Great points, Scott! I congratulate you on sharing your touching story about your dad and your own social struggles! The point you made that; “they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” is at the core of everything you so correctly point out.

Thanks for your insight!

Fay

While the article above does give some general or academic ideas on this addiction, I don’t think doing the ideas in the above article alone will be enough. You will need to get to know your kid on a personal level and enter their world to understand them better than they know themselves before you can really help. My dad accomplished this by playing my video games with me. Even though he wasn’t that good at the games, I knew he was willing to come down to my level. Once this happened, we then had some deep chats while playing games. Through this time, we realized that I was a “future tech guy” and dad started to take me on computer fix jobs with him. It was during this time together that my dad had the most influence on me. The basic rule of mentoring applies here, they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Here’s what I had to do to combat this addiction..

1. Have the kid come to their senses and realize the problem exists on their terms. Enter their world to see what they see and what logic they use (if any) and understand why they make these decisions (Knowing is half the battle)
• Kids need to realize how awesome life can be without their phone and also the negative side of things where the end results of what this addictive nature can bring to their lives. In my case, I was too late in responding to this addiction to video/computer games and experienced social skill atrophy. Because of this, I am still a single guy at age 33. There were many girls I could have asked out on a date, but didn’t because I was so far underdeveloped socially. It was only when I had this desire to find a future Mrs. Hoopes and realized that this addiction was getting in the way of that goal that I started to go into battle against this addiction.

2. Set up a battle plan and guards to keep you on the right track
• Once the kid realizes the problem exists, then you can proceed to this step. Each kid is going to be different and will have different quirks that you will need to deal with. No two kids are the same. Some of them will need a gentle nudge and others will need a harder shove to get going and keep going. Once you understand you kid, you will then create a battle plan with them that both of you agree to. If you make a plan for the kid without their input, they will probably reject it before it even begins. In my case, this battle plan only helped when I went to my mom and dad and asked for help. They were trying to do things for years previous to this, but it didn’t work because I wasn’t on the same page as them.

3. Have real (and if necessary severe) consequences if you do get back into the addictive world of tech
• This will depend on the kid. Some kids are like my sister where my dad could have an unhappy look on his face and she would realize she needed to change her behavior. I on the other hand was the knuckle head who needed dad to remove the power supply from my computer until I snapped back into shape. The better you know your kid, the more effective the consequence will be. Also, both you and your kid will need to agree on said terms, kind of like a business contract.