Phone Addiction and the Effects of Technology
In recent decades technology has advanced so quickly that socially we have struggled to adjust. We all don’t even use the same words to describe fairly common problems. When people talk about phone addiction, they might be referring to any combination of the following:
- Internet surfing
- Texting
- Calling (audio)
- Video calling
- Video game addiction
- Social media addiction
- Addiction to screen time
- Virtual addiction
- Porn addiction
- Abuse of digital devices
- Electronics addiction
- Addiction to technology
The list of devices used in addiction to a virtual world is endless: phone, computer, television, iPad, video game console, and so on.
What Is Addiction?
All the above electronic devices have some potentially positive uses—sometimes lifesaving uses—so I am not suggesting that electronic technology itself is a problem. No, the problems arise when we human beings abuse the use of these devices, as we have learned to abuse so many other good things in the world: food, exercise, education, books, travel, politics, and more.
It should be obvious, then, that we need to be aware of ‘when’ we change our use of an electronic device from a asset to an addiction. It might help first to clearly define what an addiction is. It’s not about the number of hours we do a thing. It’s about how that behavior affects our lives.
Addiction is the compulsive use of any substance, person, feeling, or behavior with little or no concern for the potentially negative social, psychological, job, and physical consequences. Perhaps an even shorter definition might help: Addiction is using anything that affects us negatively, and which we can’t easily quit.
Do You Have a Child Who is Addicted to Electronic Devices or Other Screens?
Look for the Signs.
Dependence on phone
Does your child seem to look at the content on his or her phone like a kind of emotional food?
Sneaking
If their phone use is restricted, do they sometimes sneak extra time?
Irritable
If their phone use is interrupted by other activities, or by lack of Internet reception, do they become irritable? Like someone withdrawing from a substance?
Isolated
Do they often use their phone in a place where they can be alone?
Neglecting responsibilities
Are they neglecting their chores, homework, and other members of the family?
Upset
Do they get upset about some communications on social media? Or brag about others?
Angry
Do you get “attitude” from them when you tell them to put the phone away for whatever reason?
Procrastinate
Do they consistently put off homework and other duties to be on their phone?
Annoyed
If you require that they put their phone away to do something else for you, are they annoyed?
Takes phone to bed
If you didn’t impose restrictions, would they go to bed with their phone?
Doesn't listen
Do you often have to repeat yourself to him or her, because the first time you spoke, they were completely immersed in their phone?
Don't hear you
When you call them for dinner, is it like they’re deaf or dead?
Phone use at meals
Do they ever use their phone while you’re having a family activity, including meals?
Whining
When you interrupt their phone use, do they often say things like, “Just five more minutes,” or “Oh, come on”?
Disconnected
Do they have significant activities in the real world outside school and home—sports, outdoors?
These are not small questions. One out of three teens goes to sleep with their phone ON them—touching them—not just nearby. It’s an epidemic.
A recent large medical study indicated that failure to limit screen time was the most important single factor negatively affecting brain function in children and teens. Phones have been proven to adversely affect their emotional, physical, social, and academic health. We have to pay attention to this disorder that has snuck up on us with alarming speed.
Are you not tired of having your child kidnapped by a screen? Do you want to help your child avoid effects that could negatively impact them for the rest of their lives? I wish I were exaggerating.
There IS a Solution—
How to Help a Child Addicted to Their Phone
I’m here to tell you that there IS a solution for the symptoms you’re seeing in your child. And we’re not talking about controlling or minimizing the addiction. That’s not nearly enough.
We’re talking about a real transformation where your child becomes truly happy, fulfilled, responsible, and, well, a human being again.
Welcome to the answers you've been hoping for.
For a long time now, you’ve been looking for ways to help your child. I greatly admire what you’re doing right now. You’re looking for answers, you’re trying to love and help your child, which is way more than most parents do.
And finally, you’re in the right place.
Desperately Looking for Help for Your Child's Phone Addiction
It’s like you’ve been paddling around in the middle of the ocean, desperately looking for help, and now—almost unbelievably—it’s here. This is the ship you’ve been looking for.
How could I possibly make such an extravagant promise? Because I KNOW how to teach parents how to help their children deal with the life-altering distractions of phones. What I teach has been used by uncounted THOUSANDS of parents, and it works CONSISTENTLY.
I’m not trying to sell you something here that we’re GOING to do. You don’t have to wait. The training begins right now. In the next few seconds, I’ll be teaching you things about your children and yourselves that you’ve never known.
I repeat: I’m not here to tell you ABOUT what I’m offering you. I’m beginning now to GIVE you what you need. It’s my gift to you.
What a relief to know that right now you’re exactly where you’ve wanted to be. You can learn what you need to learn. Finally, you can feel encouraged. You can feel hope. You can help your child.
And I’m going to help you do that.
Your Child is a Phone Addict,
and You Want to Do something About It
I know you’ve tried to change things: maybe counseling, certainly nagging, books, programs, yelling, controlling. But your child still buries their face in a screen—texting, playing games, and imitating human connection on social media.
And you’re frustrated and tired.
You’ve been looking for something that works, and here it is: principles that have proven to work hundreds of thousands of times all over the world.
You would not be here unless two things were true:
If parents are thoroughly committed to learning and practicing what I’m going to share with you, predictably I see children quit their electronics addiction, and instead they become happy—even after everything else has failed.
You become happy too.
It is NOT hopeless
I’m here to help you, and I’ll be using the insight and experience of counseling with thousands of parents, and from writing 20 books and endless articles on the subject, as well as appearing on 1600 radio and television shows and presenting seminars all around the world—and much more.
You are about to change the world around you, and you don’t have to do it alone, which is miserable and frustrating. You’ve already proven that with your own experience.
What You Will Learn That You Don’t Already Know
So now the question that has to be on your mind: what am I going to teach you about your child and addiction that you don’t already know?
What am I going to say that you haven’t already read in a parenting book or heard from a program somewhere?
This is going to be revolutionary for you to hear, so slow down your brain and listen with your soul: What does a child NEED more than anything else? After food, water, and air, the answer is SO obvious, and yet we keep missing it—over and over.
To see the answer, let’s start with an infant. When an infant cries—other than from obvious physical pain—what does he want? You already know, because you just pick him up. You’re pretty smart. You already know that every child wants to feel cared for. Every child wants to feel LOVED.
Picking them up and holding them is just a demonstration of that. And if you’re genuine in caring about them, they FEEL it.
But infants are relatively easy to love. They smile and melt your heart, make cute little noises, and laugh in ways we never hear anywhere else. They’re adorable.
But when they get older, they learn to spill things, make messes, ferociously say NO when you tell them what to do, scream in their car seat, fight with their siblings, refuse to listen to you, say ugly and hateful things to you and other people . . . and disappear into their phones.
They get a LOT harder to love, and when that happens, we really don’t know what to do. Usually we try to control their behavior—and we might even temporarily succeed—but it doesn’t last, and we end up with kids who are still addicted and unhappy.
We’re not so happy either.
Loving Your Children Unconditionally
Let me say this another way:
If our children become more difficult to love as their behavior changes, that proves we don’t know how to love them UNCONDITIONALLY.
If we love them unconditionally, we’d love them no matter what.
But if loving them becomes more difficult when they’re difficult when they behave badly, our love is conditional.
Unconditional love or Real Love means caring about another person without wanting anything from then in return, but we DO expect something in return for the “love” we give our children: respect, cooperation, gratitude, and a certain level of reasonable and relatively easy behavior, which does not include screen addiction.
The Real Effect of Anger and Disappointment
Now more about unconditional love: That kind of love would mean that our love would not be affected by what they do. That’s what unconditional love means.
But we really don’t know how to do that. How do I know? We PROVE it every time we become angry, or disappointed, or impatient, or irritated at them. Our anger and disappointment and frustration are undeniable PROOF that our love is not unconditional.
Deep inside, you know that what I’m saying is true, but let me demonstrate further: When other people are angry at YOU, do YOU like it? NO, you don’t. Not ever. Nobody does. When other people are angry at us, or when we’re angry at other people, we’re all saying, “Look at what you did to ME, or failed to do FOR ME.”
In anger, we’re focused on OURSELVES—Me-Me-Me—and in that moment other people—notably our children—hear only four words, “I don’t love you.” When we’re angry, we’re far too occupied with ourselves to unconditionally love another person.
I repeat:
When we are angry at another person, including our child, they hear only, "I don't love you."
I promise you that this is true.
No, we don’t MEAN to say that, but what else COULD people hear while our words, tone, and behavior are screaming ME-ME-ME? “I don’t love you” is what YOU hear and FEEL when people are angry at you—think about it honestly—and it’s what our children hear and feel when we’re angry at them. And then we have an anxious child or anxious teenager.
It’s little wonder that they respond with their own anger.
Again, we do NOT mean to do this. We do not mean to hurt our children.
But it was inevitable, because WE were not loved unconditionally—which means being consistently loved without disappointment or anger. We were not loved freely, without conditions—so how could we possibly have learned how to unconditionally love our own children? IMPOSSIBLE.
Nobody is to blame. Our ignorance of Real Love simply perpetuated over generations. We don’t know how to love unconditionally because we’ve never seen it or felt it with any consistency.
Childhood and Teenage Phone Addiction—
a Reaction to Not Being Loved Unconditionally
For emphasis, I’m going to say all this in a slightly different way:
When children behave badly—when they are addicted to their phones, for example—it is almost always a reaction to them not feeling loved unconditionally—loved with no disappointment, irritation, frustration, or anger. Your child uses their smart phone to ESCAPE the pain of the world. Full stop. What are you willing to do about that?
This could sound discouraging, even bleak. In some ways it IS bleak. Look at the world—at the utter obsession with things that are distractions from our pain, from our not feeling loved: like endless entertainment, addiction to electronics, anger, controlling people, drugs, alcohol, sex, and on and on.
THERE is the proof—in our addiction to all those behaviors—that overall we do not know how to love people unconditionally. If we did, and I speak here with vast experience, these behaviors would not exist.
Children and Teenagers Who are Loved Unconditionally Don't Become Addicted to Phones and Other Devices
I’ve been teaching unconditional love now for so many years to so many parents that I can tell you this with complete certainty: When a child truly feels loved unconditionally, he or she DOES NOT become addicted to their phone.
Instead they’re HAPPY—and responsible, and have all those qualities you wish they had.
With sufficient love, there is simply no NEED to turn to phones, games, social media, and other unproductive behaviors. Happy people don’t behave badly—like being addicted to their phone, for example. Period. Full stop. It seems almost like this statement is too broad, too much. It’s not.
Why You're Not succeeding in Helping Your Children with their Phone Addiction
How many times have you wondered why a child isn’t hearing what you’re saying? There’s an answer, and here it is: Because when you’re irritated, your child hears only “I don’t love you,” and that is so devastating, that he or she hears none of the rest of the content of what you say.
So THAT is what I'll be teaching you:
How to LOVE your children unconditionally,
which then gives them a REASON to LISTEN to you.
If you love them unconditionally, they can HEAR you —what you’re really saying—because they’re not distracted by their fear, not blinded and deafened by the “I don’t love you” message. Then it becomes possible for you to teach them anything—like how to be loving and responsible themselves.
And if they have that powerful trifecta—they feel loved, and they are loving and responsible—they are guaranteed to be happy, which is the ultimate goal for any parent, or, frankly, any person.
Your Children Can Learn to Be Happy
Your children can learn that being genuinely happy is way better than substituting screens, texting, games, and social media for real life.
Take my hand, and we’ll talk about what you can do—and how I will support you. It will almost be like starting over in parenting. You’re going to LEARN how to be a real parent, and your child will learn the lessons of life that will benefit him or her for the rest of their lives.
If you implement what you learn here, and if you do it consistently, you simply will not believe the differences you’ll see in your child, and in you, and in your family.
Imagine it:
no more phone distractions—none,
no more inattention,
no more tension in the family,
no more whining when you say it's time to be finished with a game or conversation.
It’s astonishing to see and to feel.
Our children are not bad. We’re not bad.
We just have not known how to love and teach them.
Loving and Teaching Eliminates
Phone & Screen Addiction in Children and Teenagers
What we’re doing to help our kids with their screen addiction IS NOT WORKING.
Loving and teaching them does.
Rarely is it too late to change whatever unproductive behaviors you’re dealing with, not if you’re really willing to learn and to apply these principles to the interactions with your child. I can promise you, learning how to be a parent is WORTH IT.
You’re about to learn how to ELIMINATE the behaviors in your children that are hurting them and making you crazy. Really.
I make you another promise:
Learning to be a loving, effective parent is EASIER than everything else you’ve done as a parent.
Transforming, Not Managing Your Children
We’re really going to get into this. This is not a casual effort. We’re not looking to make your children more manageable. That’s not even close to being enough.
Our mission is to help you to become a powerful and effective parent, and to help your child feel loved, and to be loving, responsible, and genuinely happy. It’s a transformation.
If you ARE truly committed to learning how to parent, I’M fully committed to teach you, and I will bring resources to the table you never thought about. The rewards are spectacular—as we have seen in uncounted thousands of families.
There is not a single thing you’ll ever do that will ring through the ages more powerfully than being a loving and effective parent.
You can do this, so let's get started.
Click the button below—it’s free—to begin transforming your life as a Ridiculously Effective Parent.