You Should Never Let Your Child Have Screen Time During This Key Moment
For overwhelmed parents, there’s often a gulf between screen time goals and screen time reality. You’ve seen recommendations from organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, which say that kids age 2 and under should have virtually no screen time, and that screen time should be monitored and limited for older kids, too. You may even have set up your child’s iPad to turn off automatically after a certain number of minutes.
But the doctors and psychologists writing those recommendations aren’t by your side offering wholesome face-to-face interaction when the whole house has the stomach flu, or when an older sibling needs help with homework, or when it’s not even 5 a.m. yet and you simply, desperately, need a little more sleep. In those moments, it’s just you, and you do the best you can. Sometimes, this involves pulling out the iPad or handing over your phone, and relying on a little help from Ms. Rachel or Elmo.
The good news is experts agree that the occasional surge in screen time won’t harm your child. The bad news, however, is that they also agree that you shouldn’t turn on a screen in the very moment you’re most desperate for the kind of relief it offers. When a child is having a tantrum, the “digital pacifier” of a device can bring the screaming to a halt in the moment — but it comes at a cost in the long-term.
Skills that a “digital pacifier” keeps kids from learning
Just like walking and talking, self-regulation is a skill that kids learn over time through lots of practice — and one that many of us struggle with, even as adults.
“Self-regulatory skills include managing anger or frustration, delaying gratification and maintaining focus,” Veronika Konnk, a lecturer at the ELTE Faculty of Science in Budapest, told HuffPost. The ease with which they deploy these skills differs from one child to the next based on personality and environment, including their interactions with parents and caregivers.
Konok is the author of a recent study which found that when parents used a screen to calm their children, those kids had poorer self-regulation in the long-term. Researchers surveyed Canadian parents of children ages 2 to 5 in 2020 and again in 2021, asking questions about both their child’s media use and their behavior. They found that children who were more frequently given a device to resolve their tantrums showed more anger and less “effortful control” a year later. They also found that kids who showed more anger were more likely to be given a device to calm tantrums later on. This is what is known as a “bidirectional relationship,” meaning that cause and effect are going both ways: Kids who were handed devices more, became angrier, and kids who were angrier to begin with ended up getting more frequent screen time.
“Children with behavioral issues or challenging temperaments are more likely to elicit the use of digital pacifiers, as parents may struggle to manage their frequent tantrums,” Konok said.
Determining which came first, anger or screens, is tricky, she said: “Which factor initiates the cycle can vary depending on individual circumstances.”
What the study shows, which is in line with previous research, is that frequent use of screens leads to worse self-regulation skills in kids. Parents may be able to calm a tantrum with an iPad, but the more they pull out the iPad during such moments, the more tantrums their child is likely to have.
Using digital distractions to regulate kids’ emotions prevents them from learning other ways to cope.
“When children rely on digital devices to manage distress, they miss opportunities to practice internal emotion regulation. Instead of learning coping mechanisms, they become dependent on external distractions. This dependency undermines the development of critical skills, such as self-soothing,” Konok explained.
“Occasional use in unavoidable situations is understandable, but consistent reliance can hinder long-term emotional development,” she said.
Other ways to handle a tantrum
In the privacy of your own home, it’s possible — though unpleasant — to allow a tantrum to run its course. Eventually, your kid will calm down and stop screaming, even if you do nothing. But there are things you can do that can hasten this process as well as help your child learn those self-regulation skills that can stop a future tantrum before it starts.
Tovah Klein, a psychologist who is director of the Toddler Center at Barnard College and the author of “Raising Resilience: How To Help Our Children Thrive In Times Of Uncertainty,” told HuffPost that children rely on parents and caregivers to teach them how to recognize and regulate their emotions.
Klein emphasized that this can be a lengthy, uneven process: “It takes a long time to fully learn to manage emotions, and even when a child is better at it, when they are tired, overwhelmed, stressed, [or] worried they will need more help.”
Parents teach kids how to recognize their emotions by labeling them, saying things like, “You are so mad right now!” or “That puzzle piece doesn’t fit, how frustrating,” Klein explained.
Next, parents help children regulate their emotions by holding or comforting them and offering ways for kids to express negative emotions, such as stomping their feet or punching a pillow.
“This is done in the context of a loving relationship, building trust that [parents] love their children, no matter what, even if the child is upset,” Klein said.
Rather than seeing a tantrum as evidence that a child is purposefully being difficult, she said, parents should view their child’s behavior as an indication that they need help handling big emotions.
After helping the child name the emotion and making space for them to feel it, parents should reassure them “that they are not alone, the adult is there to help them.”
Other tantrum-taming strategies include removing a child from a situation, for example, by leaving a restaurant to take a short walk outside. Parents can also slow and regulate their own breathing. This “can help the child settle down as their own breathing slows to match the parent,” Klein said.
While a child may not calm down right away with a parent’s touch and reassurance — and, to the parent, these moments may feel interminable — every tantrum does eventually end.
“It is hard to witness and help a child through a tantrum, but the brain and body benefit from the repetition and practice,” Klein said.
It is by this practice that kids learn to identify and regulate their own emotions. Handing them an iPad during a tantrum cuts off this process. Without opportunities to figure out how to calm themselves down, a child won’t get any better at it, and, as Konok’s research found, the child’s emotional regulation may deteriorate even more.
Parents, of course, aren’t immune from having their own feelings when their child has a tantrum. Recognizing these feelings and calming them with deep breaths or a mantra (Klein suggested “She’s just a little girl,” or “I have to breathe and be the adult here”) can help a parent regulate — which will help the child do so as well.
“Children feel the parents’ reaction and respond to it,” Klein said.
When a child has lost control, particularly in a public place, it can help to remember that kids need to experience the whole arc of a tantrum — the rise and fall — in order to learn how to self-regulate. This means that in order to grow out of having tantrums, they will need to have some. By recognizing your child’s feelings and providing a calm presence for them — and withholding the iPad — you contribute to their emotional growth and maturation.
