iPad rage is the equivalent of a drug addiction.
New York Magazine (paywalled) News+ link (also paywalled with no option to gift):
On a Saturday morning a few months ago, Rachel, a mom of two in New Jersey, tried to follow the screen-time advice she had seen repeatedly on parenting Instagram accounts and heard on parenting podcasts: Be clear about limits and give lots of advance warning. So Rachel told her 10-year-old son, Jonah, the night prior and again during breakfast that they would be leaving at 11 a.m. for a birthday party and that he would have to put his iPad away when it was time to go. After he ate his cereal, he sat with his iPad on the couch toggling between Roblox and YouTube shorts, and she set a timer. When there were 15 minutes left on it, and then again when there were five minutes left, she reminded him how long he still had to play. But when she walked into the living room at 10:56 a.m. as the timer rang out and said, “Okay, off,” her son’s reaction overwhelmed her.
“He just left his body,” she says. Jonah threw the controller onto the couch. He started yelling, “You said I had until 11! It’s not 11 yet! You’re always doing this!” He followed her into the kitchen still yelling. She tried to stay calm and be firm. Then she tried walking away. He followed her again. At one point, he sat down on the floor and refused to move.
“I remember standing there thinking, I don’t know this person. I genuinely did not recognize him,” she told me. It took Jonah 30 minutes to calm down enough to get his shoes on. In the car, he slowly became himself again, chatting as if nothing unusual had just transpired. “That’s the part that really messes with you,” Rachel says. “How fast they come back.” […]
There are parents I know who saw the recent headline about an 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy who shot his father after having his Nintendo Switch taken away and admitted to the dark thought, I could see how that happened. But as obvious and urgent as this phenomenon feels for many parents, it is only just gaining acknowledgment and study in the psychological community, which remains divided on what’s happening and why. […]
One psychologist doesn’t think it’s addiction:
Dave Anderson, a senior psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, doesn’t think technology in particular is to blame for children’s intense reactions. […] Anderson points to one particular fact: Real withdrawal symptoms don’t fade away after a few intense minutes, whereas screen meltdowns typically do. He says that post-iPad rages occur because children’s brains are still developing and can’t yet smoothly handle losing something pleasurable — and that they’re essentially normal.
One psychiatrist does:
But Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation, is convinced screens are a special case — and she doesn’t mince words about their addictive properties. In a recent conversation on The Oprah Podcast, she was asked to explain what happens in a child’s brain when a parent tries to take away a device mid–gaming session and the child erupts. “When you expose a child’s brain to a digital drug that is incredibly reinforcing, it is inevitable that that child will get into this loop of addiction where they get into a state of craving and withdrawal when they don’t have their drug,” she answered.
When I raised Anderson’s explanation with her (namely, that these meltdowns are a normal emotional regulation challenge), she conceded that not every child who gets upset when their device is taken away is in withdrawal. But for kids whose use has tipped into something resembling compulsion, Lembke sees a different pattern: extreme reactions that last too long but tend to resolve with continued abstinence. In addition, abstinence leads these kids to sleep better, exercise more, and reengage with family and school. “These long-term trajectories toward improved physical and mental health are not seen in the wake of your average temper tantrum,” she said.
A nice solution is to have a transitional activity lined up:
But Deanna, a mom in Manhattan, is slightly more hopeful. She told me that after getting into the habit of extending her kids’ screentimes to delay their meltdowns, she finally decided to enact a few changes. Before her kids receive their devices, she makes them verbally agree to an end time. And when their timers go off, she never allows an extra minute. She also always has the next activity queued up and waiting — Legos on the table or a baking project half-prepped— so the screen doesn’t get replaced by a void. It’s a lot of work, and the first week was, “completely brutal,” she told me. But she kept at it, and about a month later, the tantrums weakened. “They still grumble,” she said. “But the fighting — that’s mostly over. I don’t brace myself the way I used to.”
Transitionary activities makes a lot of sense, but a lot of this addiction comes from the constant hit without the work (resistance) to get it. Back in the day, you had to go to the TV and sit in front of it to watch it. If you had to use the bathroom, you had to leave and come back. Now you take the screen with you! Generic commercials that are not personalized are now personalized ads that keep the dopamine hit going with interactive mini-games. Forget HD, you had to tweak the antenna just to get a signal, or blow in the cartridge to make sure it would even work (that’s been debunked).
Games of the past were more difficult and had less of a reward, but now you have unlimited tries and you can start from the exact point where you left off. Even when you play Nintendo Classics on the Switch, you can play a difficult game from the past, but you can easily rewind the game, correct your mistimed jump, and keep on going. I’m guilty of this myself.
Let’s not forget that the prefrontal cortex of children is under developed which is heavily involved in impulse control and emotional regulation. Combine that with many parents who just don’t have the gall anymore to say no to children even at the young age of 2, before they have the ability to rampage.
And don’t even get me started on social media for kids…