If you follow my blog (which I hope you do!), you might know that I love my nonfiction self-help books. The most recent one I devoured was Indistractible, by Nir Eyal. The book is all about focusing your attention on the things you really want out of life, and not letting distractions (technology, usually) cause you to veer off-course. The cure-all to limiting my time on Facebook and not clicking on all the ads for the very same dress I was eyeing at Nordstrom? Yes, please!
One piece of the book that really resonated with me was Eyal’s section on promoting indistractibility in our kids. As any parent these days tries to do, I work at limiting my kids screen time as much as any other, but I often wonder how much of what I’m constantly nagging them to do is going to carry through to their teenage years or adulthood. Is my NBA-Live obsessed 11-year-old going to turn into a moody 16-year-old that won’t get off his phone to leave his room?
If Eyal has anything to do with it, hopefully not.
He outlines basic strategies to teach kids indistractibility, and challenges the notion that technology is to blame for kids attention issues these days. He says that kids need three psychological nutrients to thrive, and when they don’t get them, they turn to technology to fill the void. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness are actually what all humans need to survive. He argues that kids these days have more restrictions than even US Marines (even prisoners!) and that this lack of autonomy and control over their own life causes them to look online for this control. The same goes for competence – where a child can excel at a certain online game, and relatedness – where online social networks are king.
The key to getting them off the devices, says Eyal, is fulfilling all of these needs offline, encouraging your kids to take small risks, to give them some control over how they spend their time, and allow for failure. It’s not that technology itself is causing the addiction, it’s that they don’t have enough control in their own lives to see technology for what it really is – a tool and not a life in itself.
This all seems very good and well, but when it comes down to the day to day, especially during times like this, limiting screen time seems near impossible. At least that’s what it feels like to me.
So what’s a well-meaning (and sometimes desperate) parent to do?
One strategy Eyal suggests is talking to your kids about how you struggle with the same pull towards your device. You can tell them that you want to be intentional about setting aside time for what he calls “traction,” that is – the opposite of distraction. That means spending your time focused on doing things that support your goals and values: i.e. finishing that assignment for English class because you want to do well in that class, or spending time with family because building relationships with the people you love is important to you.
Coming up with a clear plan for how they want to manage their time allows for less ambiguity and distraction to take hold. I know this works for myself, when I have a set schedule for the day, as opposed to an entire day of freedom ahead of me, when I usually accomplish very little of what I meant to (unless doing nothing was my goal, in which case – awesome!).
He also suggests giving kids flexibility to determine how much time is enough screen time. I’ve seen this work when I ask my son how long he needs to finish his game, and he says 15 minutes. Sometimes he gets off in 15 minutes, but often, he complains again when I remind him about his precommitment. In this case, Eyal suggests telling your child that you’re going to revisit that topic if he can’t keep to his commitment. Perhaps a timer would help as well, so that he is managing it on his own without your nagging.
The point is for him to learn to manage distractions internally, so that as he gets older, he can continue to use this important skill. When we, as parents, are doing all the managing, what happens when you take the external management away? It’s the internal values and commitment that stay with us through life, not the external controls that are placed on us.
So can we make our kids be indistractible? If you’ve learned anything from this post, it’s that we can’t make our kids do anything, at least anything that requires their wholehearted buy-in. But we can live the values we want them to internalize, making traction a priority in our lives. We can show them how we struggle with the same things, but we are working to overcome the distraction. As with anything in life, “according to the effort is the reward.” And for indistractibility, the reward is huge.
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