Teenage Boy Screen Time Tips
By Grady Jordan, a Teenage Boy
How as a teenage boy with a social life I average under 1.5 hours of screen time a day.
Now if that sounds like a lot to you, you might as well click off this article because nowadays if you average under 4 hours of screen time a day, then that’s good. I have some friends that average north of 8 hours and they see no problem with it! One trick is to delete any unnecessary apps because the biggest things that were increasing my screen time were the video games- Pokémon Go and Baseball 9. I do not play any video games on my phone but do enjoy NYT games (like Wordle and Connections). Once I realized I didn’t need these apps, and that they were consuming 75% of my screen time, deleting them dropped my screen time significantly. Another important thing is to be aware of the time you’re spending on your phone- for example, pay attention to the screen time tracker. Over half of my screen time was spent reading pointless articles that I didn’t need to be reading because they didn’t benefit me at all. Realizing that was pointless helped me to stop doing it. My last, and final, tip is to limit social media and mindless scrolling. Most of the content on TikTok is a waste of time. I don’t know how much of the articles about how screens melt your brain are true, but with all the dumb purposeless content on there, I am not too excited for the future when our leaders have a serious addiction to watching car wrecks and Subway Surfers gameplay on TikTok.
Giving Children the Gift of Discomfort
I hear it from parents, teachers, camp counselors, and daycare workers. It’s on Facebook, church websites, TikTok, and blog posts. They are all asking the same question–what is wrong with these kids? They are lonely, they can’t handle in-person interactions, and they don’t know how to navigate social situations. There are many different explanations–from the overuse of iPads to the lingering impacts of the Pandemic. While those issues should not be ignored, I would like to offer an alternative explanation–children do not know how to be uncomfortable.
Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist, puts it this way, “Have we both over-sanitized and over-pathologized childhood, raising our children in the equivalent of a padded cell, with no way to injure themselves but also no means to ready themselves for the world?” This is not just parents. We as a society have gotten pretty good at avoiding discomfort. After all, vulnerability is hard, embarrassment is real, and it is so much easier to avoid awkwardness than confront it.
Sammy Rhodes, a pastor, explains it like this, “We…are awkward because we long to be embraced as we are, not as we should be.” At the same time that we are putting our best image forward on social media, we want to be understood and loved as the messes that we actually are. This is an uncomfortable dichotomy to navigate, but learning how is an important part of life. If we never allow our children to learn how to sit in that uncomfortable dichotomy, we are doing them a great disservice. For example, I see children who are lonely because they do not know how to be appropriately vulnerable with people. I also see children who would rather sit in their room on their phone than talk to anyone in person because they feel that they might “mess it up” and it “would be embarrassing”.
So, how do we start this process of allowing our children a developmentally appropriate amount of discomfort? How do we help them learn to deal with awkwardness, be vulnerable, and sit in uncomfortable places? Drawing on both Lembke and Rhodes, I think there are several starting points.
Allow your children to be bored - Children often use the word “boring” as a synonym for “the worst thing ever”. Lembke says this, “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose.” Give your children a safe space in your home to be bored and face those big questions with you by their side.
Lead by example - Children are not the only ones who hate to be uncomfortable. Get out of your own comfort zone and bring your children with you. Do a service project as a family because there is an inherent vulnerability in serving others. Avoid picking up your phone in the grocery store line to stay open to interactions with strangers because your children will benefit from watching you navigate potentially awkward situations.
Be a safe place to fail - No one likes to fail at anything, but it doesn’t have to be terrifying. Make your home a safe place for your children to try things and possibly fail at them. If your child brings home a failing grade at school, don’t immediately try to fix it. Sit with your child in failure. Be willing to try (and fail) things for yourself. When failure is simply a part of life, it becomes something much less scary.
After talking about failure, encouragement is always welcome. Lembke talks about her daughter’s inability to hold a tune, and how they were watching a movie at one point with a character who also had no musical talent. Her daughter asks if she is like that character, and Lembke thinks, “What do I say? Do I tell her the truth and risk damaging her self-esteem, or do I lie and try to use the deception to kindle a love of music?” She decides to tell her daughter the truth–that yes, she does not have any musical talent. Her daughter’s response might surprise you. Lembke says, “A big smile broke out over my daughter’s face, which I interpreted as the smile of validation….In validating what she already knew to be true–her lack of musical ability–I encouraged her skills at accurate self-appraisal…I also sent the message that we can’t be good at everything and it’s important to know.” We have the opportunity to do the same with our children.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation. Penguin Random House.
Rhodes, S. (2016). This is Awkward. Nelson Books.
Triggers in Intimate Relationships
Relationship triggers are opportunities for healing and connection.
Sometimes in marriage or committed relationships old wounds can show up. These can be negative beliefs we had about ourselves as a child or something from our history with our current relationship or from a part partner. What do we do with these?
Recognize them. Label them. Understand them. What are they saying? What does it make you think about yourself? Does it remind you of how you felt at another time in your life?
Take ownership. Don’t blame your partner. Sometimes these old feelings could be related or not related to a story involving your partner. It is important to let them in, help them understand what you are experiencing, but don’t blame them. Your feelings and thoughts are a part of your own perspective. Yes, they might have impacted it at one time or another, and this is a space where they can encourage you or affirm the relationship, but it is simply a space for them to validate your emotions and thoughts.
For the partner listening - simply support your partner. Your partner is someone with a whole lifetime of stories that have impacted them. It is likely you will hit something sensitive at one point or another. Think about your impact, be considerate with how you can nurture and care for them as they hold this trigger, but what happened to them in the past is not your responsibility. If you have personally wronged them, then that is always something to take responsibility for but you are not the one who is supposed to ‘fix’ a past wound, that is up to the one who was triggered and you can simply support, validate and encourage them in the process.
We are all responsible for our own emotions and they can be very empowering if we take the time to understand our own and others! So I hope this blog is encouraging and freeing to couples who maybe have gotten confused on how to deal with triggers as they come up in conflict or conversation. But the good news is that there is hope to understand how to discern these triggers and hope in learning how to navigate them!
When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed in Conflict…
By Kristin Rodriguez, LMFTA
Every couple has conflict. Every couple has emotions in conflict. And every couple has times when they feel overwhelmed within conflict. Some of the emotions are directly related to the conflict, and some may be related to something else altogether, but are activated by the current situation. Some in the Couple’s Therapy field would say flooded, meaning, that one is too overcome with emotion to think or speak in a way that is helpful to the situation or to the relationship. So here are some tips if you and your partner catch yourself struggling with this.
First of all, remind yourself that it is okay to feel flooded or overwhelmed. You are human and the conversation may be hitting at a sensitive part of your heart or mind and maybe even pushing against something you are very passionate about. That being said, it makes sense to feel deep emotions about those things.
When you start to realize your emotions are reaching a point where you are feeling overwhelmed or flooded, let your partner know. This clues them into the fact that you are struggling to remain fully present in the conversation. This is not a time for one partner to have power over the other, but an opportunity to honor and respect that your partner has the self awareness to seek to understand what they may be experiencing.
Take a break and tell your partner how much time you need. This could be as simple as 30 minutes, to a few hours, or after a good night’s rest. What is most important here is that you communicate a plan for when you will show back up fully, mentally and physically, into the conversation.
During the break, do some grounding exercises. This can be something like journaling, prayer, labeling emotions and beliefs or memories that the conversation brought up for you, and actively try to regulate your emotions by breathing, meditation or a walk outside. This will help your nervous system regulate, help you feel more calm, and you will be better able to better articulate your thoughts and feelings and listen more intentionally to your partner.
Return to your partner at the agreed upon time and seek to communicate more effectively without being run by your emotions, but rather letting your emotions inform your conversation.
Emotions are good and tell us something about ourselves, thus they should not be avoided, but are not meant to control us. I hope this information leads you to better understand your emotions and to better care for your partner.
Bringing Your Newly Adopted Child Home -- Temperament
By Dr. Patti Zordich
Is this concerning behavior due to trauma, attachment experiences and adoption, or is it the child’s personality, the way they were born? Often newly adoptive parents, counselors and caseworkers often attribute the adopted child’s difficult behaviors to the fact that they were adopted or the result of trauma. However, the difficulty may in fact be due, in part, to the child’s temperament, and/or a mismatch between the child and parent’s temperament.
What exactly is temperament? You’ve probably heard of the nature vs. nurture debate about how we come to the way we are; how our personality develops. For a while now psychology has conceded that it is both nature (what we are born with) and nurture (our upbringing and other environmental factors) that determine why we are who we are.
The nature part is called temperament. Thomas and Chess first introduced their New York Longitudinal Study in 1952, in which they identified nine temperament traits. 1 through their research, Thomas and Chess determined that we are born with our temperament and live with it for the rest of our lives. In other words, our temperamental traits are stable throughout our lifetime and are resistant to change despite changing circumstances and experiences. 2
It can be helpful to familiarize yourself with Thomas and Chess’ nine temperamental traits. Here are the traits according to Thomas and Chess:
Activity: Is the child constantly active or more relaxed?
Rhythmicity: Is the child regulated in terms of sleeping and eating, or more chaotic?
Approach/withdrawal: Does the Child move toward new objects and/or people easily, or tend
to shy away?
Adaptability: Does the child seem to be flexible or rigid when changes occur?
Intensity: Are the child’s reactions (either negative or positive) intense or calm?
Mood: Is the child’s mood generally negative or positive, erratic or even?
Persistence and attention span: Is the child persistent or give up easily?
Distractibility: Is the child easily distracted or does the child tend to stick with an activity
despite distractions.
Sensory Threshold: Is the child bothered by sensory stimuli such as noise, texture or
unbothered by them?
You might be wondering how this information can be useful when you’ve just brought your newly adopted child home, or you’ve been a family for several years. Understanding temperament can assist parents to:
Be more aware of your child’s temperament, accept your child as he is and refrain from
comparing your child to others.
Become aware of your own temperament, and strive to use this information to help you improve
the quality of the relationship between you and your child.
Understand and accept the differences between your temperament and that of your child’s.
Enjoy the interaction between your temperament and that of your child’s.
Set clear limits that correspond to your child’s temperament.
Prevent melt-downs in your intense child by decreasing intense and unexpected experience.
In the next Adoption blog post I’ll introduce a scale that you can use to identify where you and your child fall on each of the traits from mild to intense, identify any temperamental mismatches between you and your child, and explain some ways you can use this information can to inform your parenting style. In the meantime, I recommend the book Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide For Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, persistent, and Energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. She provides great information about how to use this information about temperament to reduce problem behaviors and improve the quality of relationship between parents and their “spirited” children.
1 Thomas, A. & Chess, S. (1989). Temperament in clinical practice. The Guilford Press, New York, NY.
2 Ibid.