Dear Kid Whisperer,

I’m struggling with my kids using their tablets so much. How much should I allow them to use them? I feel like they’re always on them, and that my wife and I don’t talk to our kids much anymore.

Answer: I was recently on a cruise ship that stopped at a private island. Thousands of my fellow cruise-goers, my family and I, were able, for several hours, to have free reign over this tropical Bahamian paradise. The island had pristine beaches, perhaps the most impressive water park on the planet, the largest swimming pool in the Bahamas, a floating barge in the ocean with a bar on it, a hot air balloon that you could actually ride, a zip line, and perhaps my favorite attraction on this earth, a swim-up bar in the pool.

It was heaven on earth, and a vast, vast majority of people under the age of 25 (hundreds of them) were staring like zombies at cell phones and tablets. Faced with the choice of experiencing a paradise that they would most likely never see again, or staring at the screens that they could experience any time they wanted, a vast majority of these young people chose the screens.

Does anyone else remember when people in their early 20s used to be interested in talking to each other? This might help today’s young people to:

Practice talking to a person

Learn what a “friendship” is

Learn how to not be scared of people

Meet someone they are attracted to

Experience an intimate relationship with another human being

Develop social skills like initiating and holding eye contact, reading social cues and being interesting

Find a long-term, loving relationship that produces love, marriage and children

Instead, we have young people who, while sitting in paradise, would rather watch videos of people they will never meet doing things that they will never do, and commenting on those people and those things.

Addiction to screens is taking away the best parts of what it is to be human.

If you are asking yourself, “Is this guy saying that intimacy, love, marriage, kids and swim-up bars are the best parts of the human experience?” my answer is a resounding “Yes.”

Your definition of the best experiences of life may or may not be different than mine, but surely your definition isn’t about getting likes or smileys or whatevertheheck thing it is on whatever mindless new social media app. If it is, I think we can agree that you are not living your best life.

So, with all of this in mind, here’s the answer to your question, and it may blow your mind:

There’s absolutely no good reason for your kids to have tablets in the first place.

None.

If you disagree, you are wrong.

The makers of these tablets, phones, apps and games (even educational ones) care about making money. There is no evidence that they care about your kids. They hire experts to figure out how to use the science of addiction, the same science behind slot machines, to get your kids addicted to their screens. The addicted kids want more and more screen time, and you purchase more and more games/apps/etc. Their attention span for, and interest in, anything that is not loud, brightly colored, and with a variable ratio schedule, plummets. Already addicted to screens as young kids, they age into social media, which depends on the same science of addiction. These companies bottle and sell your kids’ captive attention to companies that, again, do not care about your kids.

The results of all of this include kids going to school with little or no attention span left for anything that isn’t on a loud, bright, addictive screen (Don’t believe me? Ask any kindergarten teacher who has taught for more than 15 years about the changes in students since the invention of the iPad in 2010). The result is young people who are overwhelmingly uninteresting, disengaged and without social skills. The result is people, kids and adults alike, being addicted to screens instead of engaging in the wonderful, real experiences that we call life itself.

If you are in public right now, look around at the sea of phone zombies that you see before you.

WAKE UP.

You can be part of stopping this.

Taking away your kids’ tablets will make them upset and frustrated because you are essentially taking away a drug from a drug addict.

Putting away these screens will be hard.

Important things are often hard to do.

Take away the tablets. The health and happiness of your kids and our world depends on it.

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