Are your kids always asking for screens? And do you find yourself
asking the questions "How much screen time
should a kid have?" Well a lot of people are
asking me that question. I'm Nicholeen Peck. I'm a parenting expert,
author and speaker all over the world about parenting and what makes really
good strong self-governed families. And in
this video, we're going to be talking about how much
screen time children really should have.?
I've never met a child that doesn't like screens.
In fact, I think all children at some point or another ask for screens if
they've been exposed to them. Why is that? Well, it's because screen
time actually lulls the brain and
stops the hard task of thinking if the person
allows that hard task of thinking to be stopped.
So, why would we ever not want to think? Well, because it's hard work.
In fact, thinking is one of the hardest things that we ever do.
And sometimes it's really nice to just have someone do the thinking for us.
Just to tell us a story or take us on a journey
that we don't have to do any work to go on.
It kind of feeds our inner laziness just a little bit.
But is it healthy? Is it healthy to turn our brains off
or to turn them over to something else for extended periods of time?
I always told my children that digital devices
are tools not toys. There is a difference between those things.
In fact, if you were to carry a circular saw (say) in your pocket,
you would never just whip it out willy-nilly all the time. You would use a lot
of caution with that thing. There would be rules and
parameters. There would be safety measures that you
would take to make sure that that saw didn't hurt
you or anybody else. Well, the same thing with
other tools that we have which are cell phones,
tablets, computers other screens and digital devices.
They can be used for really great things. And I'm sure you
know this. We watch things, we communicate with people,
we learn things. We remind ourselves of things. We wake up in the morning because
of them. There's so many things that we can use
those devices for. But those devices can also use
us. That's right. They can control us. If we become more casual in our
relationship with devices and start thinking of them more as a toy
or convenience, instead of as something that we're
supposed to govern over, respect and use safety parameters with
to do actual work then we run the risk of that thing
taking control and working on us. So, what type of work
do you do on your devices? You write papers, you possibly do
research? You send emails to people for
communications. You might do your banking. Stuff like
that. Those are all things that show that the devices are meant to
be tools. But I'm sure you can think of many other
ways like social media and gaming and other time-wasting things
that people do on these devices which actually
also show that many people think of them as toys as well. Well, it's important that
your children understand the difference between a tool
and a toy before they ever get the opportunity to
be in charge of their own screen. In our family, we
have a rule. That a person does not get the
opportunity to own a digital device unless they are self-governed. Well, what
is self-governed mean? Self-government is being able to
determine the cause and effect of any given situation
and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them.
So, this means a person decides ahead of time "This is how I'll behave".
So, when it comes to a screen, they would say, "This is how I want to interact with
this tool. This is the amount of time I will use to
have that interaction. This is how I'll check up with somebody
else to make sure that i'm interacting well
with this device." And then they take deliberate action,
they stick to their time limit or to their action that they were going to be
doing on the device and then they're done. Unless a person
knows self mastery in other things, they're not usually ready to self master
themselves when it comes to their time with a screen
because that screen can suck them in so quickly.
So, we have determined that they have to be really good at what we call
the 4 basic skills. These 5 basic skills that I teach
in my teaching self-government parenting course are following instructions,
accepting no answers, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. These are skills that they
use in their communications with everyone. In fact, all people need these
skills. Their basic, just adult skills. And if a person learns the
skill sets to these 4 skills, that takes care of
99% of their behavior problems. If they are
self-governing with those 4 skills the majority of the time,
then we know that we can probably start to teach them
how to self-govern when it comes to screens.
In order to determine how much time a person needs
or should have on screens or in front of a screen, we need to
understand a little bit about the brain. So, the front part of the brain, the part
that does all the logical processing also is a key player in discernment
for the person. So, when you get in front of a screen
and you're allowing the screen to take you on a journey,
that actually engages primarily your emotional part of the brain which is in
the middle. It just takes your emotions up and down
around and through and you don't have to think very much if you don't want to.
So, it's really easy to disengage this discerning part of the brain.
The other night, my husband turned on a movie
and the family all came down and ended up watching it. Now, we hadn't decided
ahead of time what movie this would be. When I came
down to the the tv room, I realized this was a movie that I didn't really
ever want to see and I didn't know much about.
So, I thought, "Well, i'll give it a chance." All the children are older.
It's probably something that they can handle now even though when this thing
came out, I really didn't want any part of it.
So, we started watching the movie and I was just kind of getting sucked in for
a minute. But my brain wasn't totally turning off because I kept
thinking do U really want to watch this? Do I really? And so, there were a couple
of key things that happened. A bad word that
happened and then shortly after there were some other
things that happened related to what I call bloodlust or extreme
violence. And I went, "You know what? I cannot watch
this." All of a sudden my brain just it wasn't
completely complacent yet because I wasn't sure I trusted the movie.
And then it just told me "no". So, I had this discernment thing
kick in. If I would not have questioned anything about the movie
and just gone along for the ride, I'm not sure I would have had that moment where
I said, "No, we are not watching this and turning
it off." But that's what happened, instead because
I did have discernment and i still was in that thinking part
of my brain. So, it's important for us to realize how the brain works.
Because if we are allowing our children to have a whole bunch of time
in front of the screens then we're actually allowing them
to not discern. That means they won't be making decisions
based on what's right and wrong very well. They won't be
thinking clearly. They'll just be going along for the journey.
And buying into whatever ideas or story happens to be presented to them at the
time which could be good or it could not be. Either way though,
the fact that it's so passive and that they don't have to do
any thinking during that time means that there really shouldn't be
much time spent in that sort of a zoned out zone, right?
So, how much screen time then does a child really need or should they
have in order to be in that healthy zone? Well,
there's no real hard and fast rule. I suppose I feel like I would be a bad
parenting expert if i told you this is exactly how many
hours for this age because I don't know your child
and I don't know your family life and I don't know what they're studying
and what sources you're using for information. I don't know your
business at home. There's a lot of things I don't know.
But I can tell you my rule of thumb. Less is better. Less is better. Go
for way less. Less than you think is healthy
is usually a good gauge. So, if you think, "Well, a person could watch a
couple of hours a day" then go less. Go less than that.
Go maybe to ½ a day. Really go down. Now, our family we made a rule in
our family that we were not going to be about
screens. We had computers and we had a TV but that didn't mean we
wanted to be in front of it all the time. So, before we even had the
type of cell phones that had smart devices built into them,
we and they could have be their own TVs and their own screens. We made a rule
and we stuck to that rule throughout our entire
parenting years with our children. And the rule was this:
That we would not watch television or movies unless
they were educational movies that were part of our home school. Because I was a
homeschool mom. So, occasionally maybe we might watch a
documentary on the byzantine empire. Or on Thomas Edison or something like
that. And those videos might be watched during
the school day sometimes as part of a lesson or something. But
other than that, the only other time that we would watch
a show is on Friday night. As a family, we
watched 1 or 2 movies together and everyone looked forward to this time.
So, if my children came to me and said, "Oh, mom. Can I watch a movie?"
I would always answer with, "Well, what day is it?
Oh, it's Tuesday. Yes, remember our family only watches movies
on Friday." Then they would turn to their friend and they'd say,
"See, I told you." Because of course the friend was wanting to
watch a movie at our house. And we never watch television, network
television unless it's like the time of the
Olympics. I mean really truly there are a couple
of events like the Olympics that are big like that that we
watched on network television and that was it. Which is a total irony
because our family actually was on TV. I've been on how many news programs
and we aren't actually a TV watching family.
Now, you don't have to be as weird as us, okay? I know that's really strange.
Especially how most families function. But
try to think what less means for you. What is less than you think is healthy?
I know you you've got to have something in your mind right now that you're
thinking, "Well, IU was thinking they could probably watch
this one show a day" or whatever. And so then go less. Maybe it's
only one show every other day or
something like that. But just make yourself push it
to less than you think. Don't be thinking in the direction
that is "How much can I use it? How much can i put him in front of it
before there's problems?" No matter when or how long you put a
person in front of a screen, they will stop fairly quickly
doing their own critical thinking and they will become passive.
And we don't want people in that position very long.
Our children need to be confident and empowered which means they need to do a
lot of their own thinking, reasoning and problem solving and they
need to be talking to us during that time of figuring
and discerning. Not getting their information
from a screen. One of the benefits of having less screen time
is actually over the long term. Your children are better behaved.
I don't know if you realize that. Now at first, when they're breaking away from
screen time, there might be a little anxiety,
some change in habits some frustration even some boredom
because they don't know what to do. But over time, they become much more content,
much more constructive, much more creative and communicative too.
So, this is a good thing for their overall health
and behaviors. If you've liked this video, I think you're going to love my next video
which is called "How do you deal with temper tantrums?"