Impulsive kids easy prey for addictive-by-design content

The end of a typical school day in my house is punctuated by the noisy entrance of my three boys and a hasty request, “Mom can I use your phone?”

The allure of the screen is powerful, and despite working full-time in the realm of media literacy education, my home is not immune to the siren song of social media.

The rise of the smartphone and subsequent death of the landline has fundamentally shifted the way children interact with peers outside of school hours. While mine do still run down the block to knock on the doors of their friends’ homes, gone are the days where a phone call was the way to arrange a meetup.

Instead, either I act as personal assistant to broker their social engagements via texts with people who are saved in my contacts with names like “Timothy’s mom Maria,” or they hop on some kind of chat or messaging app to make arrangements themselves.

As they get older, the latter is becoming more prevalent. But they’re still very young — my eldest is just finishing Grade 7 — and I have so far resisted buying them their own phones.

This means, however, that when they need to communicate with the outside world, they ask to use mine. Mine, that is already logged into my own Facebook, Tiktok, Bluesky, Instagram and YouTube accounts.

And what’s a kid to do while waiting for a buddy to text them back (likely also from a parent’s phone) but explore the sparkly and shiny world of endless short videos and hot takes available on those platforms?

And can you blame a busy mom for absorbing a few moments of focus and productivity between the work day and the inevitable chauffeur duties when dinner needs to get on the table?

This is the slippery slope of how my kids end up online more than I’d like.

Kids are fractured into individual realms, fed addictive-by-design content that they don’t yet have the impulse control or emotional maturity to regulate.

Sometimes it’s nice to pretend I haven’t noticed how quiet they are, sometimes it’s the most convenient tool to end the incessant Itchy-and-Scratchy level of sibling provocation that goes on in my house.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this. And I’m sure I’m not the only one extremely uncomfortable with this either.

The hard truth is that some of that fractious behaviour is because of the frenetic videos they’ve watched. Gone are the days of shared TV cartoons after school. Instead, the kids are fractured into individual realms, fed addictive-by-design content that they don’t yet have the impulse control or emotional maturity to regulate.

Their little brains have been flooded with messages too quickly to digest, with hits of dopamine completely divorced from any personal effort or connection to lived experience.

Their behaviour is orders of magnitude worse after these screen sessions than before. They become frustrated that the real world doesn’t provide the same level of stimulus, and that spills over into frustration with the people with whom they live.

I’m hopeful the upcoming social media ban for children will have some effect, but I’m also all too aware that kids who are too young to have their own devices are frequently on their parents’ — no need for age screening when the app has already been installed by an adult.

We need a reset, and perhaps the social media ban and its endorsement by Doctors Manitoba will provide that.

We need a reset, and perhaps the social media ban and its endorsement by Doctors Manitoba will provide that.

So we’re going 100 per cent screen-free in my house for at least the next two weeks. I will handle the social arrangements and my phone will be for little else.

We’ve framed it as an adventure, an experiment, and something we’ll discuss and navigate together at the dinner table.

We’ll reflect on how we’re feeling, how we’re getting along and what we’ve accomplished. And then we’ll make a plan going forward, so we’re aware if it creeps up on us again.

This household (and hopefully, provincial) clampdown isn’t because kids are sneaky and take advantage, but because they simply don’t stand a chance at self-regulation against content designed to be addictive by experts in developmental psychology with MBAs.

The slope (and the slop) is just too slippery for us to allow our children to slide down into it.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers

Rebecca Chambers
Writer

Rebecca explores what it means to be a Winnipegger by layering experiences and reactions to current events upon our unique and sometimes contentious history and culture. Her column appears alternating Saturdays.

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