there's only two places in society where we can tell people where to go what to
think what to eat who to be friends with how to dress and that's school and
prison how do we raise in distractible kids as the father of a tech loving
eleven-year-old I remember when my daughter was only two years old and some
of her first words were iPad time iPad time well we want to make sure that we
are raising our kids in a way that they themselves can deal with distraction I
think that this will be the skill of the century so there's a few things that we
need to realize following the indestructible model when it comes to
raising in distractible kids we need to find the root cause of why our kids are
getting distracted and not be satisfied with just blaming the proximal cause you
know parents have been blaming all sorts of things for their kids
bad behavior for generations in my generations it was video games or
television before that it was the radio all the way back to the written word was
blamed for causing distraction and when it comes to kids these days people find
some reason why kids are behaving the way they are but as opposed to being
satisfied with just the proximal cost let's dive deeper to understand why kids
overuse technology a very widely accepted theory of human motivation says
that all of us need three things for psychological well-being
according to self-determination theory we require a sense of competence
autonomy and relatedness and when we are denied those things the needs
displacement hypothesis says that we look for them wherever we can get them
and when we look at kids lives today they are deficient in these three
psychological nutrients consider competence with the rise of standardized
testing a good number of kids these days are constantly told that they're not
good enough they're not competent in their school activities and when they
feel that way they look for competency elsewhere well of course the tech
companies are more than happy to give them a feeling of competency when they
play a game online now consider kids sense of autonomy this is the most over
scheduled generation in history between after-school activities like Kumaon and
swimming lessons in Mandarin kids have very little time for free play
and for those families who can't afford all those after-school activities many
parents are scared to death by the message we've heard in the media that
our kids are somehow going to be abducted at any minute turns out this is
the safest generation in American history and those fears are unfounded
and yet many parents keep their kids at home where they have little choice but
to look for a sense of agency and control through their devices so when
kids are constantly scheduled throughout their day and restrictions placed on
them they look for a place where they can feel agency and autonomy in fact
researchers tell us that kids today have 10 times the number of restrictions
placed on them as an average adult twice as many as an incarcerated felon and so
when kids don't feel a sense of autonomy offline they look for it online they
play fortnight or minecraft or whatever other game because that's where they
feel like God's they own that environment they have a sense of agency
and control that they so severely lack offline finally consider relatedness
researchers tell us that kids today have very little time for free play not
supervised by coaches or parents but time to just be kids it turns out that
free play is incredibly psychologically nourishing free play is where we
understand others and are understood ourselves we need this time for proper
socialization but kids have less time for free play than ever and so when they
don't get that sense of relatedness offline where do they go well they go to
Instagram or snapchat or tik-tok these apps these social media companies give
kids the sense of relatedness that they're striving for so the root cause
of overuse in most kids lives is not the technology itself but rather the fact
that they are missing these three critical psychological nutrients of
competency autonomy and relatedness get smarter faster with new videos daily at
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