How to cut your kids' cell phone addiction
By Kelly Wallace, CNN
updated 1:01 PM EDT, Tue September 24, 2013
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Parents around the country are concerned kids are addicted to cell phones
- Viral video showing adults' addiction to devices has more than 23 million views
- Moms and dads offer innovative ways to limit kids' time on cell phones
- Experts say parents first need to embrace technology, not punish kids with it
Editor's
note: Kelly Wallace
is CNN's digital correspondent and editor-at-large covering family, career and
life. She's a mom of two girls and lives in Manhattan. Read her other columns
and follow her reports at CNN Parents and on Twitter.
(CNN) -- There is one image I could not
get out of my mind after spending a recent weekend with close family friends,
and that is the image of their kids, ages 10 and 13, on their devices. All
weekend. All the time.
My girls,
ages 5 and 7, don't have phones but that doesn't mean they're not fascinated
with them. In fact, my 5-year-old, who would live on an iPhone or iPod if she
had one, was constantly looking over the older kids' shoulders as they played
games or checked Instagram.
So when a
colleague sent around this YouTube
video, which has now been seen more than 23 million times, offering
a sad commentary on just how addicted we grown-ups are to our digital devices
(there's now a facility in the
United States to treat Internet addiction!), we wondered how
addicted our kids are, too.
In
conversations with moms and dads across the country, in response to our request
on CNN's Facebook page, we
heard growing concerns about kids seemingly tied to their digital devices, but
also some innovative ideas about ways to cut the cord.
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Cutting
the cordes safe?
Jennifer
Alsip of Robinson, Texas, reached her limit, she said, after her 17-year-old
couldn't put her phone down.
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"It's
like she couldn't be away from it," said Alsip, a single mom of two, who
said she couldn't afford to pay the $15 or $30 extra every month when her
daughter went over her monthly data plan.
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Alsip
gave her daughter a warning: Either "cool it" with the nonstop phone
connection or she would take the phone away. Then she realized she could do
something else: cut off the Internet on her daughter's phone once she reached
her maximum data allotment.
"She
knows she has a limit so she stays off of it more," said Alsip, who said
the upside is more family time. "We're eating dinner with no phone right
next to you with notifications coming (in) and her picking it up to see, 'Oh,
Harry Styles did this,'" Alsip said of the One Direction star, laughing.
Melissa
Barrios, a mom of two in Ventura, California, pays an extra $5 a month for a
special program that allows her to shut off her 13-year-old daughter's phone
from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.
"At
first, it was kind of weird to her, because there's always this, 'Well, my
friends' parents don't do that.' But it always goes back to the same thing.
'Well, we're not your friends' parents. We're your parents.'"
A
novel way to 'be present'
Mark
Love, a woodworker just outside Austin, Texas, whose 12-year-old has a phone,
was lamenting with a close friend about how technology had changed the dynamic
at their dinner table, not just for the kids but for the adults, as well.
It was
that conversation -- tied with a need to make his friend a birthday present --
that led him to create the "Be
Present" box two months ago. It's a small, wooden, carefully
crafted box, etched with very clear directions about how you can pack your
technology away. Inside it says, "1. Insert Phone. 2. Close Lid." and
the cover of the box says, "3. Be Present."
Love, a
father of two, posted a picture of his creation on his Facebook page and went
to bed. "I woke up the next morning and it had gotten tens of thousands of
likes and shares and it has gone completely bananas all over the world,"
said Love, who heard from people as far away as Australia, Denmark and Great
Britain.
The
boxes, which sell for $60 each (Love wanted to create a "pretty, well-made
... piece of art," which people would want to have sitting out in their
homes), have led to a new dynamic at his dinner table, as his kids fight over
who can put their device inside first.
"The
deal is until it's over, you don't get it out and it has actually, I think,
made a big difference," Love said. "We have to actually talk to each
other again and that goes for my wife and I, too. It's not just the kids."
All
phones on the table -- or else!
Amanda
Humphreys, 19, said she and her friends realized at a dinner three months ago
just how addicted they are to their phones.
After
everyone was posting on Facebook throughout the dinner and nobody was paying
attention to each other, a friend came up with an intriguing idea -- pile the
phones in the middle of the table during the meal and whoever touches or grabs
their phone has to pay the tab.
"We
all looked at each other in kind of this moment of panic but we all went along
with it," said Humphreys, who described herself as "one of those
people" who got into a car accident a year ago because of texting while
driving.
She said
the new phone policy means real conversations about real things.
"A
major thing is our topic of conversation is no longer what someone else posted
on Facebook, which it often would be," said Humphreys, who lives in Sussex
County, New Jersey. "I think we all kind of realized we didn't know what
to talk about besides, 'Oh, did you see so and so's photo on Instagram?' We
actually, I think, have a better idea of what's going on in each other's lives
and it's really nice."
A
pledge to take a 'tech time-out'
Foresters,
a fraternal benefit society providing life insurance for its members, came up
with the idea for a so-called "tech timeout" after
hearing from member families concerned about technology addiction.
The
organization created a comical YouTube
video, which has been seen more than 300,000 times, encouraging
people to pledge to take an hour a day when they put their technology away. Almost
9,000 people have taken the pledge
so far.
"We
all can relate," said Kasia Czarski, Foresters' senior vice president and
chief membership and marketing officer, and a mom of a 13- and 16-year-old who
helped launch the initiative. "We grapple with this in our family. How do
we create family togetherness yet how do we recognize this is a new world that
is important to our kids? You can't just ... shut it off. This is here to stay."
'Best.
Idea. Ever.'
The best
way to deal with the issue of children addicted to cell phones, said Ann Brown,
a single mom of a 17-year-old son in Cleveland, is to not give them one in the
first place.
That's
right. Her 17-year-old does not have a cell phone, which led me to ask how she
managed to pull off that trick. Doesn't every teen in the country want one?
"It's
because I'm the mom and I'm the boss," Brown said with a chuckle. She said
her son is never texting under the dinner table or checking e-mails at a
restaurant -- and can actually have a conversation with adults.
"It
comes back to a backbone. I'm the parent. When I say 'no,' no means no,"
Brown said. "And I think there are so many parents these days that they
don't want to deal with that kind of thing but they give in and you just can't
give in as a parent because then what happens next? They know they can get away
with whatever."
Best
advice to parents?
Sandra
Bond Chapman, author of the book "Make Your Brain Smarter" and
founder and chief director of the Center for
BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas, said parents who
are concerned about their kids' dependence on digital devices should first
embrace the technology and not punish them with it.
Second,
she suggests challenging children to do "interval training" where they
spend 30 minutes doing homework without any form of disruption from technology
-- and during the next 30 minutes of homework, they are allowed to check their
phones or other devices. (You could also try 15 minutes if you can't quite get
your kid away from the phone for 30!)
When she
does this experiment with teens, she said they are "blown away" by
how much better they do when they are not distracted by technology. "What
they see is they are able to complete their homework almost in a quarter of the
time it takes them," Chapman said. "They see that they learn better
the next day when they're doing tests or trying to remember it."
Thankfully,
the phone conundrum -- Do I give my kid one? At what age? What are the ground
rules? -- won't be an issue in my household for a few more years, but I'm not
wasting any time. I already ordered a couple of Mark Love's "Be
Present" boxes -- one for our household and another for my close family
friends.
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