#3 in a series: I can tell you, but you’re not going to like it.

Once again, I’m the fun-killer, offering information for your recreational purposes that you might not like hearing.

Thus far, I’ve discussed getting more sleep and more physical activity as ways to help children who seem restless, unhappy, unable to focus (except for electronics, usually).  If you have been experimenting with those changes – perhaps for your children, perhaps for yourself – and a few weeks have gone by, I suspect you have noticed a few changes.

You may be sleeping better and waking up more rested and alert. You may be naturally less reliant on caffeine and high-sugar foods to wake up or to get through your day.  If you were tracking it, you might also notice that you are spending less recreational time with electronics. If you were managing these changes for a child, you experienced some degree of pushback, possibly to the level of an addict being denied their drug of choice, because the brain becomes addicted to the rewards of social media, video games, etc., and it will take time to replace that addiction with healthy patterns.  If you were able to persist, within a few weeks you probably noticed positive changes in mood and behavior.

Some studies have supported the approach of adding positive changes before taking things away. For example, if a person needs to quit smoking, eat healthier and exercise, success is most likely to accrue if exercise is added first. This becomes an additional reward and incentive, and can help buffer the withdrawal from nicotine as well as withdrawal from addictive, highly processed foods. In that spirit, it seems it could be easier to have begun helping a child heal from the cultural damages that contribute to anxiety, depression, attentional problems, etc. by adding positive things (sleep, exercise and play) before directly taking away negative things (specifically, the largely unsupervised world of the online universe).

If your child has any unsupervised screen time, it is almost guaranteed they are seeing things you do not know they are seeing or want them to see. End of story. You think you have adequate controls, and firewalls; and somewhere far away, people with far more expertise in technology than most of us are busily creating pathways to circumvent parental controls.

As I have shared in other columns, one of my little escapes in a long work day may be a two to four-minute clip off the internet of some old movie: a dance scene from Mary Poppins, a short scene from Much Ado About Nothing, a few moments of Branagh’s Henry V, the latter not cheery but stunningly well done and quite grounding, as examples. These are my typical fare: dancing penguins, singing suffragettes and Shakespeare, but sometimes up will come next some horrible thing – R-rated, violent, hideous – so terrible that even shutting it down immediately is too much exposure.  From this I hypothesize that if you think your kiddo is happily watching perfectly clean children’s videos and do not supervise, you don’t know. You do not know whether some horror or corruption that was carefully created and marked with the right key words to intrude on that corner of the market is slipping into the stream.

Under the best of circumstances, if it were an hour or two of tap-dancing penguins, it is on too much time to surrender to passive entertainment without being selective. Most people will not just absent-mindedly pick up any book and read it for a couple of hours and then look up, surprised and resentful, when interrupted for food or water or homework. The internet, however, is something else: the endless parade of “talking” kittens, so-called “influencers” and worse contrive to steal time every day from many people. It’s not all bad, of course; I listen to educational lectures when I’m on the stationary bicycle six days a week. I’ve encouraged people to watch “The Chosen.” I’m in favor of well-researched educational programming. I’ve done car repairs under the tutelage of a mechanic on Youtube and am still stumbling through beginner Spanish with the internet, too.

If you are unconvinced about the use of the internet, watch the documentary, “The Social Dilemma.”

Cutting back on tech time is hard. You’re probably not, initially, going to like it, and odds are your child will fight you – hard.  We’re talking about your child’s well-being: their physical health, mental health, intellectual development and social skills. It’s worth the trouble. Try adding the deliberate reduction of entertainment with electronics to the improved sleep and physical activity habits.  Then see what happens.