Glorious and terrible screens!

I woke up this morning and settled into my meditation practice planning to write you guys about “masking” for today’s email.

I was thinking about when my son was briefly attending public school over three years ago and we observed two different children. There was the Cooper who appeared “typical” but had difficulty staying still and listening at school and the Cooper after school, at home - the child who cycled through screaming panic attacks in the evenings, with his service dog pressed on him, as tears streamed down his face. The Cooper who couldn’t sleep at night, had stomachaches, and whose eating was decreasing again.

But as I sat on the floor this morning with the sky still dark out the window, I could already hear the annoying pings and dings of my 5-year-old’s ipad. I imagined it illuminating William's chubby cheeks in his bedroom. It was only 6:15am and he just turned five and he was already on a screen.

It made my heart hurt for a moment. Then I reminded myself:

It’s not going to kill him.

Our home life looks different than if I were raising neuroptyical kids and that’s ok and necessary.

I can always make a different decision, and set more boundaries around screens.

Given this scene, I thought why not dive into the complex topic of screens and the love/hate relationship with them that many of us have as parents of PDA kids and teens?

As parents, we often feel a guilt-inducing sigh of relief when our children or teens get on screens because we finally get a break from the constant 1:1 attention. We can take a quick shower, return a text or relax our hypervigilance around keeping another child safe. Yet at the same time, our mind shouts: “I am rotting my kid’s brain,” “I’m a bad parent!” or “they are going to get addicted!”

There are many paradoxes with screens, especially with PDA children and teens and there is no single answer to the question: “Casey, what should I do about screens?”

But what I can offer is a logical way of thinking about screens so that you can make aligned decisions for your family, which might be VERY different than the decisions I make. (For more on my family’s story with screens and burnout, feel free to read here). 

I don't tell parents *what* to think or do. I try to teach *how* to think with insight, clarity and objectivity amidst all the confusion, so that parents can find their path out of the dark woods with their specific child and their specific family.

Screens are multifaceted

Screens can be deeply regulating for a PDA child or teen and can facilitate things like learning, safety, toileting, eating, decompression, even sleep! For example, when my son was deep in burnout, I gave up on screentime limits and watched him spend months on a screen 8 hours a day. I was terrified, yet, I saw him start to regulate, start drawing and writing again after two years of refusing, and getting ideas for experiments and things to do around the house. This was after refusing *all* engagement except me entertaining him by throwing pillows at his body or bouncing his body on the trampoline for him for hours (he wouldn’t move his legs himself to bounce).

At a time when my son barely ate anything, allowing him to graze and eat buffets in front of a screen allowed him to eat more and more consistently. For many PDA kids, a screen can facilitate using the bathroom (ipad on a chair while taking a poop, anyone!?), or consuming calories by tuning out some of the intense sensory experience that accompany eating (smells! sounds! tastes!). Many PDA kids actually learn from the content they watch, get ideas for transformation experiments and activities, and it can be deeply regulating to have the autonomy to switch between silly clips of animals and building worlds in Minecraft.

At the same time, screens can also be addictive and dysregulating to some PDA kids and teens. The intensity of the sounds and flashing images that the child or teen is drawn to can be regulating on one level (autonomy around getting to pick different videos), but dysregulating on a sensory level (too much sound and light and movement!).

Some PDA children and teens immerse themselves in content that is deeply distressing and inappropriate (violence, porn, etc.) or engage in video games that lead to huge meltdowns and cognitive loops that they can’t seem to tear themselves away from. Other parents have observed that screens are making it harder to sleep for their PDA child or teen, or that they are eating less because they are so hyper-focused on their screen.

The reason I highlight these examples is because empirically (meaning from the data points that I have from working with 100s of families) I have learned there isn’t one way that screens affect PDA children and teens. For some PDA children – like my son – they are regulating and not addictive. He even sleeps better if he has some time before bed with his ipad and turns it off himself after just a few minutes. He sleeps with it in his room, but doesn’t use it in the night. For another PDA child this might be a disaster and lead to less sleep because of sensory dysregulation and getting up all night to watch.

For about one in five of the families I have worked with, screens did end up being more dysregulating for their kids, and in some cases very addictive. Different decisions around boundaries needed to be set. In a very few cases, some boundaries needed to be quite intense (cold-turkey-esque) and even though on the surface those decisions may have seemed to be “not PDA-affirming,” they were absolutely the right decision for that child.

Your child is not the middle of the bell curve

But what about the research on screens that says your child will lose IQ points, have less frustration tolerance, or worse outcomes with school and behavior later on?

The first thing to know is a research study can be true in its average findings or correlations from a large sample, and yet not apply to your specific child or speak to the causality behind the study's findings. (For example, the children who watched more screens may have already had a deeper root cause that the study wasn’t aware of that led to both more screen time AND less frustration tolerance). Remember, your child is not located in the middle of the bell curve in these studies of “children.” Our children are outliers.  

Second, even within the distribution of PDA kids and teens, there are outliers. Most of the families I have worked with do well with reducing screen time limits, especially in the beginning when they are gaining their footing with PDA, helping their child or teen out of burnout, and trying to re-establish trust. However, this is not true for all.

Now I know you may be thinking, "What about my family, Casey? What should *we* do?"

And this is what I call “an empirical question” because we can’t answer whether or not *your* child will find screens helpful until will collect data (empirical evidence) on *your specific* child.

Observing your child

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you observe your child and their interactions with screens.

• What type of content are they gravitating towards? Are they regulating by watching something about their special interest, watching silly animal or music-making videos, or zoning out with some non-spoken images which relaxes their brain? OR are they constantly changing the content (like every 10 seconds) like a slot machine, constantly looking for more violent, inappropriate (violence, sexual content) content, and seeming to be agitated in their body?
• What are they doing when they are on the screens? Does your child or teen socialize using screens? Do they draw, build, eat, bathe (we have taken many baths with an ipad on the toilet seat!) while watching? Do they speak to you or a sibling, or pause to try stuff from the content? OR does your child seem to be completely disassociating or going more into fight/flight? You may need to look closely to discern whether your child is relaxing and zoning a bit (relaxed body but not frozen, upper half of the face not frozen, facial expressions present) or completely dissociated and seemingly “not there.”
• What happens when they get off the screen? Do they seem to sleep OK and not have additional dysregulation (more than before or during screen time) OR do they seem more agitated! If you can’t see a difference in the moment, start looking at patterns week-by-week along the following dimensions: connection with you, nervous system activation, and basic needs access.

The data will lead you to your decisions

Once you have the data on your child, then you can make some cost-benefit decisions.

You may realize – if I tune out all the research and external opinions about screens, my kid is actually doing OK! The benefit of more screens (more trust, more regulated kid, more time to do laundry for parent), may outweigh the costs (for example, a sibling watches more screens).

Alternatively, you may decide to try boundaries if you are observing that the benefit of unlimited screentime (autonomy!) does not outweigh the cost to your teen’s mental or physical health (no sleep, not eating, not leaving the house, etc). Setting a boundary around screens means that your PDA child or teen WILL have a nervous system reaction. However, that doesn’t mean it is the wrong decision. (For example, some families turn off wifi access at a certain hour of the night or removing connectivity if they observe porn usage. They don't do this as a punishment, but as a boundary.)

If you don’t know what to do, your next step might be to give yourself permission to experiment a little more, observe without judgment, and collect more data.

For example – Perhaps you and your co-parent don’t agree on what to do. Instead of making a huge decision (No screen time limits!), pick a micro-change as an experiment that is time-bound and observe what changes or doesn’t. For example, let’s add screens during mealtimes for a week and see if it makes eating better or worse.

This is an invitation to step out of the conversations about screens as “good” or “bad”, and the notion that your decisions are “good” or “bad.” It's ok to relax out of a particular parenting philosophy and do what objectively works to support your family to find long-term peace and helps your unique child or teen to thrive.

Back to my morning

As I finished writing this, I could hear William whimpering, still on his ipad because of a snow-delayed start to school. He was getting intensely frustrated with one of the games that his older brother taught him existed (*sigh*) on his ipad.

The game was one of those free ones you can download and then the child is bombarded with advertisements in the middle of the game.  The kind that makes me want to throw the ipad out the window and scream at the creators – WHY!?!?! WHY!?

Yet, after my sacred pause, I went in, gently set a boundary and stated that we were moving him to Kahn Academy.  My heart leaped in my chest as William started to thrash and whine, an ingrained response I still have to the feeling of “always escalating” from Cooper’s violent meltdowns at this age.

But soon William settled, and Cooper climbed into his bed to help him. They then worked on math games with the door closed so they could have “privacy” together.  They used the glorious and terrible screen together until it was time for school and then they headed out into snow, regulated and happy.