Parents assume their children can control their phone habits. The problem is — they can’t.
Because the fact is that teenagers can’t regulate their impulses, as their frontal cortex — the centre for impulse control — is not developed until their 20s. This is pointed out by Dr Delaney Ruston, a physician and the director of a new documentary, “Screenagers” which delves into the complex relationship between teenagers and their screen time, as noted in The New York Times.
Though the documentary largely focuses on teenagers in the West, this problem has followed the journey of mobiles everywhere, and India is no exception.
A middle class Indian mother living in Delhi, who knows little about operating phones, was called “illiterate” by her son after she snatched it following his failure in an examination. The same son abused his father behind his back after he took his phone away following another misdemeanour. The mother, frightened to imagine how far her son’s aggression could go, handed him the phone, at least during the time that the father was asleep.
She later told the author,
He is like a man without cocaine when his phone is taken away. He gets very aggressive and calls us ignorant when we protest against his over-dependence on his phone
Of the addiction equaling cocaine, one can’t be sure. But screen time does release dopamine, the compound behind some of our most irresponsible behaviors. Now imagine the level of crippling dependence a teenager can feel to an object that excites as much as cigarettes, or sex, at an age when it’s difficult to regulate oneself.
Another boy, aged 16, cannot avoid the urge to play video games — even during his 10th board exams. He knows he has to study, and is a brilliant student, but he can’t get himself to shut the damn thing off.
So he plays it, and immediately shuts it off when he hears his mother return home from work at 4 pm.
As noted by clinical psychologist Beth Peters, and observed by thousands of parents in India and elsewhere, teenagers can even turn to dishonest means to access a gadget that has been cruelly snatched away from them.
But snatching away phones, no matter how unkind it seems to teenagers, often becomes a necessary intervention. A better way to deal (with a slightly reasonable child) is reasoning with them using facts — winning the argument by teaching them a lesson and not defeating them with punishment.
As made clear with the studies cited above, your teenager can’t really self-regulate his/her behavior. So as a parent, adding to the file of all other roles you are already playing, of a friend and guide, among others, add another one — a screen time regulator.
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