Dr. Anna Lembke

I think most parents are struggling with this in some form or another.

I was interested that initially you sort of framed giving your daughter an iPad as if it were maybe less addictive than the phone.

Yes.

But I would say that's not really the case.

Any device that gives that child that kind of visual and audio stimulation and has access to the internet where they can see an infinite number of videos, including, by the way, videos that you probably would be horrified to know she was watching.

Okay, so I think this is a really important piece that

Or even that they know what their kid is doing or what the Internet... Because the Internet will push to your child stuff that they're not even looking for and haven't even considered.

That's one thing.

The second thing is we always need to think of the age of the child.

10 years old is still within a frame, an age range, when you do have control as a parent and can do more.

And what I would recommend first, and by the way, I'm contrasting that to older teenagers where they're out in the world.

But with a 10-year-old, here's what I recommend.

You can sit down with a 10-year-old when you're not dysregulated and they're not dysregulated, you know, you're not screaming at them to get off the iPad and say, you know what, we need to talk about this as a family.

This is a problem.

And you can describe what you see, the way she gets dysregulated, the way she kind of uses it as this transitional object, which, by the way, is a Freudian term to talk about how we do use an object to kind of get us

through emotional bumpy patches, but I would just really have a very open and transparent discussion.

And you can even bring in your own struggles with limiting your digital media use, because we're all struggling.

And I think it's good for parents to be transparent.

And then,

And this should involve, you know, your partner if you're raising her together with a partner.