Help Your Kids Break Screen Habits the Easy Way

When kids develop unwanted screen habits, it may seem impossible to change them. But it’s not.

Do you ever get so frustrated with screen time that you want to throw all of the devices out the window? If we are honest, we've all been there at one time or another. But then we come to our senses and remember that technology provides a lot of great tools. 

We watch YouTube videos to learn how to fix our cars or make new recipes. We use software to create household budgets, video conferencing to communicate with those far away, and navigation systems to find our way to unfamiliar places. These convenient technologies can help us with everyday details of life. However, some habit-forming leisure screen activities, like video games and social media, are detrimental; they distract adults but hurt children the most.

How Screen Habits Form 

Our brains form habits to conserve energy, allowing us to focus on other tasks. Because we crave low-effort, high-reward activities, picking up a screen to satisfy boredom is easy and can quickly become a harmful habit, especially for a young person. Even adults struggle to manage screen time. 

Fueled by persuasive design, entertainment screen activities offer instant gratification, making them nearly impossible to resist. It is easier to give in to a lazy screen habit than to do homework and chores or to manage something more difficult or awkward, like real-life relationships. Unfortunately, breaking free becomes challenging once screens become part of your children’s daily routines.

Understanding how habits are formed will help you fix screen time overuse in your home. The habit-building process involves four key steps:

1. Cue: This triggers thoughts of the habit.

2. Desire: The habit's reward becomes apparent.

3. Easy routine: No significant barriers exist to performing the habit.

4. Reward: Carrying out the habit provides pleasure or distraction.

Habits can’t exist without this structure, so disrupting any of these elements can dismantle the habit. For instance, some individuals change their route to work to avoid passing by tempting donut shops, disrupting the cue. Others hide the TV remote to make late-night Netflix binging less convenient, disrupting the easy routine. 

When it comes to screen time, we can't easily change the desire or the rewards offered by screens.  Instead, we focus on altering the other steps. Our goal is to make desirable habits easy and undesirable habits harder to execute.

Common Cues for Screen Habits

• Transition time during the day

• Hanging out with certain friends

• Physical states: hungry, tired, isolated

• Location of the device: easy access means more use

To teach our kids how to build better screen habits, we must help them remove temptation cues from their environment. But they can’t do this themselves. They need parents to change their environment so they will be set up for success instead of failure.

Crushing the Cue

Screen habits work like other habits, starting small and becoming stronger with repetition. Innocent screen routines, like playing on a parent’s phone in the grocery store, on a long car ride, or on the sidelines at a sibling’s soccer game, lead to powerful habits. For some kids, the decision to quit a sport can be the small change in their schedule that leads to a full-blown gaming habit or even addiction. For others, the gift of a tablet or smartphone for Christmas can seem innocent at first but marks the start of a downward spiral.

Like the sound of a whistle at the starting line before a race, a cue triggers the brain to follow through with the activity that has been associated with that cue in the past. Every time the cue occurs—being in the grocery store, getting in the car, being at a soccer game, seeing the phone—the brain remembers the reward associated with it, triggering the desire. Soon the habit is stronger than the child’s willpower to resist. And why would they want to resist? Kids don’t know the damage that can be caused by prolonged and habitual screen use. They don’t know that rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm are on the rise in our culture. As parents, we have this information, and it’s our job to educate our kids and not let them fall victim. 

Many things, even a certain time of day, can become cues for a screen habit. Parents like Beth, a mom of three, discovered this the hard way. 

Beth’s oldest son, Jack, became obsessed with a certain video game. Like many of his friends, he headed to his room to play this video game every day after school. His cue was the transition time between walking in the door from school and settling in at home. Beth was exhausted, trying everything she knew to limit his gaming habit. She had tried everything she could, setting timers, crafting charts, and even visiting with a counselor. 

After discussing screen habits at a ScreenStrong workshop one morning, Beth decided to interrupt that afternoon transition time. On a normal day, Jack would get a ride home with a friend and start gaming, while she would stop by the grocery store before picking up the younger siblings from school. When they got home, she would unload groceries and start dinner prep alone in the kitchen. 

That day, she decided to deviate from her normal routine. She told the kids on the way home from school that she would jump on the trampoline with them when they got home. She left the groceries in the car and headed to the backyard when they got home. Her youngest son was so excited that he ran to Jack’s room to tell him the news. Much to Beth’s surprise, Jack left his game and came running down the stairs to see if his mom was really going to jump on the trampoline.

After Jack watched mom jump for a few minutes—something they all found pretty entertaining—she convinced him to join in. He did. He jumped on the trampoline with his younger siblings and had a blast. What happened next was key. 

While they were all outside, a neighbor wandered over and asked Jack if he could help him move something in his backyard. Jack agreed and went to the neighbor’s house to assist. An hour later, he came home and helped his mom get dinner on the table while he reported on his time with the neighbor. Jack did not play video games that night. His normal afternoon routine was interrupted.

Small Strategic Changes = Big Results

Beth’s story is a wonderful example of the power of interrupting a gaming cue to dismantle an unwanted screen habit. Beth witnessed the fascinating power of how one small strategic change—her decision to delay the unpacking of groceries and dinner prep and go outside with the kids after school—disrupted the normal routine. She learned that if she wanted to change the habit, she had to interrupt the cue and make the routine harder to do.

That first day was such a big success that Beth planned something simple every day to interrupt that particular time of day. She now keeps a football, drinks, and snacks in the car for afternoon stops at the park on the way home from school. On some afternoons, she brings the dog, and they visit a dog park. She even changed Jack’s carpool schedule to pick him up two days a week, so she and her son now have time to connect on the way home; he is not left alone after school as much, even though he is old enough. This cascading effect has resulted in fewer conflicts about screen limits and homework. She told me that her decision proved to be more powerful than all her counseling appointments with her son. 

Change Leads to More Change 

Beth discovered how changing the flow of three critical hours during the afternoon derailed her son’s gaming habit. She also made a discovery that many ScreenStrong families make: when you break unwanted screen habits, you make space for good things to happen. In Jack’s case, his neighbor asked him to help with his landscaping business due to reconnecting that first day when he was in the backyard. Jack now works for him a few days after school and on weekends. Jack’s weekday video gaming dopamine reward cycle has been replaced with healthy dopamine-inducing activities like meeting new people, exercising, and engaging in more meaningful and purposeful work. 

These healthy habits will continue to lead to more healthy habits, and the video game will begin to lose power over Jack. However, because we know that old habits are easy to restart—they never really go away completely—Beth will need to continue to keep an eye on his progress and be mindful of warning signs of screen overuse. Old patterns will likely creep back in without accountability. 

Help Your Kids Dismantle Screen Habits

While we may not have the power to dismantle the persuasive design elements found on screens, we do have the power to dismantle unwanted screen habits in our homes. Screens are here to stay, but it is a myth that we teach our kids to resist unwanted screen habits by using apps and games that have been infused with rewards, likes, bright, flashing colors and various in-app hooks. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

No one benefits from practicing bad habits. Every dad who has taught his son how to throw a baseball in the backyard knows this. It’s all in the follow through. As the ball releases from your hand, you continue to move your arm in the direction you want the ball to travel. You set the ball on the right course, and then you do it again, and again, and again. Eventually, the habit becomes ingrained, and a new habit is formed. 

It turns out that the old adage “practice makes perfect” is true, but only if you are practicing correctly. Bad habits stay bad habits. Good habits can be built upon for further success in life. The young boy who learns proper follow-through in the backyard with his dad can become a proficient Tee-Ball player and maybe even a high school athlete if he continues to build his skills and receive good instruction from his coaches.

In Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a book I highly recommend, he writes,

“The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit; you can only change it. Champions don't do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned.”

The ScreenStrong solution is not overwhelming when you understand how much power you have over habits. Your kids will follow your lead like they follow the lead of a successful coach. With your guidance, that screen habit may not completely disappear, but before long, it will weaken and lose its power over your family. When parents create an environment for their children where doing the right thing is easier than doing the wrong thing, everyone wins. Our kids win, our families win, and our culture wins. 

Take a stand for your kids and take one small step today to mix things up. Help your kids break harmful screen habits and return to living in the real world again. Is it really possible that something as simple as jumping on the trampoline with your kids after school could rescue them from a screen addiction? Yes, sometimes it is.

Melanie Hempe, Founder

Melanie Hempe, BSN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens course series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and the community—to skip toxic screens through adolescence so that teens can reach their full potential. Visit ScreenStrongSolutions.com for educational material and ScreenStrong.org to learn more and join the community saving childhood.