Digital Rebel: A Silicon Valley Doctor's Approach to Screen Time
Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, talks about her own family's rules.
Whenever I read an interesting book about digital media, screen time habits, or behavioural psychology, I have a burning question for the author: "What are the screen time rules in your own home?"
Authors are cagey about this. They don't want to reveal too many personal details, which is understandable from a privacy perspective, but this can undermine the potency of their argument. It would be so helpful to know how they handle things on a daily basis within their own households.
In Dopamine Nation, addictions expert Anna Lembke offered some personal tidbits that I appreciated. She wrote that her kids weren't allowed to have phones until high school, which made them an "oddity among their peers... At first they begged and cajoled for a phone of their own, but after a while came to see this difference as a core part of their identity."
This information left me with even more questions, so I was pleased to hear Dr. Lembke dive into it in more detail in a recent interview with the New York Times. She acknowledged upfront that she's always been reluctant to say what they did as a family because "I don't want people to feel like, 'Oh, we should have done that or we should do that.' I really think every family has to find their own way."
But there is value in knowing what others do! It teaches and informs us, and gives us permission to do things differently. So I loved what she said next.
We did not have any devices in the home environment until our eldest started high school. Now, when our daughter started high school, she came home and said, "I actually can't function as a student in high school unless we get a connection to the Internet." We're in the heart of Silicon Valley, so we realized that that was true, with the constantly changing high school schedules, all of the assignments online... We got an Internet connection, and really, it was downhill from there.
The interviewer paused. "You didn't even have Internet in your home?"
Dr. Lembke replied, "We did not have Internet in our home, and I did not own a smartphone, if you can believe it, until about 2019, when I was forced through work to get one in order to be able to prescribe controlled substances using dual security." She said she doesn't judge other people for making a different choice and recognizes that her job situation is unique. "Most people do not have that."
Wow! No Internet in the home at all until high school is even more hard-core than my dogged smartphone resistance with my kids. I was surprised and impressed by it.
A Crucial Baseline
Not surprisingly, after the Internet entered the household, her kids "struggled to various degrees with their time online." But they were older by then, and something crucial had already been instilled in them. As Dr. Lembke explained:
What I'm really grateful for is that they have that baseline, this notion that too much time on the Internet is not a good thing. It's not a good thing for relationships. It's not a good thing for mental health. It's not a good thing for physical health. Even if they intermittently struggle with spending occasionally too much time online, they have this very strong idea rooted in, let's be present. Let's be present together. Let's not be distracted.
The family has another wonderful practice of taking phone-free vacations together, where no one uses any devices for the duration of the trip. Dr. Lembke described a three-day vacation to Yosemite, where they all lingered at the dinner table because there were no phone notifications to check after the meal, and conversation naturally extended itself. They would "mosey along after dinner under the stars."
The wonderful feeling this evoked has convinced Dr. Lembke that, as a society, we desperately need Internet-free communal spaces:
We need places where we come together—not all of the time, but some part of the time. We come together, and nobody is connected to the Internet, and they can't get connected. Because when the ability to choose is removed, it changes the state of craving.
I've experienced that at my parents' off-grid cabin on the edge of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, where the cell reception is so spotty that it's easier just to turn off the device and spend days unplugged. It totally changes the quality of the experience.
It Starts With Us
So, if we need those spaces, who creates them? We do. We start in our homes, as parents, with our own families, which is where we have the greatest influence. We insist that phones are not welcome at the dinner table, on leisurely walks, on car rides and family vacations, during hangouts with friends. We get comfortable drawing firm boundaries because we know it is good for us and for our kids.
We reframe our thinking about it as giving our kids back their lives, instead of letting an Internet-connected device steal it from them. We fiercely defend their right to a better experience of childhood, not one that's degraded and steeped in shallow, insipid Internet culture. Our kids deserve better than that, but it requires vigiliance and determination on our part to see that through.
It is so refreshing to know that the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, living in Silicon Valley, had an Internet-free home until her kids were in high school. (They’re now aged 18 to 23.) There's no reason why we can't do that, too, or at least strive for lesser degrees of it in the form of Internet- and phone-free spaces and experiences.
If you're interested to know how another expert and author, Dr. Jean Twenge, handles screens with her own three teenage daughters, check out this post: I've Finally Figured Out When My Kids Can Get Smartphones.
The NYT interview is well worth listening to: Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked. Dr. Anna Lembke Sees a Way Out.
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My husband is a computer engineer and our oldest is heading down the same road. The Internet is very important in our home, but it is frustrating that we have more screens than people. (The side affect of having techies in the family.) We want our kids to learn to have a healthy relationship with their use of the Internet and smart phones. This is what we have figured out for our family: teens get a non-SIM card phone at 15. They don't have a phone number or the Internet via cell phone towers - just on WiFi at home. We have parental controls on until they're 16. When they turn 16 they can get a SIM card but they have to pay for their own phone service. We have monthly check ins with all our kids to talk about life and their phone/Internet/screen usage. I recently floated the idea with my 8 year old of having 2 mornings a week where he doesn't watch TV before school, but he reads books, listens to audiobooks or we play a game together. He was willing to give it a try and last night he even reminded me that today was a no screen day. 🥺 We keep tweaking as we go, but it feels good to be making some progress!
I love Anna Lembke. Understanding dopamine better is utterly essential in the fight to stop screens taking over our entire lives! Thanks for this