Your Kids Learn By Mimicking You

Your children, atleast in their formative years, learn as much from watching you, watching what you do & from their environment as they learn from what you communicate verbally to them.

If you’re aggressive with your spouse or your colleagues or if you are sarcastic, abusive, condescending, dismissive, angry or ignorant to the people around you, that is exactly the kind of behavior your child will imbibe to a certain degree.

If you are sitting at the desktop or on the phone with your neck bent over it for the majority of the day, that is the kind of life your kid will emulate & live out too. Somewhere they will tell themselves, albeit unconsciously, that the virtual worlds that mommy & daddy peer into their devices with bent necks & folded arms is more fascinating than the world outside of it.

Even with their developing brains, they will for sure find it hypocritical if you ask them or scold them to not spend excessive time on screens and devices when you yourself spend the better part of your day on a screen.

You are leading them up for screen addiction sooner or later because all they see is how mom or dad just cannot stop using these digital devices themselves.

Not to mention that the age by which kids now have access to personalized screens like Ipad or a smartphone has dropped lower and lower over time. What used to be ages of 10 or 15 two decades ago before a child could access a smartphone has now dropped down to as low as 3 or 5.

A 2020 study conducted in the Department of Pediatrics, University of Michigan of 346 English-speaking parents or guardians with kids between the ages of 3 to 5 found that: “The sample comprised 126 Android users (35 tablets, 91 smartphones) and 220 iOS users (143 tablets, 77 smartphones); 35.0% of children had their own device. The most commonly used applications were YouTube, YouTube Kids, Internet browser, quick search or Siri, and streaming video services. Average daily usage among the 121 children with their own device was 115.3 minutes/day (SD 115.1; range 0.20–632.5) and was similar between Android and iOS devices.”

Parents need to be mindful that in addition to denying access & creating barriers between their kids & addictive technologies, they themselves need to de-addict & distances themselves from their devices AND more importantly live a fun & happening life alongside it rich with hobbies, quality social connections and great family time. Because the impression that you want to leave on your kids is not just of digital minimalism but that by minimizing digital time-spend, you actually get to live a fantastic life in place of it.

When your kids see the fun things they will miss out on if they spend too much time on their devices, they will atleast have something worth abstaining digitally from. Doesn’t mean they are immune to the lure of the web and they will be renounce their devices with open arms.

You will still have to fight for it because the dopamine high of the social medias & digital graphics is too strong for their nascent developing brains. But at the very least you will have a fighting chance of raising them right, in this generation that is born into digital, where the entire ecosystem is centered around digital technology, where even before kids reach the age of 10 they are addicted, dependent & shaped by their devices and have with very little frame of reference outside of their digital worlds.