Why Screens Feel Regulating (But Might Not Be)

 Today we’re talking about why screens feel regulating or it looks like our kids may be regulated, but they actually might not be. Listen, this is an important conversation today, and I give you so much credit, and seriously, I’m applauding you for hitting play because. I think that there is a lot of tension for parents.

I think there’s a lot of confusion and sometimes guilt around screen time, and I think we hear a lot about it. There’s a lot of opinions about it, and so it can be easy to kind of say, you know what, I’m not, I’m not gonna listen. I’m not gonna listen to that. I’m not gonna get into this today, but I want you to know before we even get into this conversation.

That I do think is so important for us to hear, especially if you have a neuro with a lot of dysregulation, that there is no judgment here. Okay? Screen times, screen time for our kids is really a part of our culture. It is part of. The way most people are parenting. You may be a family that uses screens regularly.

That is okay. This episode is not about taking screens away, although we are gonna talk about some implications for excessive amounts of screen time and what that can look like. But, but even, but even in that. I just want you to know that if you’re feeling guilt around how much screen time your kid has or how to start putting up some boundaries around screen time, that this is a really good place to just start thinking about it.

And I, I wanna encourage you to lay down that guilt right now. Just start thinking about what that change might look like. We’re gonna talk a little bit about that at the end of the episode, but. I really want to walk through this question that everybody seems to be asking and that I see come up often on social media is that if my child is calm on screens, especially for kids that are struggling with dysregulation, so they might have meltdowns, they may struggle with transitions, they may struggle with being in public.

There might be certain times of day, and screens seem to be a really good solution if that’s the case. Then what’s the, what’s the problem? Or, or is it okay to be using them and how much should I be using them if it seems like my kid is regulated when they are on them? So we’re gonna talk about that and the confusion that we’re hearing.

Or I guess the mixed messages I should say, that we are hearing online even different experts why screens look regulating, but might not be. I also wanna share a personal story from my own life that is just really magnifies this point, what we can do to start building regulation. And some really interesting research that I think we need to pay attention to for our neurodivergent kids.

Okay? So listen, if you are. Just joining us for the first time here, and you don’t know who I am, I am a mom, uh, that is in the trenches with you first and foremost. And so I am living this, I am figuring it out. My kids, have had many struggles. As most kids do throughout their lives. I have one kiddo that is neurodivergent and so that that definitely, uh, changes some of the ways that I need to support him.

And, and honestly, it changes to parent him because there’s just, there’s other challenges that. We have to wade through and I need to support him in. So, uh, I am also an occupational therapist though, so, a very close second hat that I am always wearing in a lens that I even see my own children through.

And this, this screen time is definitely something that I think a lot about as an OT. So again, I promise that this will be a clear and balanced conversation on screen time. Okay, so let’s talk about why screens can look regulating. Let me give you an example that I often hear from parents is that when my kid comes home from school.

They wanna have screen time, and this works really well for us because they are overwhelmed throughout the day. They may be on some this. This gives them a chance to kind of reset and relax. And there is absolutely a truth in that. And I think that the key word there is it is giving the brain a chance to relax.

What screen times do for us neurologically from a brain perspective is. It entertains us. It allows our brain to go into a passive mode, particularly when we are just watching something and even, uh, when it’s a specific video game. But when we’re just watching content, whether that is, uh, for our kids a show, whether that is a YouTube channel, and.

Whether that’s kind of short form content, like 30 seconds to 62nd content. Although there is of course, a challenge in that short form content because. It is very quick and there are a lot of dopamine hit. In fact, there’s dopamine released. When we are watching shows that are enjoyable to us. Anytime we’re doing anything that is enjoyable, that is, that is pleasing to us, we get that hit of dopamine.

Now, remember that a lot of our neurodivergent kids have a lower level of dopamine, particularly kids with a DHD. And so this is a way to kind of get that dopamine hit. It’s also a way to go passive to turn off the brain. And so yes, it can be something that if you’re allowing your child to have screen time, which most families are, that if there is a challenging point of the day when your kid is super dysregulated, that it seems to make sense of, oh, well this is so regulating for my kid, so I’m gonna give them this.

Now I think that that can turn into a slippery slope because what happens is our kids subconsciously starts to make a connection in their brain that when I’m feeling out of control, when I am feeling regulated, because that’s really what. What the experience is like. It’s the brain being out of balance, that dysregulation.

And so the brain is fighting to find regulation to find homeostasis or balance, if you will, and it will focus on that more than anything else. It’s why when your child is really dysregulated, you may see them run away and hide. They’re trying to find regulation. It’s why you may see them running around jumping.

They’re trying to find regulation. Now this gets into their underlying sensory needs and the way that their brain is wired in the ways that they are then seeking out to regulate. Okay? And there’s lots of ways that we seek out regulation. And we will instinctively do this from a very young age to try to find that regulation to try to bring our brain back into.

And so screens are an external tool, a way of doing that in a sense. But it’s actually not true regulation. When we’re talking about regulation. It is a skill. You may remember that from an earlier episode when we talked about all about emotional regulation. We talk about sensory regulation, emotional regulation, but let’s just call it as a big umbrella term today.

Just nervous system regulation. Brain regulation. Okay? Whenever we’re, whenever we are. Triggered into dysregulation because of sensory needs or whether because of our emotions, what we are doing in our brain and your child’s brain is just trying to bring that level of balance back. And so that is actually a skill.

It’s not something that kids are intuitively born with. It is something that they’re trying to figure out. It’s a, and so they will learn how to use external tools to help. Regulate. There’s all kinds of ways that we can do this, right? Like it could be eating because, oh my gosh, I love when I eat. I feel so good.

That helps me regulate. I’m gonna grab that screen. It feels so good. That helps me regulate. Okay, that might not be what your child is thinking, but there is this association made in the brain. While I’m saying that helps me regulate, for those of you that are listening on podcast and on YouTube, I am using Air Quote.

Again, it’s, it’s kind of a bypass to helping us start to just calm, because dysregulation can help us, can make us feel out of control, but it is an external tool. It’s a buffer, an escape, a distraction, a reprieve, a pause button. That’s, that’s how I think we need to think about the screen. Unfortunately, that can feel so big and so overwhelming, and it can feel so hard to start to think through how do I actually regulate myself now?

I think the tricky thing for parents is that we associate calm. As being equal to regulation. So if our kid is running around wild, if they are having really big emotions, and then we see they have that tablet in their hand and now they are calm, wow, that seems like regulation. But what’s really happened is they’ve put a pause button on that.

Some of you listening right now know that, that then the transition off screen is really hard and all of the dysregulation comes back. Or it’s, you know, the transition went okay, but now they’re still bouncing off the walls again, or those feelings have in a corner. So yes, they’re able to move on, but that kind of feeling of being overwhelmed or dysregulated or whatever it was that was causing your child to be dysregulated before the screen.

Some kids are able to move on past that as adults because it kind of just gives us a break and it allows us to reset. But we haven’t really dealt with or processed the dysregulation, the big emotions, the overwhelm that we were feeling, that our kids are feeling. So it’s important for us to know that calm behavior isn’t always true Regulation.

And so when we’re using screens to help our kids regulate, and I’m not talking about just screen time in general, our conversation today is really about are they regulating? Because this is something that I see popping up on social media all of the time, and I think that there’s a defensiveness around it because we growingly, uh, becoming concerned with screens and its impact on our kids.

We feel all of this guilt. And so when we see our kids are calm, I, I think that there is an understandable pushback to be like, Hey, wait, like this is helping my kid. And there is some truth in that, but it is a short term solution. It is definitely a quicker solution and sometimes. It is truly a godsend to just be able to, for everyone to be able to have that break to be able to hit that pause button.

But what I don’t want us to do is to confuse that with true regulation, which is a long-term skill. It takes a lot of consistency. That takes a lot. Practice because what actually builds true regulation, that self-regulation, a child learning how to cope with their big emotions, their son, is to use other strategies like movement or co-regulation with you.

We talked about that in the last episode here on the Connected and Capable Podcast. Go back and listen to that episode. If you’re like, oh, what is co-regulation? How do I even begin doing that? That’s how we really truly start to show our kids how to regulate, but it can be work for us and it forces us to deal with our own regulation, which is hard, and we can’t not do 100% of the time.

We can also leverage sensory input, we can practice with transitions. Those are ways that we start to actually build that regulation skill. Okay. It’s built through experience and that’s not something that a screen can do for a child or quite frankly, for us either. So I promised you an emotional, uh, an emotional story.

It actually is a little bit of an emotional story, a personal story, and I hope adult example here because this is an example from my own life that has really hit me in a profound sort of way. And I can see how it applies 100% to our children. So as a kid that grew up in the eighties and nineties and that had some significant trauma in, in those years, despite getting extra help from therapists and, you know, other supports in my life, I didn’t really have an understanding of what to do.

With big emotions, and so like any child, I developed coping strategies. Also, growing up in the eighties and nineties, I had a lot of access to screens, and while there were limitations on what I could watch, it really wasn’t part of the conversation. Then of course, there were not smartphones and tablets, and it was on a shared television the time I was in my late twenties and early thirties.

I started to have some sense that I used television in particular to help me with my dysregulation, particularly with anxious feelings. What’s interesting is I wasn’t even able to identify those feelings, which is often where our kids are at. See, I had not developed those skills. I had not even have that interoceptive awareness.

Remember, that’s one of our eight senses, and it’s all about how we perceive the feelings on the inside of our body. And so I as a coping strategy as a child, had not even learned to identify, oh, I’m anxious because it was such a constant baseline for me. Certainly peaked at times and I had developed some healthy coping strategies and the truth is that without other tools, the screen was a helpful, it allowed me to reset and for me that pause button.

Kind of just stayed on pause. I was just always hitting another pause button. My anxiety would get big, and one of my strategies’, the only one was, okay, I just am gonna watch, you know, a show that I really like and this is gonna help me kind of check out because I am past my capacity of dealing with this right now.

Well, years into that, starting to realize that I was actually just. Suffering and not dealing with the dysregulation, the uncomfortable emotions because I didn’t know how to do them, how to deal with them. So I had to learn how do I start to process these emotions and then what do I do with this really uncomfortable feeling of a heart that’s racing or a mind with many thoughts that are going at one time when I fity, how do I start to deal with that?

And honestly, just recognizing it was the first step. And then it was starting to challenge myself to do other regulating strategies, to also tell myself that I was safe, even though these feelings felt bigger. And please hear me. I am not saying that this is perfect. I still struggle with these big feelings.

I am still figuring it out. I am still working on it. But it took me a long time to realize that I was not really building regulation skills and, and actually after many, many years of doing this, I can see how it had a huge impact in my life because I was silently ignoring stress because I was silently ignoring the anxiety.

I had all kinds of chronic health problems as a re the, the body will start to re react. Hey, if you’re not gonna pay attention to this, yeah, you’re gonna have like a really, you’re gonna have a really bad headache. You’re gonna have migraines, you’re gonna struggle with this, you’re gonna have digestive problems.

And the list went on and on. The longer I didn’t deal with it. Now obviously this is not going to be the outcome for our kids. And the reason I’m sharing this story with you is because. I think that it’s so easy in our culture to end up in this place, and I know that the, the conversations are there now that we’re not necessarily present there, but we also have so much more demand in front of us now than we even did in the nineties or the early two thousands.

We have these smartphones, we have these tablets, and worse. Worse is content. Video games are now designed to hook, hook our kids in, to get them longer, to get them to keep getting the dopamine hits so that they get hooked. That is so much of what short form content is, and it has been developed with a lot of intention.

On how the brain works to get people to watch more. And so we do need to be aware of this. And the type of content that our kids engage in actually does matter. So if you’re choosing content that you watch together instead of up close on a tablet, it can actually be less of a buffer. You know where there can be a little bit more room for regulation skills because there can be some co-regulation happening.

We can also engage the brain in an active way when there are components to a screen time where a child is interacting instead of just passively engaging. And again, I am, my old can never use a tablet independently and watch some shows. I am just saying that there are ways. To kind of minimize the effects of this hitting the pause button, the reprieve, and having it be more of an active experience for your child.

Screens are not the enemy. And they can be a healthy alternative with intentional use. I am not saying that it’s an all or nothing here. I think it’s more about our awareness and where we wanna put the boundaries. And so that brings me to the research. There was actually a huge review done of 147 studies of looking at screen time use and ADHD.

Collectively looking at all of these studies, that’s a lot of studies. This was actually just done last year, clear results across all of these studies that showed that kids that had a lot of screen time, around four hours or more actually saw an increase. So the opposite of regulation, an increase in inattention and an increase in hyperactivity.

And there’s more research that shows, you know, looking at screens before bedtime can actually trigger the brain to stay awake and have it more difficult to be able to downshift the way the brain needs to, to be able to fall asleep. And so this research. Seems like, wow, four hours. That might be a lot. But if you have an elementary aged kid and you’re in a school district like mine that gives kids a tablet in kindergarten and they’re on it a lot during the day and then they have some time at home, it can be pretty easy to get to four hours.

That’s actually not an excessive amount, although the, the, the by many kids standards because. They are getting so much exposure to it in most schools before they even get home. So again, this is not an all or nothing approach, but I do think that we need to recognize that when a child is in front of a screen, it’s not true regulation as a skill.

It is a reprieve, just like it was for me for many years. So how do we start to build that regulation skill and, and really what are the, what are the next steps if you are wondering, oh my gosh. Like how do I put these boundaries? Around screen times, how much should a kid be having? I think that is nuanced.

I don’t think there are right answers here, but if you’re looking for guidelines or you’re looking for help of what are some specific strategies that I can use to help my child transition off the screen, I’m okay with them having it. When they wake up from their nap or they get home from school, or they’re having some after dinner, anytime that you’re using it when your child is quote unquote dysregulated, I think is when we really need to pay attention.

And if you’re wondering, what do I do? I have a child that already seems like they’re. Kind of fixated on screens, maybe even addicted to screens. Then I would love for you to come into the connection High. This month in March, we’re gonna be focusing on screens and we’re actually doing a one hour workshop, uh, next week, but it will live on in our libraries.

You can watch and listen on our private podcast feed there anytime. All of these aspects. We’re gonna be looking at what this looks like in real life, so it’s practical and doable and you can make it work for your family. And I know we have so many therapists watching. So for those of you that are in our therapist membership, the Therapists All Access membership, we’ll be sharing that resource there for you as well.

I know that so many of you wanna support the families that you’re working with, or you have your own families and you wanna be informed. You wanna know what are the, the best, uh, kind of steps to take to. Using screens in an intentional way. Again, I wanna thank you so much for being here for this conversation.

I know it is a tough one, but I do believe, I do believe that when we are intentional, we can help our child build those regulation skills slowly, step by step, that actually builds those new connections in the brain. That’s a new pathway in the brain. And with that, your child builds more capability. I want you to know that I believe you are capable to, and for those of you that have taken that step to be in the connection hive and you’re learning and you’re getting that support, that you are capable.

So take a deep breath my friend, and I’ll see you next time.