touch with what really matters to us, and behave in a way that’s in alignment with our deeper priorities. Our children and our families are what’s at stake here, and it doesn’t get more important than that.

And finally, in this distracted and addicted world, there’s something we can do in every moment, and it may be the most important piece in this whole conundrum.  When we’re with our kids, we can really be there, be with them, present. Our grounded, undistracted presence is the ultimate antidote to the anxious, untethered, disappeared world in which they are living.  Land in the moment when you’re with your children.  Give them the experience of what it’s like to be with someone who cares about them.  Remember what they tell you about their lives and ask about it.  Create continuity in a world that appears and disappears faster than memory can grasp.  Be the light in the darkness, the sanity in the insanity.  Love means presence and in that, we, blessedly, have complete control. 

How to Love Yourself When Those Around You Can't

I had been working with Mary (not her real name) as a client for several years. It was the loneliness in her marriage that initially brought her to see me. She was struggling in the relationship, but didn't want to leave. She described how sharing anything with her husband about her real experience took enormous effort and involved intense strategizing and emotional stress. She worried about how to present her truth so that it would be understood and received by her partner — not rejected, attacked, or minimized. As a result, she was starting to keep important experiences out of their relationship, only presenting what was factual or impersonal, which was then creating more isolation and intensifying her loneliness.

In my first session with Mary and her husband, it became clear to me why she felt so isolated and disconnected from him. I saw within a few minutes how her husband’s way of responding to her was entirely out of sync with what she needed to feel understood, supported, and loved. Regardless of what Mary shared, he began his response with the word "but," telling her why she was mistaken and what she was doing wrong that made her feel the way she did. He then frequently followed up his criticisms with what he knew to be true about her experience, based on his greater wisdom. I watched as he trampled on her truth again and again, and demonstrated his unwillingness to allow her to have the experience she was having, to just hear how it was for her without any "but." What I witnessed is not uncommon, however, and most of us have experienced Mary’s loneliness, frustration, and stress in trying to get what we need in similar kinds of relationships.

There are people who listen with and from the word “but,” with “but” always in between their ears and your heart. No matter what you present, they seem intent on proving you wrong or pointing out the holes in what you're sharing. Perpetually in search of the fly in the ointment, they invalidate your experience and simultaneously demonstrate that they know more or better.

Like Mary’s husband, this kind of person relates from their head and their intellect, but not their heart. Their responses protect them from taking in or feeling your experience — feeling you — or, as it can sometimes seem, allowing you to even exist. Knowing more, being the expert, keeps them from having to try to understand or empathize with what you’re expressing. Their "but'" keeps them from having to venture outside their comfort zone, to be vulnerable, or to really listen or learn. They are quick to shut down your experience with dismissive phrases like “that’s just such and such” or “I get it already,” which are further attempts to stuff your experience into a box that they can control and dismiss.

When someone relates to you in this style, you may feel that you are not being listened to — not being loved. It feels as if the other person is not on your side, not curious about or interested to know you, not offering your experience the care and nourishment that it (and you) need to grow. The other’s mission is not to understand you or help you know yourself more deeply, but rather to win the case against you and keep you under control.

There is no place for Mary’s experience with her husband, and so, understandably, relating feels like a fight, with her on the defensive, trying to force a space in which her experience will be allowed to land.

Expressing yourself in this kind of environment takes enormous effort, fending off the other’s intellect and resistance, and fighting to be heard and acknowledged, to not have your experience butchered, reduced, boxed, or denied. At the end of a conversation, you feel exhausted, or as one woman expressed it, "nailed into a coffin." Communication is an experience of loneliness and frustration — sadness and anger. Connection cannot happen, because your experience is fundamentally not allowed into the dialogue.

The tendency, when in relationships with such people, is to shut down and stop sharing, and sometimes to stop feeling altogether, to go numb. And sometimes to fight back and try harder, constructing new strategies to get your experience heard properly. But none of these options offers much lasting relief. So how can you be with the “but” heads in your life, some of whom are family or others you can’t avoid, in a way that keeps you feeling alive and well? How can you be in their company in a way that leaves you feeling good about yourself? 

The best way to stay well and on your own side in a such a relationship is by employing the skill of fierce awareness. While it is painful to have your experience constricted and rejected, you can stay grounded and feel good about yourself by staying vigilant as a witness, watching your own experience as the relational event unfolds. You can relate with such a person carefully, mindfully, with great self-compassion. First, by simply noticing what’s happening inside you as you even approach a topic that matters to you. And then, paying fierce attention physically, mentally, and emotionally to what is arising as the other responds. You may notice a feeling of desperation or franticness rising up, a tightness in the belly or throat, a feeling of rage, dizziness, tears, numbness, or who knows what else. But regardless of what appears, you keep noticing that which is happening inside you, staying vigilant in your awareness — and most importantly, staying kind and compassionate with your own experience. 

You may also become aware of a blaming or shaming, a criticism you inflict on yourself, that you should be able to express yourself in a way that’s understandable, should be able to get the other to reflect you properly, to want to know you, that you are somehow failing because you can’t get your truth across in a way that feels satisfying. Whatever arises, you keep listening and loving inside, telling your self-judging super ego to step outside, as it is not helpful and not accurate. Awareness and self-compassion are your protection from getting swallowed up and identified with your instinctive reactions. Awareness can also guide you as to when it's time to exit the conversation and/or shift it somewhere else, which is another way that you can be self-loving and take care of yourself within such a relationship. 

You cannot control another’s responses or the experiences that arise within you, but you can stay awake to what's happening within you, you can offer unwavering kindness towards yourself, and you can determine for how long you will continue watching and working with an experience that doesn’t work for you. Indeed you can love yourself in any kind of company.

Epilogue:

The response I received from the above blog was enormous. In reading the responses however, it became clear to me that I left out an important step in the process of loving yourself. I had mistakenly assumed that, like my client Mary, by the time you were reading my article, you had tried everything else to get yourself heard properly, and thus were ready for the practice of fierce awareness, on its own. While vigilantly and lovingly staying with your own internal experience is always useful when in the company of others who are not supportive, there is also a relational strategy that may be useful and empowering in such situations.

The strategy is this: ask for what you need, specifically and clearly. When your partner dismisses your truth, argues against your experience, or consistently responds to you with the word "but," ask him if he would be willing to simply listen to what you are saying without responding at all, to say nothing and just absorb what you are expressing. Or, ask him if he would be willing to repeat back to you what you had shared. Or, ask him if he would be willing to respond by rephrasing what you had said in his own words. Ask yourself what you would really need from your partner's response and ask him, gently, if he would be willing to provide just that. You might also let him know, if it feels right, what the kind of response you are requesting would offer you, what it would provide in your own process. The key here is to ask your partner with kindness, a kindness that is for both you and him, with the words "Would you be willing..." leading the way.

This strategy can always be used, no matter where you are in the relationship. It can be used again and again, regardless of whether it has been successful in the past or not. It makes a perfect handshake with fierce self-awareness and in fact, the knowing and asking for what you need arises precisely out of fierce awareness.

Asking for what you need may in fact get you what you need from your partner, and make you feel more understood and loved. And, staying with your own experience with awareness and self-compassion, before, during and after you ask, will undoubtedly get you what you need from yourself.