What do sugar and screen time have in common? Dopamine.

Whether our grandchildren are digging into ice cream sundaes or swiping the screens on their iPads, the effect is the same. A neurotransmitter called dopamine is released in their brain. This chemical travels via neural pathways to the brain’s reward center, thereby providing a feeling of pleasure.

What’s the problem? After all, who doesn’t love to bake a batch of chocolate-chip cookies or go out for ice cream with their grandchildren? What long distance grandparents don’t use video chatting as a way to connect, build, and maintain loving and trusting relationships with their children and grandchildren?

The purpose of this blog isn’t to condemn an occasional ice cream cone, movie or video game. The purpose is to examine the effects of dopamine on developing brains and discuss healthy and effective ways to navigate the amount of screen time our grandchildren watch while they are in our care. 

Negative Effects of Digital Screens:

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the average American child spends seven hours per day staring at a digital screen.¹ This means that for children who sleep ten hours per night, fifty percent of their waking hours are spent interacting with digital devices.

These videos and games have been deliberately designed to deliver intermittent rewards that trigger the release of dopamine. As we have already seen, dopamine provides a feeling of pleasure and leaves our grandchildren, or anyone for that matter, craving more. Unlike I Love Lucy or The Andy Griffith Show, which we watched as children, videos and games don’t end after thirty minutes; they stream continuously.

Evidence is beginning to show that dopamine, triggered by digital screens, impairs impulse control and entraps children in a perpetual state of hyperactivity. This hyperactive state negatively affects their social interactions, school performance, and overall behavior. When the reward centers are overstimulated, other areas of their developing brains are not as active as they should be. As a result, children who spend too much time watching television and playing video games have trouble focusing, retaining information, communicating and controlling their emotions. Basically, they become mentally lazy.

Given that digital screens appeal to the reward center of our brains, psychologists recommend that parents and grandparents do NOT use screen time as a reward in itself.

Research also shows that some children prefer the virtual world to reality. Their desire for constant stimulation, which video gaming and other video sources provide, becomes all encompassing. Because boys are visual and highly competitive, they are more susceptible to becoming addicted to gaming than girls.

Digital screens are here to stay. So, what are we as grandparents—especially those of us who babysit regularly—expected to do?

Establishing and Maintaining Healthy Screen Time Boundaries:

We start by understanding and respecting the guidelines for screen time and social media set by our grandchildren’s parents. Many of our adult children have already programmed parental controls on their devices. These controls monitor both time and content. If we don’t know the guidelines, we need to ask. If we don’t agree with the guidelines, we need to request permission to discuss our concerns, all the while being respectful and remembering that we are grandparents, not parents.

Next, we need to establish guidelines for our own homes. While our rules may be stricter than the ones our adult children have established, they should NOT be more lenient.

We need to prayerfully determine the following:

1. Which digital devices are welcome in our home?
   Televisions, iPhones, iPads, personal computers, and gaming consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox are all digital devices.
2. How much screen time do we allow per day? 
3. Does our home have any sacred spaces that are off-limits to devices?
   For example, are iPhones prohibited at the dining room table while we are enjoying Sunday dinner? Are gaming consoles and iPads prohibited from the bedrooms or behind closed doors?
4. What media content is allowed in our home?

Digital devices afford anyone easy access to mature content (violence, sex, gambling and strong language). Consequently, we need to monitor what our grandchildren are watching while they are in our care. The nonprofit Common Sense Media provides age-appropriate rating guides for movies, television shows, podcasts, apps and video games so parents and grandparents can make informed decisions.²

Our screen time guidelines need to be communicated with our grandchildren and their parents in a friendly atmosphere and not as a result of an argument

Children and teens will automatically turn to digital devices when they become bored. Therefore, we need to be intentional about planning family-oriented activities when our grandchildren are visiting or in our care. Fun activities include the following: hiking trails at a county park, visiting the zoo, having a Lego-building contest, combing the beach for shells, building a castle with cardboard moving boxes, taking an art lesson, touring a museum, having dinner at a Mexican restaurant, washing the car, or checking out books at the local library.

Modeling healthy smartphone and screen time habits:

If we want to help our grandchildren develop healthy smartphone and screen time habits, we need to model them. We start by taking an honest inventory and regulating the amount of time we spend looking at our iPhones and computers, especially but not limited to the times we are with our grandchildren. Furthermore, we need to police ourselves when it comes to posting photographs and information about our grandchildren on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other types of social media platforms.

Readers were outraged when founder and CEO of Facebook and MetaPlatforms, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a family photo and message on Instagram on July 4, 2023. He obscured his daughters’ faces with emojis. What does this show us? Regardless of the so-called safety nets, we need to take precautions when “sharenting” or posting our grandchildren’s pictures on the internet. Social media is ubiquitous. It’s practically impossible to retrieve a photo or personal information after it has been shared.

Closing Thoughts:

Watching grandchildren can be exhausting, especially for those of us who are in our sixties and seventies. Screen time keeps our grandchildren occupied while we get some needed rest. However, given the fact that excessive screen time produces a continual release of dopamine, conditioning our grandchildren’s brains to seek pleasure, it’s imperative we set limits and monitor screen time while they are in our care. 

 ¹ What Screen Time Can Really Do to Kids’ Brains | Psychology Today

² Common Sense Media: Age-Based Media Reviews for Families | Common Sense Media

Recommended Resources:

Grandparenting: Screen Kids, Gary Chapman and Arlene Pellicane (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2020).

How Screen Time Creates Child ‘Dopamine Addicts’ With Bad Habits (fatherly.com) How Screen Time Creates Child ‘Dopamine Addicts’ With Bad Habits (fatherly.com)

What Screen Time Can Really Do to Kids’ Brains | Psychology Today

Common Sense Media: Age-Based Media Reviews for Families | Common Sense Media