Screen "addiction," aggression, & kid not talking

Locked Hope, baby. Welcome to the program. I'm delighted to be able to be on today's program along with my colleague from Life in the Balance. Kim, I'm doing well. Thanks very much. Good. Would you not have either of our parents on, yes, but that is the time to make a few plugs. First of all, if you want to call into the program, that's three, four, seven, nine, nine, four, nine, eight, one, and press the number one. Secondly, if you are interested in having the kids we lose, the lives in the balance documentary, screened in your area or community or at your school, go to the kidsreelose.com and contact us. If you are on that website and you go to the screenings page, you can see just how many places are already screening the film. Of course, our goal is to get as many eyes on that film as possible, especially now that the United States Education and Labor Committee is considering the issue of restraint and seclusion and what, if anything, the United States government should do to regulate its use. If you want to be particularly involved in our efforts to advocate for change, then go to the Lives in the Balance website and sign up to become an advocate in the advocacy section and you can help us make a difference for these very vulnerable kids and all of their caregivers. I think that is pretty much everything I was thinking about. A couple of film festivals that we lose. There are two film festivals coming up. There is one in Philly next Friday, March 15th. There is another screening at the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival. Nine days after that in Los Angeles and all of those details are on the kidsreelose website. Very exciting. Especially exciting. Some festivals don't excite me all that much. I think that is one of the things that they do need impact inside the community. To the degree that film festivals believe that this is an issue worthy of having people be aware of by golly. I will take film festivals in the meantime. We want to get this film seen by as many people as possible. If it is possible for people to screen it in their communities, please be in touch with us and we will be back. We will be back. We may have nine of our parents on the phone with us today. I did get a message from Jennifer that she is doing with something at her office but hopes to be on shortly. I do not know what Stella's status is today. I am going to start with a couple of things. Let's start with the email. This is a mom who has been waiting very patiently since January to hear our thoughts on her situation. I have a nine year old son who had an abrupt onset this past September. A very challenging symptoms that have ultimately been diagnosed as obsessive compulsive disorder. With ticks, possibly Tourette syndrome to be seen. With this has come a significant amount of anger and explosiveness that has been incredibly challenging for our son and our family relationships and function. We are in the care of the psychologist, psychiatrist and neurologist who have started an ethyl sori entity present and are debating an anti-psychotic medication as well. We have been in dire need of a parenting paradigm and we were encouraged to read the explosive child this fall. As that approach to navigating these challenges completely resonates with my belief system and philosophy as a parent and educator. We have been trying to implement as best we can, although it is very challenging. We have identified lagging skills and unsolved problems, put a lot of the unsolved problems in plan C. We have tried plan B with some success and some challenges and are committed to continuing to press on. We have tried to reduce plan A as much as we can. All of that said, the vast majority of our unsolved problems stem from screen use. Our son seems to be physically addicted to the games on the iPhone and it is nearly impossible to limit this. We are actively determined a series of limits during the week to a certain extent, but every time it's time to stop, we navigate a possible explosion even when the stop time is completely consistent. With the solution we came up with together. We have tried to collaboratively come up with alternatives to the phone for weekends where phone use is now beyond what we can allow looking forward. While we found some things we can leave the house to do instead, we cannot be at home without struggles around the phone. We have tried to teach him and offer him other ways to relax and calm outside of the phone as the route seems to be that it is his primary self-suding mechanism right now with limited success. In fact, you book to see what guidance I could find and I did see the section on when children don't follow through with solutions. The recommendation that we continue to look for solutions is a more realistic. However, I'm just losing confidence that with the intensity of the draw of the phone for our son, we can problem solve our way out of this. We are debating a serious plan A move of eliminating screen time completely so that we can try to get back to using time in other ways and helping our son find himself outside of it. But we are afraid of the up people this may cause in our relationship and worried that without a replacement and place our son will really struggle. We are also debating additional medication to lower the temperatures so that we may better work to address the problems. Apologies for the long preamble and of course this is only a piece of the context but I thought core question. There is around any insight on the problem solving approach when the power of screens is involved. It is extremely hard to get our son to follow through on his end of collaborative solutions when it means giving it the phone. I know many families struggle with screens so I'm wondering if any specific insights of a risen and recent years beyond the core candidates of the model has people used CPS to navigate this one. You see it would done success in extreme cases of screen addiction and out. Your model has helped us in a time where we needed a roadmap desperately and I thank you for that and really want to stick with it. But without some new ideas to move forward I'm not convinced I can make it work around the phone issues. So there you have it. I know what has a popular topic indeed. You want to go first on that one or would you like me to? I'm sure this comes up in the team frequently. It comes up regularly and I know you and I had a conversation recently because another parent had emailed with the same terminology of addiction to screens and does plan B work with addiction. I really enjoyed what you had to say about it and I think folks would want to hear from you on this very hot topic first. Well that assumes that I can remember whatever sage wisdom I can forth with when I talked about it last. What I usually say is that the word addiction doesn't help. But what I am hearing is that the child is really, really attracted to screens. And I'm hearing the theory that he's finding it to be very self-suven. So obviously you want to stick with plan B on this as long as you can. I don't find it is one that necessarily solves quickly. I find it is one that is often rocky on the way to a resolution. I find it especially when you add something like a set of compulsive disorder to the mix that, well that's another reason I probably wouldn't use the word addiction. I could even use the word compulsion in the case of OCD but I don't really love that term either. If it's what we need to get from the child in the empathy step and I don't know if we have this or not. is what's difficult in terms of putting away the screen and further down the road since there are already solutions in place for that. What is hard about getting off the screen when he has promised to? I need the details because it answers to those questions that are going to help me know what kind of solutions are actually viable and why the previous solutions haven't worked out so well. In the absence of that information, I'm stuck with useful, but what I would call insufficient information. Screen addiction is insufficient information. The diagnosis that may be contributing to the problem in sufficient information, although I don't know if the screen problem was an issue before this deterioration in the child's functioning. It's self-suiting. It's a theory. I don't know if we've heard that from the child. I think the empathy step is going to be key here because I'm missing some crucial information about exactly what it is that's hard about getting off the cell phone and exactly what's hard about the solutions that haven't worked so far. I think the information that we would get in the empathy step would move us beyond the word addiction, would move us beyond the word compulsion, would either verify or not the theory that the phone is self-suiting. And would set the stage for solutions. All of that said this is a very tough unsolved problem for many folks. As I said earlier, it doesn't solve quickly most of the time or evenly, but I have seen people make significant progress on this issue. But only if we get the very specific information that we need in the empathy step of clandet. Kim, what could I miss? I think you hit most of it. I mean, you know, when we talked before, you had said that sometimes using the word addiction in that label gives us a little bit of a justification that we've got to use clandet because it's, you know, it's an addiction, right? But you talked a lot about it being semantic. It's a descriptive way of saying it's a serious problem for sure. And then I would just add that in our Facebook group, the B team, there are lots of great stories if you use the search function of folks who have had made progress using plan B with this. Could those very powerful subjective screens and get it to pretty hot topics of tons of post come up about that. But many of them do include some positive stories about how plan B has helped. Although I certainly understand that parents might jump to plan A because they're so fearful of what they read about what screens could be doing to their kids brains and all of that stuff, but certainly encourage plan B, you know, as much as possible. So the other thing I would add to this is you've got a kid here who had a abrupt onset of pretty serious difficulties fairly recently. And I guess I'm curious what's happened since mom emailed us in January and whether the voice condition has stabilized to any degree. One of the things that I would say is that although I am allergic to the thought of giving a kid cart blanch on screen time use, I don't like destabilizing kids even worse. So if the screen is self-suiting right now and we don't think that we've achieved a level of stability yet, I'm not sure, especially hard on an unsolved problem that we fear might destabilize things even further. I just one man's thought there, obviously because this is a radio program and because we don't know this boy or his mom, because this does not take the place of clinical care. I'm glad that this boy is a care of his psychologist, psychiatrist and neurologist. But I think stability comes first. And I'd be reluctant to take a full swing at an unsolved problem that we fear could cause greater instability if we're still in the midst of an unstable situation. Yes, that's my last thought on that. Kim, any other thought? No, I think we covered it pretty much. Let us move on to some other people who've been waiting a while for us to have this program. Here's the next one. Once again, the call in number 347-994-2981. Let's move on to this next email. Obviously, we wish the mom and her son all the best and we certainly have our fingers crossed that the care that he is receiving has helped a lot since January. Here's the next one. I just completed the explosive child in a whopping four hours as I was unable to glue myself from the content. As a mom of a kid would behavioral challenges, I have found this to be the most helpful resource that I have yet encountered. Other literature in my line up includes self-reg raising your spirited child in one, two, three magic. Although interesting reads, I found myself disappointed in the lack of a plan. Now that I have completed the explosive child, I realize that I have been doing it all wrong. To give a brief background, these are some long emails today by the way, just fair warning. To give a brief background, I work in special education at a local and entry school as a physical therapist. I encounter a wide variety of behaviors on a daily basis and have always prided myself hold on. Where am I? Where am I? I have been doing this for a long time. I appreciate and greatly value your insight. Well, first of all, thank you for writing in and we're glad to take this one on. Kim, you want to give it a whirl? You want me to start. And by the way, we have been joined by, well, I'm not sure we've been joined by Jennifer, I believe. And on one sec, I'm trying to unmute. Is not happening. Well, Kim, go ahead. We'll see if we can unmute. The person who's called in. Go ahead. Oops, that's the issue. Kim got disconnected. I'm on my own. Although I think we now have Jennifer. Jennifer, is that you? You do. Yep, that's me. Hi, Jennifer. It just told me I was unmuted. I got it. You just got unmuted and Kim, if you're listening, I couldn't unmute you. So please call back in. I didn't realize it can have dropped off the call. Jennifer, did you hear all of that? I heard some of it. I didn't hear quite all of it. Then what a nice start. There's Kim. And now she's unmuted. Let me give this a whirl. The first thing I would say is that, boy, this mom sure does seem to be working hard at trying to make things better. And she's also working very hard at keeping her son off medicine. And that's admirable. It's admirable so long as it's going well. But it doesn't sound like it's going well, especially at home. And of course, it remains to be seen how long it's going to continue going well at school. I am very glad that the impulsiveness and poor self-regulation is not interfering at school. And that medicine doesn't seem to be needed at school. But there are some things that are going on at home that medicine would actually do well. That of course places the mom in a bit of a conundrum because stimulant medication, which is the time most often used, for poor impulse control and for poor self-regulation, is more often used at school and is more often a daytime medicine. And it might give this mom some benefit over the weekend, though, and thankfully these are not generally speaking blood-level medicines. So while I admire her efforts to keep her son off medicine, just food for the lot here, we don't want to decryve her son of medicine that could be doing kin and the one-year-old and the whole family a lot of good. But that's actually not my main point. I don't know why I started with that one. But it's not my main point. My main point is this. As the mom knows, sticker charts and pom-pom jars and toy train jails and prize boxes and positive reinforcement, and even being blue in the face are not part of the CPS model. But it does sound like there are a lot of expectations. The five-year-old is having difficulty meeting. Many of them, when the five-year-old is in the presence of the one-year-old, and those are all specific individual unsolved problems that need to be solved, excuse me, proactively and collaboratively. And so while I'm glad that the explosive child has made its mark, and that the mom is also trying to stay away from planning and that she knows that kids do all of they can, all of that's the philosophical part of the model. But the practical part of the model is we need a list of unsolved problems. Each situation that we're starting to have difficulty meeting expectations needs to be on our list. And then we need to start solving those problems. And what I'm not gleaming from this email is that any of that has actually been done because I'm not reading anything about having done plan B with the five-year-old. Nor am I reading about any solutions that they've come up with. What I'm mostly reading about are interventions that would flow for my kids do all of they want a mentality. I guess that's my two cents. Let's, if we haven't already, let's make our list using the assessment of lagging skills and unsolved problems. And if we haven't already, let's make sure that we're coming up with solutions in plan B that are realistic. Realistic meaning that the solution is doable even with a kid who is unmedicated for his ADHD. And if we find that we can't come up with any solutions that are realistic for a kid who is has at least a moderate case of ADHD, then that may tell us something about whether medication would be beneficial here. That's my thoughts. Kim, did you hear a lot of the email because I know you got cut off. I don't know if you were Jennifer want to add your thoughts to it. Yeah, sure. I heard the email. Yeah. And I don't know if there's a reason block talk radio decided to hang up on me, but I'm back. I wanted to say to this mom that yeah, I said goodbye. I wanted to say to this mom that a lot of her story, though, not all of it is very similar to what goes on in my own house except a little bit different age range, but my son who's three does quite well at school, you know, 95% of the time he has some blitz for sure. But at home, the screaming, the laying himself on the floor, tantruming and the physical aggression, although he has an older sibling, so it's not as dangerous, but he does hurt her. We have. And so the what's the only you. And I think, you know, the way because one of the main questions was, you know, what am I supposed to do when he's hurting, you know, in her home, the baby. Well, you got to keep the baby safe, right? And in figuring out in doing the list of the unsold problems, like you mentioned, then you can planfully figure out how to keep the baby safe. And I know that mom said it's not realistic to have them apart, you know, all day long, of course not. And yet there's going to be some time that will emerge as predictable as far as when you might be able to put some things in place to make sure that the safety thing could be taking care of ahead of time. Of course, if it happens in the heat of the moment, yes, you better keep the baby safe. And I would also say what was my next thought here? She mentioned something about him having difficulty answering questions, but I didn't quite write a full note on that when you were talking. I don't know if I got that down right, but it doesn't know why he does things. You know, my three-year-old son can't really tell me why either. And yet I do a lot of guessing with him, like is it about this? So did sister do that or did you not expect the sister would do this? Did you want sister to do this? It sounds, you know, and so, and I know when I'm right, because I can read it from his facial expressions, he comes down when I get it right. So I have to do a lot of guessing, and he doesn't necessarily, you know, use the five finger methods, like we like to do. He can't quite do that yet, but he gives me other indicators that I got it right. And we've reduced the amount of sister getting hurt and the amount of screaming. And I got to tell you my son's scream is one of those ones that could like break windows. It is horrendous. It is definitely makes us want to do plan. I always only make it worse, but you know, what was I saying? So we've been able to decrease the screaming and the tantrums and the hurting of sister by teaching him some language he didn't have before, like how to take turns and asking for turn to have a turn in a couple minutes. That's one phrase he's learned. It's decreasing episodes beautifully. There's some others like that, but that's for him. And that's through us working with him to figure out like how come this didn't go better and understanding as much as we can, but of course taking a lot of guesses in his case because he's so young. So anyway, food for thought around he might not be able to tell you why, but you could do some educated guessing and see what feedback he can give you in whatever way he can that you might be close. So that you have information that can be useful in coming up with a solution that has a shot of working. The things can get better for sure. Jell? What do you think? Well, I think that whenever I hear someone talking about things being really, really horrible at home, two things come into my head. And the first one is be very gentle with yourself, mom. You know, wait. You're suffering through this. And the more gentle you are with yourself, the more gentle you're able to be with your kids. Give yourself a lot of grace. The other thing that occurs to me is plants. is your best friend, plant seed, everything that you can. And that's where going through the all-stop can be very helpful because if you go through and you make that list and you say, "Okay, this is what I'm going to concentrate on first." And it's keeping difficulty being safe with younger siblings. And people feel I find especially when they're first starting off with using Plenty. What I hear on the B-team is that they're very hesitant to plan and see the other things that it feels like giving in. It feels like letting go. And you're not doing that. It's you're recognizing that you can't fix everything all at once. So instead of continuing to allow my stress level to rise because I'm trying to solve this problem and the six other problems, I'm recognizing that I'm not going to be able to solve these six other problems right now. So I'm just skipping the part where we all get aggravated and it doesn't happen anyway and just letting it go. The other thing that I would say is that I understand that medication hesitation. We started my son on medication the summer between kindergarten and first grade. And it was the hardest thing we ever had to do. And there were a lot of people who were very willing to share their opinions about why that was wrong with us. But it gave him the ability to be able to minimize who he was. It gave him the ability to be who he was without all of the other stuff getting in the way. And it may be a gift that you give your child to explore that possibility. So that's what I have to add. It is a boy. You guys have some very good advice there. Medication is a very hard decision. I also, there's things that medicine does well and there's things that medicine does not do well at all. And there's no question that especially in the United States, medicine is over prescribed in my opinion because people aren't exactly sure what else to do. With impulsiveness and hyperactivity and inattention, it's interesting because the medicine that are most commonly used for that, fortunately, have a side effect profile that isn't especially concerning. There's many medicine that people put kids on that I wouldn't be able to say that about. But for hyperactivity and poor impulse control and inattention, those medications have side effect profiles that are less concerning than many. And so then it becomes sort of the balance between potential side effects and benefit. And on those kinds of issues, the benefit usually outweighs the potential side effects because of the side effect profile of those kinds of medications. But once again, I hope to devote so much of what we've been saying to this mom to medicine because certainly if she can get by without medicine, she wants to. Right? She's going to be appropriately conservative about, but we don't want her to be living under conditions that are unnecessary if medication can give her and her son some benefit. I guess that's the main message. Shall we move on to one more? We have no callers today. No, no, I'm not going to give the phone number now because we're not going to have time to take a call at this point. But here we go. Here's one more email. I've read the explosive many child, many times, listening to countless podcasts and court through the lives of the balance website. I feel like I know can be inside and out. Problem is, when I try to implement it, my non-year-old daughter freaks out. Whether I spring it on or proactively or try to make an appointment with it, a collaborative on a problem in the future, she starts screaming and crying and says she won't do it or that she'll only talk to my husband. And I put it out that that of itself is the problem, but she is resolute. She told me she talked to me someday, like in the summer. This was within February. I wanted the first problem to be work on to be the fact that she has difficulty talking about any problems with me, but can't even get that going. How am I supposed to solve any problems when she refuses to talk to me? I'm not worried about anything. She's going to therapy and has just told her therapist that I talk too much, so I've been working on that. My husband thinks our long pattern of ineffective communication on both parts has led to where we are. Also wanted to mention that my daughter suffered a major physical trauma, lawn mower accident when she was three. I wonder if this incident plays in the summer for lighting skills. She pretty much has all of the lighting skills, especially in flexibility and low frustration tolerance. She seems to have difficulty expressing herself verbally, which the therapist wonders is the result of her accident. As it happened before she was fully verbal, just wondering what you think. Guys want to give that a whirl? That's a lot of self-position in here. I'm going to whether it was a lawn mower accident or not does it matter? We don't know what it is. Maybe it was the lawn mower accident. Maybe she would have been having difficulty expressing herself verbally or without the lawn mower accident. We'll never know. Maybe she would have been inflexible anyways. Maybe she would have had difficulty talking to mom anyways. We don't want to be thinking about the lawn mower accident because we cannot answer the question of whether it was the lawn mower accident with any level of precision. Even though I fully appreciate the desire to understand what caused all of these difficulties, you can't answer that question with any level of precision. It's very easy to point at one thing. I don't usually find that it's one thing, but I don't usually spend much time on figuring out what thing it is because it doesn't matter. We can't do anything about the lawn mower accident. Now, even though I have the feeling, I can only imagine that it was very traumatic for everybody. But here's my thought. I'd like the idea of talking to his daughter about difficulty talking to mom about problems. Love it. I just don't know if mom is the one to have that conversation. I don't know if that's the way the ball is going to get rolling. So while I agree that it would be great for the daughter to talk to the mom at some point, I think the person that do that plan B with the nine-year-old daughter on that unsolved problem is that it had. Let's just get the ball rolling. With plan B, then maybe mom can sit in and not say anything. Then maybe mom could actually start to say something and a future plan B. Then maybe mom could even lead a plan B with dad present. All progress is incremental. If she's talking to the dad, then the ideal person at the moment to solve the problem, difficulty talking with mom about problems, is dad. What do you guys think? With you, exactly what I was going to say, and that's not a concession. That's a different way to get things going. That's an okay thing to do. The goal is still to get mom involved as you laid out. But that sounds like a natural place to start. I just want to point out. When we first started using plan B in our house, there was a lot of resistance. I think that my son had just been planned aid for so long. He didn't believe that that was how things were going to go. He didn't understand what was happening and his first instinct was always, "I'm going to end up in trouble at the end of this conversation, so I'm not having it." There's an entry on the B team where I talk about the conversation that he and I had, where I explained the plan B process to him. At 9, this woman's daughter is old enough to understand the basics of the conversation. I started off just by saying to him, "There's been a lot of yelling and there's been a lot about happiness and I don't like it. it when we walk away from a conversation feeling unhappy with each other. That's not how I want our family to be and I don't think that's how you want it to be either. And the other thing that came out of that and the other thing that I was thinking about is I was listening to you read it, is that the first step of that plan B conversation in the empathy step is the parent listening for reason and that a lot of times moms have a hard time just listening in the beginning and that maybe that needs to be where that conversation starts. If it can't start with that, if that isn't on board with plan B and I know that that happens a lot but if it can't start with that for some reason then maybe it could start with I'm just going to listen today. The floor is yours, I'm not going to say anything back, I just want to hear what you have to say and start there. That's great. The other another option is to not have the child and then I got one more big piece of guidance, not have the child have to do it in words but to do it by text. If the nine-year-old is already texting or if I do it in the notes or sometimes the finger method that we talk about on this program sometimes making statements and having a child hold up one to five fingers to let us know how true it is and we're guessing there are many ways to communicate with the Kippy-Sides words but that leads me to my last thought. I want to go back to it to see if I missed something. I'm not seeing that this child who we who is having difficulties verbally has had a speech and language evaluation and I'm not seeing in the email that she's receiving any type of speech and language help and if she's not and we have a child who we believe has language processing delays we get the reason just language processing delays and potentially difficulty expressing herself verbally. That may actually so nice that the therapist wondering if that's a result of the accident I would be wondering less about that and wondering about if that's happened already making sure that this child gets a speech and language evaluation because that could actually explain a lot that is currently unexplained. I would spend less time trying to figure out why the kid is having trouble expressing herself verbally and put more effort into finding out if there's some kind of help that she needs that would benefit her greatly in that realm. Good point. And there we have it. Three great emails. No calls. We did get a caller late in the game but with only one minute left we're not going to take our call from area 707 because we won't be able to do a justice but please call us on the next program and we'll try to call early and we'll get you in quickly because callers take clarity on the program. Any other last thoughts for today before we sign off? I don't think so. To mention there's only two more programs left in this school year, April and May. They will take our summer break until the fall. Thank you both as always for doing this along with me and sometimes without me. Let's call out a day for today. We'll be back next month. Take care all. Bye bye.