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Melanie Hempe: It's not that you spend all of your time, you spend time initially setting them up to getting them used to doing things without a screen, and then you're home free because now you don't have to keep monitoring that screen. Your goal is to be able to get your kids to fall in love with real life. The screens are going to be there forever.

John Fuller: Well, technology is a big topic for parents these days. How much is too much? We have some practical advice for navigating kids and screens today for you on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

Jim Daly: Technology in my mind is rather neutral, but abuse of it, addiction to it, those kinds of things are where we get into trouble. Certainly, kids with screen time is a big problem. We were raising our boys right when screens were taking off in the early 2000s and man, Jean did a fabulous job.

If I gave a report card to the two of us, she got the A and I probably got a C in terms of monitoring and making sure that they weren't overindulging. I would say on the phones, we both did that really well. I think they were 17 and 15 before they got smartphones, and that was good. They just had the emergency flip phone for a while.

But this is a really important topic and this is where parents will have a lot of pillow talk because this is a great concern. There are practical things that you can do, and being equipped with knowledge about what works, what doesn't work, and how to be the parent in the room. We're going to talk about that with our guest today.

John Fuller: And she is passionate about this topic. Melanie Hempe is a former nurse and a mom of four adult children. She's experienced what she calls the good, the bad, and the ugly of screen times. She's written a book called *Kids' Brains and Screens: Empowering Kids to Overcome Screen Addiction*, and we'll encourage you to check that out.

Jim Daly: Melanie, welcome to Focus on the Family. It's good to have you.

Melanie Hempe: Thank you for having me.

Jim Daly: Now, I know this from our prep and all, but you were a labor delivery nurse. Man, that prepared you for this, for screen time. I mean, but it's so funny, what a stressful environment though to come along and all the things that you did to help moms become moms, first-time moms, fifth-time moms, whatever it would have been. How many years did you do that?

Melanie Hempe: Quite a few years.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you that question at the beginning. What got you into this screen teaching situation?

Melanie Hempe: Certainly wasn't by choice. It was by necessity. So, our oldest, we have four, and our oldest son was addicted to video games right under our nose and we had no idea what was happening. Being a nurse, I was very shocked at myself for not recognizing the signs.

I'll just briefly tell you, when he was little, he just loved video games. We thought he was so smart. I remember in his little footy pajamas clicking on the screen, and we just thought he was so smart. Then by middle school, he started dropping out of his sports and his extracurricular activities. My husband and I were like, "Wait a minute, is this normal for a child to want to be on a video game for hours and hours a day?"

By the time he got into high school, things started getting worse. My friend said, "Well, at least you know where he is and he's not getting in trouble." I'm like, "Well, there's still something." I had that gut feeling that something was wrong, but there were a lot of problems in our home because of it. Adam was a good kid, he had straight A's. Isn't it interesting how we assess our parenting based off our kids' grades? Because we thought we were doing a good job. We don't have to worry about this thing because he has straight A's.

Anyway, I was the game cop mom. Hated that job. Do you know what this is? The job they never tell you about where you're constantly setting the kitchen timer. "Adam, get off." It was always, "Mom, five more minutes." It started really encroaching on our family time and there were a lot of conflicts in our home because of it. Even to the point where even at Christmas, he wouldn't even want to come up and open presents. He was in the middle of his Call of Duty or whatever game he was playing.

It got really bad in ninth grade when they handed him a laptop. That's when we lost control over his time because now he was gaming all through the school day. Believe it or not, yes, this is what kids are doing. That's a whole other podcast. But we lost the ability to help him manage the time.

Jim Daly: Let me ask you, and we're going to unroll that whole story, but the developing brain. I mean, you have an RN background. What's going on with the brain, especially in the early years, and how does gaming impact that development?

Melanie Hempe: Well, I didn't know anything about that until we picked Adam up from college and he looked terrible. Let me just tell you, my nursing brain kicked into gear, we put him in the car and I'm like, "Something is wrong with him." I had to ask that question that no parent wants to ask their kid. "Adam, are you on drugs?" He said, "No, Mom, that video game did something to me. I've been in my bed for a week. I haven't gone to classes. By the way, I'm dropping out."

So I came home and to answer your question, I had to dive into what addiction does to a kid's brain because what I saw in my son was a chemical addiction. This wasn't just a regular process-looking thing. It was unbelievable what happened to him physically, emotionally, mentally, all that.

So what happens in the brain, if you know about child development, the development happens from the back to the front, from the cerebellum to the frontal cortex. That limbic area is in the middle and it's very active during especially childhood. What happens with gaming is there is a lot of dopamine that's stimulated from screens. That limbic area gets overly stimulated.

We know it takes 25 years for this development to occur all the way to the frontal cortex. That myelin is there, you're familiar with what that is, to get everything all mature. But what happens with addiction and what happens with dopamine, whether it's dopamine from cocaine, whether it's dopamine from a video game, from watching porn, from gambling, it's still the same dopamine.

Cocaine just blocks the dopamine inhibitor receptors. So now your brain thinks you've got to make more dopamine, you're still getting high on your own supply. So when your child is playing a video game, that dopamine is being triggered. It's the same dopamine as any drug. This is why they get addicted. It is a reward pathway dysfunction, if you will. As a parent, we're out there thinking, "Well, surely they would never make something that would hurt my kid."

Jim Daly: As you're parenting Adam and again, he's a metaphor for everybody's situation, whether it's an Adam or a Trent or a Troy with our boys too, and girls too. But in that context, what are the things that a parent should be looking for early on? We're going to talk about timing and some gaming is probably okay, but it can't become the thing.

Melanie Hempe: Well, it depends on what they're playing. When you're talking about what to look for, what we have discovered through the science, and I'm talking about the medical science around all this, there are certain screen applications that are very different from others.

For example, if your child is on an Excel spreadsheet and writing essays for school, they're probably not going to get addicted to that. I've never had a parent come in and say, "My kid's addicted to typing essays." That's never happened. What happens on a video game, though, is very, very different. It's a completely different thing and we call that a toxic screen. Toxic screens are video games, social media, and pornography. Those are the toxic screens that we refer to.

Parents have to understand that difference. They have to understand this is not Pac-Man. The screens today are very different from what you grew up with. It's really hard to parent that because it's like, "Well, I thought Pac-Man was okay and they could play as long as we monitor the time."

Moderation doesn't work for toxic screens. Just like you just can't do a little bit of porn and be okay. You can't just do a little bit of gambling and be okay. The way that your brain is set up, the best way to get your child addicted to a screen is, I hate to say, by giving them a little bit of time on a regular basis. That's how an addiction forms. This is medical information and this is my passion, to get parents this information so they can understand and then they can make their decisions based off of some science instead of off of some cultural opinion that changes every week or just parenting laziness. Because we're all busy and you just don't pay attention. Junior's making good grades, I think he's okay.

Jim Daly: To your point, you have three other children. Adam, I think, is your oldest, correct?

Melanie Hempe: Yes, he's our oldest.

Jim Daly: So he was in that early modality of we all don't know what we're doing here. What has changed with the younger kids? How have you approached this differently?

Melanie Hempe: With the younger kids, they saw what happened to their big brother. So it was kind of like, "Okay, guys, we're not doing this again. This gaming thing, we're not doing this." I'll never forget the day that I had a big whiteboard and I wrote down probably 20 or 30 life skills. I looked at the little boys and I said, "Okay, you're going to need to learn how to do all these life skills before you ever get a video game." One of them said, "But Mom, I'm going to be 18." I said, "You know what? You probably will be and that's okay."

Jim Daly: That's funny. I'm so curious for the parents who feel like they're in the wrestling match right now, like you're describing. How can moms and dads reel in their children's screen habits and on top of that, how can they reverse some of the effects of excessive screen use?

Melanie Hempe: You can get it back and that's our focus over here at ScreenStrong is to prevent and to reverse screen addiction. It's not that hard. In fact, it is so much easier to raise a child who's not addicted to screens than it is to raise that one who is addicted.

The way that you solve any addiction problem, it starts with access. You can try all the other things, you can do all the fancy diets around your food problems and you can do whatever, but from a medical viewpoint, you start with access and that means that you have to remove the access of the thing that's causing the addiction. This is why again moderation doesn't work for some things. For highly addictive things, moderation doesn't work.

So you take it away and believe it or not, there's a little pushback in the beginning, but this is what I get so excited about. The life that you live once you do that is so much easier. You have all these myths in your head and you think my kids are going to hate me and they're going to be left out and all these things are going to happen. None of that stuff is true.

You chose a different path because there are two paths. You get to do the cultural or the counter-cultural. You choose the counter-cultural path, it is so much easier. We never argue with the younger boys about screen time. We never had fights. I feel so bad for Adam because he remembers his childhood full of conflict and arguments and the little boys and my daughter, that's not what they remember. It's very different and it's very, very easy and we have a whole 30-day reset that we do.

Jim Daly: And again, it's not having access.

Melanie Hempe: You have to do that. You have to start with access and so, yes, you can't do, "Well, I've got the best parental control that's going to help me." I'm sorry, I hate to tell you, that is not going to work. I think that most parents figure that out.

They figure it out, they're like, "Dang, we tried this and now we're back to and it's worse than it was before." Because the way the cycle is, it's access and then it's the dopamine kicks in and then the attachment issue starts, you're detached and then what happens after that is they get anxiety and the anxiety causes the craving and they're back to their access. So you have to stop the cycle at the access.

John Fuller: Well, that's Melanie Hempe and she's our guest today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and we're talking about a tender subject for a lot of families, but she's offering a pathway for hope and we're going to encourage you to get a copy of her book called *Kids' Brains and Screens*. Stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast today.

Jim Daly: I want to ask you, again, I'm hearing the no access. For the parents that are in it, their kids, let's say they're 12, 13, they've been gaming since they were eight or nine. Describe that battle and what that looks like and how you unwind that as the parent calmly and really practical stuff here, versus the "never get on the bus" strategy for your six-year-old.

Let me give you a little background from our home back when the kids were young, the boys. We went to the zero screen. We didn't even have television. I remember having to go to friends' houses to watch, but Jean just was very good about there's other things our boys can do at 8, 9, 10, 11, and we just didn't have even television in the house. They did, they used Legos and Erector sets and they played in the basement. We had lots of marble stuff, the marble game and you connect all that and it was all really good.

But I would say, once we brought screens back in, they were probably like 12, 13 and then gaming was a little more on and that's been an issue for us. So speak to those two environments again. I know we've touched on it, but for the parent that's going, "I don't know that the battle would be worth the result."

Melanie Hempe: Well, it's a trade. So just you've got to know that you're trading and it's all about time and how your kids are going to spend their time. If you understand about the brain development, you understand all these things that have to happen while they're little because you can't go do your childhood when you're 30. You have to do these things when you're little and I think that's a big mismatch and that's what we do in our material. We really explain that to kids and to parents about what has to happen.

So that's the first thing. You have to weigh that. Now, we're not saying that all screens are bad forever and ever, but the addictive screens are, the toxic screens. So that's the video games, the social media, pornography. Those are the things you want to pull away. If you want to go watch a baseball game or football game with your family and a family movie night or anything like that, that's not the same thing.

But when you take it away, first of all, "no" is like the best word in the human language here. You have to use a coach's mentality. This is how we coach parents and this works really well. You have to take off this parenting hat. For a mom, it's going to be that emotional, "Oh, I don't want my kids to hate me." You have to take that off and you have to put your coach's hat on. Your team is losing. What does a coach do? You're in the middle of a losing season.

What do they do? They have to redo their game plan and they have to go back to the basics. Your team will follow you. Your kids will and they will be actually very happy and amazed that Mom and Dad care enough about me to do this because you're going to have to spend more time with your kids initially. That's just initially because you're training them to do all that downtime activity without a screen and they get brilliant.

Jim Daly: You mentioned Adam and the Christmas story. I want to come back to that because you said it quickly and I just want to unpack it a little bit. What was going on and looking back, what were some of the warning signs that you saw, and describe it again but let's just go slower so people can catch it.

Melanie Hempe: Sure. So one of the warning signs that I missed is that your children start to pull away from your family and that means from family traditions and activities and they would rather choose to be on their screen with their screen family, with all those players, than with you.

So at Christmas, more than once, we would be upstairs, we would have all of our traditions and Adam would be gone and he was in the basement playing video games. One year I had to go down there and I literally put Christmas lights on his computer. Like, what was I thinking? I look back and I feel like I really missed it.

This is why I want so badly for parents to hear this message. I knew something was wrong. There's something wrong when your kids don't want to come hang out with you. That's just not normal. He kept choosing his game over us. At that point in his life, he would have said that his game was way more important than his family. That's a huge warning sign.

But there were a lot of little ones that led up to that. Kids start playing more over time, they start dropping out of other activities. A lot of times parents think, "Oh, well they're just going to be a streamer one day or they're going to make money doing this one day." No, no, no. That's not going to happen.

Jim Daly: It's called a drug dealer.

Melanie Hempe: It's a, yes, and I felt like a drug dealer.

Jim Daly: Melanie, I want to walk through age and stage a little bit. So if your children, let's say they're single digits, they've got their tablets. How many kids do we see on airplanes? But you're in the let's say 7, 8, 9-year-old range. Some screen you said, the non-toxic screen time, on an airplane, there's a great example. You want to show them *Adventures in Odyssey* or something that's wholesome. You're saying generally that's okay? Is that a place where you still time out after you do an hour or two?

Melanie Hempe: It's not even an hour. The best practice is for it to be co-viewed with Mom sitting down, watching something. Probably about 20 minutes is the better limit for your child's brain development.

Jim Daly: And then move that up if you're at the 10, 11, 12 age group. They probably have homework assignments now that they've got to go online on the computer, they've got to look up Aztec history or something like that.

Melanie Hempe: And you have to have that in a co-view situation as well because we know what happens when kids are left to do their homework alone. They do about 15 minutes of homework and then they're off playing their video game and checking their social media. It's very, very distracting.

So what we recommend: in the kitchen, have a place set up in your home where you can maybe be working on dinner but you can see the back of their head and the front of their screen. You just have to coach them. We're not coaching them. We are throwing this stuff out to our kids and then we're saying, "Well, why are they getting addicted and why are they not getting their homework done, by the way?" They'll get their homework done so fast if Mom is sitting there watching them do it.

Jim Daly: Boy, so true. But again, one of the difficulties for the parents, and you're right, you had to figure this out yourself, but you were a working mom as an RN?

Melanie Hempe: At the time I wasn't. I had four children I was raising. I had to realize that I had to get this figured out and like with our first one, we kind of messed it up. But I had to spend a lot more time with our kids and it's T-I-M-E. You've got to spend time with them.

And they love it. Well, the thing about it is, it's not that you spend all of your time, you spend time initially setting them up to getting them used to doing things without a screen and then you're home free. Because now you don't have to keep monitoring that screen. Your goal is to be able to get your kids to fall in love with real life. The screens are going to be there forever.

Jim Daly: I want to go back to the age thing again because I think the average age now of a child getting a smartphone is about eight.

Melanie Hempe: Really bad idea.

Jim Daly: But in that context, the best advice I've heard is just stave that off as long as possible.

Melanie Hempe: We really believe the science backs up 18. Minors should not have devices, period. That sounds like, "Wow, really?" Think about it. When you think about it, it sounds right. Minors should not have addictive devices.

And you know, they say, "Okay, well what about a GPS?" Well, our young boys learn how to read a map and they got that part of their brain working. They'll have the rest of their life to have GPS, that's fine. So we're talking about this window of opportunity. When you're looking at high school, you're talking about 48 months. Can you not do this for 48 months? Yes, you can.

We told them early, "Guys, no smartphones till you're 18." So while they still, we started early, we told them, "No smartphones till you're 18." They got a flip phone, they got a few things, emergency phone. And that's all they needed. What ended up happening is they ended up developing all their social skills very differently than kids who depend on social media and gaming. They're like the leaders of the social thing in our area. They have stuff all the time.

Jim Daly: Let's just move a little further down the road now. This is just practical for the parents. So now you're into the 13, 14, 15-year-old category. This becomes a little more difficult, I think, but you're still the parent, I get it. But it is difficult.

Melanie Hempe: Yeah, it is. But when your kids understand this, when they understand the brain science, then you're on the same wavelength and they're understanding. That 15 and 16 and even 17-year-old brain is worse. The things that they're looking up when they're 10 years old are very different from the things they're looking up when they're 15. I believe 16 is probably the peak of the worst time for a child to have a phone.

Jim Daly: From that perspective, the parent, that's where you need to tip in more because of that. But the key there is developing the relationship with that later teen so that you can have those good, healthy discussions, right?

Melanie Hempe: Stay in that relationship. And that's where the attachment comes in because so often we allow our teenagers to become detached from us prematurely. So you think about it as a coaching relationship. We're not overprotecting our kids at all.

In fact, by not giving them a phone, you are not overprotecting them. They're having to get in the real world and figure things out. So you're thinking about this as a coach. I think this helps a lot of parents because they're like, "Oh, I can do that. I can be a coach. I'm not being a mean parent, I'm just being a coach." And your team desperately needs you and you have to set the parameters. A good coach is warm and caring, but they're also strict.

Jim Daly: You also opened your home for in-person events. I think this is really good. Make sure your children's friends are coming to your house so you can kind of keep an eye on things.

Melanie Hempe: Yeah, and the way you do that is food, okay? Food, a pool table, table tennis, foosball, pinball, trampoline in the backyard. We joked around that with Adam we spent money on therapy, with the boys we spent money at the grocery store. Would you rather spend money at the grocery store? So I told them, "Anytime for any reason if they ever wanted kids to come over, I would buy the pizza, I would make the food, I would do the brownies." Even to this day, their friends all come over. "Mrs. Hempe, can I come over for dinner?"

Jim Daly: What would be your final word for the parent, and let's keep it in the encouragement area? I hear what you're saying, but it can all be better.

Melanie Hempe: Yes, and it's not as hard as you think. I think that we think it's going to be so hard to delay this. It is so much easier, trust me, I've done it both ways. I've raised a screen addict and I've raised three kids that aren't and I'm telling you the pathway, you've got two pathways. You've got two choices. You either go with the culture on this issue or you take a different path and the different path is so much easier.

It does help, I would encourage you, to get some education around this, which is why I've taken all this brain science and I've put it in real simple terms so you can understand it. You can explain it to your wife, you can explain it to your husband, to your grandparents. "Stop buying phones for my kids!"

And then you can explain it to your kids. You're a coach. So you're at the team meeting and you're just telling your team. You don't want to coach for strike outs. This is going to be so fun and we're going to be camping in the backyard and we're going to be doing all these fun things together. That's what they want, even your teenagers. Your teenagers want you to spend time with them.

Jim Daly: This is so good. And I'm telling you, this is one of the biggest needs parents are expressing to us is this screen issue and you've got the answers. This is so, so good and thanks for being with us. All excitement, yeah, it's so much fun.

I would say you do have great training as an RN though. Parents, there's a temperament to parenting. There's the take-charge parent, but you don't want to take charge in such a way that doesn't allow your children to grow. But you do have a good command like an RN. "Hey, you're in the emergency room, somebody's dying. Where's the doctor? I don't know, he's not here yet, but this is what we've got to do." You do strike me as that person.

Melanie Hempe: Well, and most people can see that in their coaching brain and they can transfer that over and be like, "Oh, you're right. If my team is losing, we're all in this together."

Jim Daly: But what a good analogy though even like that for screen addiction. It's an ER moment. You know, you've got to get your child on the right stuff.

Melanie Hempe: And you want to prevent it. Prevention is always better. And let me just say, when I was in middle school, and you might remember this, remember the smoking problem and they brought the lungs in the jars? Well, this is like my black lung. I'm explaining to people because I remember seeing that.

It was like, "Oh, I went home and told my mom her friends to stop smoking." Well, that's what we need. We can solve this issue. It doesn't have to be a battle. We can all get excited about learning the science and be like, "Okay, we were doing it wrong. We were smoking and now we're not because now we have the answer." And the answer is in science.

Jim Daly: Yeah, and what was so amazing with that, then they showed you people that had stopped smoking 30 days later, their lungs are pink. Your lungs come back.

Melanie Hempe: You can get them back. Yes, and you can get your kids back and get in that relationship again with your kids. Melanie again, thanks for being here. Great energy, appreciate it.

John Fuller: And let me turn to the listener. If you want to strengthen your family's approach to screen time and technology use, I want to recommend you get a copy of Melanie's workbook, *Kids' Brains and Screens: Empowering Kids to Overcome Screen Addiction*. I think half the audience should say, "Yes, I need that." It's full of illustrations and great insights into brain science and development. It's perfect for parents to work through with their children of all ages.

And when you reach out to Focus on the Family today, we'll send you a copy of Melanie's book as our way of saying thank you when you support the ministry with a gift of any amount. We're a phone call away, 800, the letter A, and the word FAMILY. Or you can donate online and get Melanie's book and learn about other Focus on the Family resources. Notably, our Age and Stage e-newsletter. When you sign up for that, it's free. You're going to receive weekly emails with parenting insights tailored to your children's unique ages.

I'm also going to mention our free Tech Guide, which is a brand new resource from Focus on the Family. It's updated with all the latest tools for navigating technology as a parent. You can find all of these great resources at focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ.