screens and emotional regulation

In the past week, I’ve encountered all of the following:

A social media post stating that a child’s first grade teacher allows students to watch “Bluey” and other shows on school-issued iPads when they come back from recess “because they need time to regulate.”
At a well-known performing arts school, teachers tell students, “When you’re done with your classwork you can play video games on your school-issued computers.”
A parent messaged me to say that the guidance counselor at her child’s middle school told parents that tweens “need Snapchat to self-regulate during lunch.”
My daughter’s 7th grade English teacher sent an email last week pleading with parents to talk to their students about completing classwork and staying on task. Half the students have missing work but instead of using the ample class time she offers to complete it, they are instead playing computer games on their school-issued computers. (And before we blame the teacher for poor classroom management, consider this: there are 34 students in the class and 33 of them have internet-connected computers provided by the district. If you’ve never taught middle school before, this is an absurd ask of the teacher.)
Social media posts riddled with misinformation and disinformation about “regulating” emotions
Irresponsible professionals pushing harmful messaging, suggesting that parents who limit screen time are somehow harming their children. This is false.

I’m going to be very blunt: Screens do not help children regulate. They do not. They actually have the opposite effect.

The difference between kid and adult screen time

Let’s unpack this.

The numbers are grim. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) children between 8-18 years old average 7.5 hours a day on screens. That’s outside of school hours. We also have a youth mental health crisis in America (check out the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning from last August). A 2023 CDC study found that one in three teen girls has contemplated suicide. I recently saw a post that said the typical teen ennui of yesterday has been replaced with crippling anxiety today. And anxiety is what occurs when we do not learn how to regulate, control, or act on our emotions.

I know many adults like to come home from work to binge-watch Netflix or mindlessly scroll through social media as a way to “wind down.” We might even think of this as a way we regulate after a long day. However, there are two fundamental differences between adults doing that and what I see in how children are being given screens to “regulate” both at home and at school:

Adults have fully formed brains. Children do not.
Most adults today had analog childhoods in which they had ample opportunities to learn the skills of self-regulation. Children today are in the middle of a childhood in which those opportunities are being displaced right and left thanks to excessive screen use at home and at school.

To understand why screens cannot regulate children’s emotions or behavior, we also have to have an understanding of brain development, and most of us do not.

Lost opportunities to engage and grow

Quite simply, the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that is the last to fully develop (and is not finished until our 20s or even 30s) is where our executive function skills are built and housed. Executive function skills include things like planning, prioritization, organization, metacognition, and yes, emotion regulation. Children need ample opportunities to practice building these skills, which, not surprisingly, occur in daily conversations, classroom experiences, and real-world situations.

Unfortunately, as illustrated in the bullets above, a child’s chances to practice and build these skills is being constantly displaced by the use of digital technology.

Dr. Doug Gentile’s research on displacement highlights what should be an obvious fact: Time spent on screens is time we are not spending engaging in other activities. Duh, but also WOW. If kids are spending 7.5 or more hours per day on screens outside of school hours, that leaves only 16.5 hours left in a day, hopefully at least half of which are spent in sleep. What real-world opportunities are being displaced by so many hours engaging with a screen? And what skills aren’t being honed because children seek the ease, comfort, and dopamine surge that comes with screen time?

Digital media is designed to addict

An equally important part of this conversation also has to focus on the fact that most digital tools for school, “educational” apps, social media sites, and video and online games are intentionally designed to manipulate a child’s attention and focus. Worse, the companies who implement these persuasive design techniques actually hire developmental psychologists to make their products as compelling to children as possible.

Unfortunately, due to their underdeveloped executive function skills, children are especially vulnerable to these manipulative design techniques and cannot resist. If you’ve ever attempted to take an iPad away from a Roblox-hooked six-year-old, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. Because the human brain is amazing, it adapts. So in order to get that same dopamine hit when a child engages with a game or app, she has to use it for longer each subsequent time.

Addressing how adults see screens

Finally, we also have to address the adult problem of seeing screens as, at best, harmless, or worse, beneficial to children’s social and emotional experiences.

When we hand a toddler who is having a tantrum an iPhone to soothe him we achieve peace and quiet in the short term. But short-term gain sets us up for long-term pain. Children do not intuitively know how to self-regulate. They must be taught, both explicitly and by watching others. If we are pulling out our own phones in moments of frustration, we’re showing our kids that this is what one does. If we hand over the iPhone to the screaming toddler, we’re teaching them, “When you behave like this, I will give you a screen.”

When we tell tweens that they can turn to Snapchat during lunch to regulate we’re teaching them: “Being in middle school is hard; you should escape.” We are not providing them with strategies, skills, and lots of awkward social moments in which to practice these skills that they absolutely will need later in life.

Will a teen be angry if you take away social media during lunch? Of course. That’s developmentally appropriate. But if you look at the expereinces of schools that have banned phones and social media during the school day, the benefits to student mental health, school culture, behavior, and focus are magnificent. Why wouldn’t we do this?

I recently posted a video about a parenting strategy. It’s about a message learned years ago from a parent educator: It can be disarming to use the phrase “I forgot to teach you” when trying to help children learn something, whether its how to behave in a restaurant or how to avoid being rude with a smartphone. This video currently has over 200,000 views, nearly 25,000 likes,” and more than 150 comments. That’s a lot. But what I find most interesting is how many comments show that people do not understand how young children learn, that parenting is full of teaching, and that screens set up a dynamic that complicates even the best parent-child relationship.

I am not judging parents

If you’re reading this and feeling judged or shamed, please don’t.

It’s not our fault that things have gotten so hard (looking at you, Big Tech), but it is our responsibility as parents to understand child development, persuasive design, and what it means to regulate our emotions. As I have said before and will say again and again, we can only be the best version of ourselves as parents and teachers about 80% of the time. We will screw up. We will occasionally resort to handing a toddler who is having a tantrum an iPhone in the grocery store because otherwise we might just lose it ourselves.

That’s all good and normal, as long as we can keep those instances as the exception, not the rule. The 20%, not the 80%.

Exception not the rule

Obviously, there are always exceptions to this. I would not deprive a non-verbal child of a digital tool with which she could communicate. I would trust that a medical professional whose expertise is in child development and nonverbal communication would be prescribing such tools on an as-needed basis. But just because one child needs eyeglasses does not mean all children in a class will benefit from eyeglasses.

When you find yourself at a decision-making point around whether or not to give your child or student access to screens, here are three helpful questions to pose:

What do I gain?
What do I lose or replace?
What do I model?

Occasionally, we may want to gain some peace and quiet, even if it means losing some 1:1 time with our kid and modeling that screens are a fun escape. In school, it might be that as a special treat, once or twice we watch a fun movie together as a class. All of that can be ok, as long as these experiences are the exception not the rule.

Not surprisingly, the solution here is tech-intentionality; choosing to utilize screen-based technology in the context of our three foundational principles: Less is more, later is better, and relationships and skills before screens.

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This article is reposted with permission by Emily Cherkin, MEd., The Screentime Consultant. Emily’s book, The Screentime Solution: A Judgment-Free Guide to Becoming a Tech-Intentional Family, was released in 2024.

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The Screentime Consultant: Please stop saying screens help kids ‘regulate’