There are plenty of high functioning addicts. That doesn't mean you can just keep plowing along. The kid is asking for help, it would be very negligent to just handwave it.
My nephew (14) is glued to his phone for hours daily.... problem?
- Thread starter Buddy
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Not his kid, so it would have to be his parents, which don't seem as alarmed. You can't just send an underaged family member outside of parental care to consult with a mental health professional.
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I have a 16 year old who was going through this. And he was certainly not Captain of any team or had a big social circle. So I think this is a situation that's universal. With my son, our family has a history of depression and we were going through some things. My kid had 6 months where he didn't even play games. He just sat on his bed watching YT. He just needed time to himself - a sort of Gen A version of alone time.
That said, nephew might be in a situation where he doesn't feel motivated or is burned out. As someone who understands sometimes just wanting to shut down and do the very bare minimum this can be a great coping mechanism for simply REBOOTing.
I would look into therapy as well. There may be things that no amount of prodding or constant demanding answers or even "seaking clues" will ever find. But a stranger with a kind demeanor may be something he needs: a sympathetic ear.
Also: honestly? A lot of kids use their phones the same way we did TV back in the day. It's not any weirder than us watching 4 hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings.
That said, nephew might be in a situation where he doesn't feel motivated or is burned out. As someone who understands sometimes just wanting to shut down and do the very bare minimum this can be a great coping mechanism for simply REBOOTing.
I would look into therapy as well. There may be things that no amount of prodding or constant demanding answers or even "seaking clues" will ever find. But a stranger with a kind demeanor may be something he needs: a sympathetic ear.
Also: honestly? A lot of kids use their phones the same way we did TV back in the day. It's not any weirder than us watching 4 hours of cartoons on Saturday mornings.
Yes, I was talking about his parents. No need to involve the kid yet. Maybe the OP can try to convince his parents to make a consultation first to see if the professional thinks there may be a problem there.
Maybe the professional can give some tips of how to address the situation without involving the kid further, see how the situation evolves.
Buddy
I would highly recommend the whole family watches The Social Dilemma on netflix. It gets the point across, really well, that all the big tech companies have an incentive to make social media and phones as addictive as possible, and build multi billion dollar businesses on attention farming.
It also touches on topics like body image, depression, and fomo and so on.
Secondly, I would recommend getting agreement and buy in to put controls on the phone, maybe for those two specific apps at first. Either ban them completely for a couple of weeks or heavily restrict them. It can be done as a trial period even, to see what works.
I was worried about myself getting sucked into YouTube (and being annoyed that I was losing hours when I'd rather have been doing other stuff) plus I was worried about my teenage boys being the same.
Google turns off parental controls at 13, so we mutually installed Block to setup blocks on specific apps and try to enforce a bed time routine. He has the pin to change the setup on my phone and I have it to change the setup on his.
I think it's worked, "ok" in terms of getting to a sensible/mutual understanding of the issue and avoided some of the parent/child arguing.
Changing tack, I haven't read all the comments in here but it sounds like people are already posting "what aboutisms" etc. which is sad to see, and hurts my soul.
Do you really think any one persons "will power" can stand up to hundreds of millions of dollars in psychological research and experiments on tens of millions of users? Nope!
Imho there are *some* parralells to the tobacco industry where they were spending huge money to advertise their products, and make them seem as cool as possible...whilst lobbying hard, denying the harms etc. etc.
If people want to read more, there is quite a lot of science and research out there about depression, attention spans etc, as well as a growing number of countries that are banning and limiting phones in various ways.
There is the who study from a little while ago as a start.
I would highly recommend the whole family watches The Social Dilemma on netflix. It gets the point across, really well, that all the big tech companies have an incentive to make social media and phones as addictive as possible, and build multi billion dollar businesses on attention farming.
It also touches on topics like body image, depression, and fomo and so on.
Secondly, I would recommend getting agreement and buy in to put controls on the phone, maybe for those two specific apps at first. Either ban them completely for a couple of weeks or heavily restrict them. It can be done as a trial period even, to see what works.
I was worried about myself getting sucked into YouTube (and being annoyed that I was losing hours when I'd rather have been doing other stuff) plus I was worried about my teenage boys being the same.
Google turns off parental controls at 13, so we mutually installed Block to setup blocks on specific apps and try to enforce a bed time routine. He has the pin to change the setup on my phone and I have it to change the setup on his.
I think it's worked, "ok" in terms of getting to a sensible/mutual understanding of the issue and avoided some of the parent/child arguing.
Changing tack, I haven't read all the comments in here but it sounds like people are already posting "what aboutisms" etc. which is sad to see, and hurts my soul.
Do you really think any one persons "will power" can stand up to hundreds of millions of dollars in psychological research and experiments on tens of millions of users? Nope!
Imho there are *some* parralells to the tobacco industry where they were spending huge money to advertise their products, and make them seem as cool as possible...whilst lobbying hard, denying the harms etc. etc.
If people want to read more, there is quite a lot of science and research out there about depression, attention spans etc, as well as a growing number of countries that are banning and limiting phones in various ways.
There is the who study from a little while ago as a start.
No offense, but my opinion is that it's none of your business. He has parents of his own. My aunts and uncles did a lot of meddling in the parenting of each other's children and it was always unnecessary and only led to resentment. My parents always ended up telling them "we can parent our own child, thanks."
To be fair, all of them are horrible bigots who had no idea how to be parents, but my perspective because of that is to leave the parenting to the parents and just be a fun uncle/aunt.
To be fair, all of them are horrible bigots who had no idea how to be parents, but my perspective because of that is to leave the parenting to the parents and just be a fun uncle/aunt.
We already have tons of evidence. It's like cigarettes for the brain. Highly addictive, very hard to cut back, and something we all know is bad.
I want kids someday. I also am a control freak.
Im doing the work now required to understand that at the end of the day, i cant control the person that my son or daughter grows up to be.
Sounds like hes crushing it already. You can lay down a path for your kids, and gently push them towards it, but we gotta let them self-realize too. If they're gonna be a boring ass phone nerd… *shrug*. Just love them.
Im doing the work now required to understand that at the end of the day, i cant control the person that my son or daughter grows up to be.
Sounds like hes crushing it already. You can lay down a path for your kids, and gently push them towards it, but we gotta let them self-realize too. If they're gonna be a boring ass phone nerd… *shrug*. Just love them.
Okay. Let me know if you ever need something from your Steam wishlist or something. lol
My younger nephew (age eight) is like this, obsessed with his tablet and doesn't answer when asked anything when he's on it. My sister is strict about limiting the time they have on them so she's trying to nip it in the bud before it gets as bad as the situation in the OP.
My advice would be to get him some short story collections. Happy to give some recommendations if you let me know what books he likes. I used to read obsessively as a kid, stopped doing so for a few years, and found it difficult to get back into it at first but short stories really, really helped.
This. If he is living his life in his phone, then he isn't living in the world.
As a teacher, and a parent, I would say yes, it is a big problem. There is increasingly evidence that excessive phone use is extremely bad for children and is very detrimental to things like their mental health and attention span. In some of the worst cases students are on their phone in excess of 40 hrs a week!
It is easily fixable though, your sister can use parental controls to restrict the phones screen time and regulate hours of usage. We also have house rules, like no phones out when we are eating or hanging out.
You can choose to keep the parental controls on with Google. My daughters phone still has controls and she is 14.5!
At that age I was on forums for hours a day not too dissimilar to this one. Only difference is I wasn't browsing what the algorithm was feeding me. I was on a PSP hacking forum and a GTA forum.
Ask about things that actually interest him that he would like to do, art, music, skills. He is still at an age when doing something for 30 minutes a day will make him proficient as a young adult.