5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Protect Your Child from Digital Addiction

We’ve had the smartphone since 2007. That means there is a generation of children who have never known a world without a universe of palm-sized fun. We adults, on the other hand, have a pre-smartphone context. Depending on when you were born we can bore the younger generations rigid with how we only had a Sinclair pocket calculator, digital watch or ‘Tanks’ to keep boredom at bay. Just like our kids, we felt those ground-breaking bits of tech were just as vital to us and equally baffling to our parents. However, apart from a bit of mild jealousy at our best friend’s ZX Spectrum, these devices did not bring with them a whole world of anxiety. Not so for our children. Julie Lynn Evans– child psychotherapist – recently described in ‘Bringing Up Britain’ (BBC R4) a bleak picture of child despair; colossal family rows; the brilliance of social media at exaggerating natural girls’ bitchiness. It’s a terrifying world of subtle games and dark sites where can learn to be anorexic or compete at self-harm. As parents can we honestly say we have a complete picture?

For older people who remember how slow, awkward, time consuming it was to engage with, capture and store the world around us we literally love the new tech which brings the holy grail of seamless reliability. But, we have the ‘pre’ before the ‘post’ to moderate our activities. Kids and young people born into this world do not, and we have not caught up with that fact. It is our job to intervene, contextualise. It’s something we’ve signally failed to do. Many of the platforms have safe settings and offer parental controls. Our kids will try to access this stuff, and we don’t have the experience of being a kid in the digital age. They are way ahead of us, in fact they are ninjas in this stuff. And just as our kids are growing out of their clothes, the tech is evolving just as quickly. The parental controls we set when the kids were tiny, and we still had the initiative are rapidly overtaken as we  hand over our old laptops, iPads and phones. Can you honestly say you re-set all those settings when you passed on that IPhoneSE? 

Fact is there are literally thousands of highly intelligent engineers and developers deployed by companies with eye-watering financial resources solely on keeping us engaged and swiping. The fight seems unequal, but take heart, nothing but nothing compares to the influence of an empowered and informed parent who’s got their child’s welfare at heart. Dr Richard Graham of the Nightingale Hospital, London – who runs a digital addiction clinic for teens – has some straightforward and honest practical guidance for families to prevent things reaching crisis point:

• Sleep – no devices in the bedroom. Charge downstairs. Don’t buy the excuse of the needing the phone for the alarm function.
• Talk. Honest dialogue about habits builds an honest picture of who’s doing what.
• Substitute phone use with something exciting. Tough – but so worthwhile.
• Try to establish a varied media diet. Variety, stimulation. Make a habit of exploring – games and social media.
• Don’t be caught using your phone. Prioritise time without your phone. It’s much easier when you’re doing it with others.