Guiding Your Family toward Emotional Health
Episode 8 Healthy Family Boundaries for Social Media
Dasha Cochran: Pretty much all of our digital products were designed to be addictive, designed as a drug, and they have very same effect on our brains as any other stimulant drug would be. So we're talking like LSD or cocaine. So any type of a excitatory drug. But it can actually be more addictive, because you know when somebody is taking cocaine, they're not taking it like 200 times a day.
But if you think about how many times we touch our phone, or we go on social media, or we engage in any kind of screen, it's like we're taking this microdosing, we're microdosing essentially on a stimulant.
John Yoder: Greetings everybody. Pastor John Yoder here. Welcome back to our podcast, and specifically to today's episode, “Healthy Family Boundaries for Social Media”. Friends, it is so easy for parents and children alike to become addicted to screens. Those of you who have immigrated to the United States understand the kind of intense pressure that your children face both academically and culturally.
On the academic side, for those of you who have come here from refugee camps and other places with lower levels of education, it is a struggle for your children simply to get a high school diploma. For those of you who came to the United States with a good education and a high salary, there's intense pressure on your kids to get the kind of grades to get into a good university or graduate school.
In addition to the academic pressures, there is cultural pressure on your kids. In the classroom and in the workplace, they need to understand how to function the American way. Not just to understand English, but to understand systems and structures and how people get along. But at home, in the immediate family, or in the extended family, or in the church, there is the expectation for those children to behave in a different cultural manner, maybe to function in another language, and perhaps even to become fully fluent in two different languages.
This adds another level of academic stress to those students. When kids have finished everything that they need to do academically, they've finished their homework, they've done all they need to do for school, they've done all they need to do to keep people content socially, the easiest thing to do to reward them is to say, you can look at a screen. Now that could be television, it could be social media, it could be videos. It could be a lot of different things.
There are some disadvantages to making screens the primary place where we spend our downtime. One is diminished people skills. A second are depression and anxiety, the kind of things that we've talked about in our previous two episodes.
A third are benign side effects of the internet. Things we're going to talk about in this episode. Things like reduced attention span, fear of missing out, sleep deprivation, and a permanent digital footprint.
Our next episode is entitled “Warding Off Online Predators, Bullies, and other Bad Actors”. In this episode, we will talk about some of the more benign side effects of social media addiction, but next time we will talk about some of the truly toxic people that are out there online.
Then in episode ten, two weeks from now, our title is “Raising Socially Savvy Kids”. And we're going to talk about moving beyond the pressures of academia, beyond the cross-cultural pressures, and beyond screen time, to helping both young people and adults develop the kind of people skills that we need to build strong families, strong churches, and a strong society.
If you enjoy this [00:04:00] podcast, we have other free resources for you available at www.immigrantministry.com/ccp. That stands for Cross-Cultural Parenting. You will find a link there to join our Facebook group where you can not only listen in to pastors and counselors, but engage with them and ask questions.
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We have been absolutely blessed with a marvelous lineup of Christian counselors who are providing these podcast interviews for us. Two of them that you will hear today, you've met in the past. Dr. Dasha Cochran is a Russian American. Christine Chow is a Malaysian American. And right now we have a new sister to introduce to you. Her name is Jacqueline Crake, and I will let her introduce herself.
Jacqueline Crake: So I was born in Houston, and then my dad's job moved us up to the Dallas area in when I was five. So Dallas has been home. My dad is a first [00:06:00] generation Mexican American. My mom is Mexican. So she was born in Mexico. I grew up in a very classic Mexican American household. But my husband is American, doesn't speak Spanish.
When I came back from the UK, I studied, I got my master’s in counseling, took the national counseling exam, moved back to Dallas, started working in practice, a group practice. I earned my hours for my license, and I was in private practice. And now I work full-time at my church in Dallas, and get to practice counseling here, which has been such a gift.
John Yoder: Ever wonder why screens are so addictive? Dasha explains to us screens are addictive because it is what they were designed to be.
Dasha Cochran: There is actually a really interesting book. It's a toxic book, but I feel like every parent should read it just to know it's out there. It's called “Hooked” like on a hook. [00:07:00] And it essentially was written by a psychologist who works for tech companies and he was basically explaining to the tech workers how to make digital products as addictive as possible. They call it “delightful”, AKA addictive product.
Pretty much all of our digital products were designed with that in mind. They were designed to be addictive, designed as a drug, and they have very same effect on our brains as any other stimulant drug would be. So we're talking like LSD or cocaine. So any type of a excitatory drug will have almost exactly same effect--withdrawal symptoms, so on and so forth.
But it can actually be more addictive because when somebody is taking cocaine, they're not taking it like 200 times a day. But if you think about how many times we touch our phone or we go on social media, or we engage in any kind of screen, it's like we're taking this micro [00:08:00] microdosing, we're microdosing essentially on a stimulant.
John Yoder: Today, Jacqueline shares with us four ways in which excessive screen time can be harmful. The first of them is a reduced attention span.
Jacqueline Crake: If our kids see us trying to have time alone in God's Word, but they see our phones next to us and we're constantly getting pinged. It's real for our children, but it is also so real for us.
Anytime I sit down to read God's Word, if my phone is around me. And sometimes it's hard 'cause my phone is also a resource for commentaries and videos that I want to read alongside my Bible. So if I don't put it on Do Not Disturb, or put it in the next room, I can easily fall into responding to messages, looking up something that I thought of online.
And so I think modeling it is really important. Just saying Hey, from this time to this time, [00:09:00] no screens. And mom's doing that as well, and dad's doing that as well. And so you can go outside, you can read a book but we're not doing screens for this amount of time.
John Yoder: The second issue that Jacqueline addresses is FOMO, which stands for Fear Of Missing Out.
Jacqueline Crake: Social media presents that FOMO of oh, then we start to think this person posted that they went on this vacation. I should go on a vacation too. Now I started off with just five minutes of scrolling, and now I'm planning a vacation that I want to go on in the next few months, and so it just is this ongoing cycle of desire for more.
John Yoder: The next issue that Jacqueline addresses is sleep disruption.
Jacqueline Crake: Anytime we're looking at a screen, our brains are stimulated. And it's gonna, because the blue light in a screen kind of gives our brains this idea that it's time to be awake. Our brain just is [00:10:00] energized and wakes up. We get dopamine hits anytime we look at a screen. We even this desire to say okay, five more minutes, or like a little bit more time to scroll. Our brain always is gonna want some more of it no matter how much we say. Okay, that's enough.
And so I think our body loves routine, and having a same time to go to bed each night. Social media and screen time really disrupts that because we think, as I said already, five more minutes, it'll be great. And then we're in like an hour later.
John Yoder: The final issue that Jacqueline addresses is our digital footprint, which we could also call our digital shadow or our permanent record. And the point is to say that anything we post online could remain there forever and affect us in the future.
Jacqueline Crake: But I would say every job that I have interviewed for since I graduated college in [00:11:00] 2012 has asked for any kind of social media handle in the application. The implications are, that communicates to me that this job in their hiring process is going to go look at my social media and see if there's anything there that would disqualify me from being capable of doing this job that I want.
And so I think educating our kids on those kinds of things hey, this isn't only something that is right now and will go away. It's something that is out there for a long time. And like I said earlier, you never know who is gonna screenshot something and then it's theirs forever.
John Yoder: I talk to a lot of people from a lot of perspectives and I hear a lot of different things, but one of the ways that I know when I'm onto something is when I talk to people from different perspectives and they say the same thing. Our three counselors today are Russian, Latino, [00:12:00] and Asian, but they say the same thing as we close, and that is this: It is not enough for parents to set rules about social media usage. They need to lead by example. Here's what Dasha has to say.
Dasha Cochran: I don't know if you're familiar with AA, but it all starts with this idea of awareness. Right? “Hi, my name is Dasha and I'm an alcoholic”. This is how I would introduce myself if I were to attend AA.
So for us as parents, I think just sitting down with a child and say let's look at what's happening. What do you think? Tell me more. Do you know how many, how much time you have to spend on social media? Or how much time you spend playing video games? Or maybe a couple of hours.
Okay this next few days, why don't we just track it? Why don't we just track it and we see how much time you actually are spending playing your video game, and go ahead and add all the time. You're not playing, but you're still thinking about the game. Let's see how much of your time it actually [00:13:00] consumes. So the first step is really awareness and awakening.
I will also say that we as parents are also addicted and they see it, right? Maybe we're not addicted to video games, though many of us are. We might be addicted to our phones. We might be addicted to Facebook, right? Or to TV. And so it can really be an awakening for a family to say, what is our consumption across the board, right?
Like, how much time are we devoting? Can this time be spent in any other way that will benefit us? What are the costs? What are the benefits of living that kind of lifestyle?
John Yoder: It's always easiest to set boundaries when children are young and they grow up with them, but sometimes it's unavoidable that you have to start a new boundary in their teen years. Jacqueline shares that it's best for parents in that situation, not just to set rules, but to lead by example.
Jacqueline Crake: I always appreciated when my parents were honest with me. And I always appreciate when parents are [00:14:00] honest, just in general. And I know I've worked some with teenagers and they love, they're not adults, but they love to be treated like humans.
Having an honest conversation with your teenager and saying, Hey, I am learning a lot. I've never parented a teenager before. This is my first time and I'm learning a lot right now. And one of the things that I'm learning is that a lot of our screens actually impact us in negative ways. And so I would like to try to do this.
And you may not get positive feedback from your teenager, but also understanding that they're teenagers, they're driven by emotion. Their prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed yet. But God has entrusted you with this teenager. So you are in some ways I think parents, sometimes just need permission like you're in charge here. You're the adult here. And so it's [00:15:00] okay for you to say, Hey, this is what we're gonna start implementing in our home.
John Yoder: Whenever we take something away, it's always important to put something else positive in its place. Christine recommends that when we limit screen time, that we replace it with social interaction time.
Christine Chow: Yeah, I think that would be very difficult to undo a habit, especially if it's been for many years and set. But most importantly, it needs to start with the parents. If parents are on screens a lot, on your phone, you are not gonna be able to get your child off the screen.
Because oftentimes it's what we do, rather than what we say that our children follow. So they have to understand what's going on in me, what am I doing and how could I model, and then invite my child to join me in what I'm modeling rather than, putting a principle on a child that we [00:16:00] ourselves are not living by. So that would be one thing.
And I think, when you've got a habit already going you might need to think of a way to break that is more encouraging because it, it could easily get locked into a power struggle, which actually destroys connection even more. We could come at it with rules and just say I said that you can only have two hours of screen time and that's it, and I'm gonna take away your devices, no ifs and buts about it. And then the team's really angry with you.
And our goal is to deepen connection. That did not do that. So it might be important to tap into maybe families with other youth and invite them over. Because a teen usually would wanna come out when another youth that, especially if it's someone from school that they're friends with, or someone from church that are in the same youth group with them that they really like and get along with.
Start there. And then begin to work a habit into it. Hey, I really [00:17:00] enjoyed that dinner time with our friends. Let's have them over more often. Let's have family dinners together more often. Like slowly work that in to change a habit rather than coming at it with rules, but coming at it with more action. And yeah and more gradual change rather than, immediate demands.
John Yoder: Dasha shares a story of how they actually implement social media boundaries in her family.
Dasha Cochran: And we were really convicted, my husband and I, back in January that we really wanted to do something. But he works in tech. He's on the computer all day long so it's really hard for him and hard for me in some ways too.
So we decided February, every February it's gonna be our screen free month. We're fasting from screens. Now we still have to use them for work, but we set their specific limits about when the kids can use them. My kids are teens. My youngest one is 11, my oldest is 16. Then we add another component, like plan to replace it with something valuable, like something fun, right?
So we took a ski trip. We planned something every weekend to where we would go out and go kayaking, or go to a new restaurant, or check out an interesting museum, or get together with friends and let them know we are off screens.
So when you're taking something away, you gotta replace it. It's kinda like Jesus says, right? If the demon was cast out and the house is empty, it's fair game. So that same principle works for addictive behavior. So take something out, do it collectively. Create awareness. And then make sure you replace it with something.
I think a very toxic situation, which we all parents do that is to say, Get off that device. Get off. While we're on our phones, and then we are not paying attention to them. Go do your homework. And we are not setting the example to say, Hey, actually, let's figure out together how to make this better for all of us.
John Yoder: The book of Proverbs says to us, “In the multitude of advisors is wisdom”. Friends, you've just heard from three completely different counselors from different backgrounds, that we need social boundaries, not for individuals, but for entire families. Next time we're going to talk about warding off online predators, bullies, and other bad actors. Don't forget to check out our resources at www.immigrantministry.com/ccp. I'll see you next time.
