Smartphones have no place on the family island!

The most important information

Based on a survey conducted by Danish television, Jesper Juul writes about family life with and without smartphones. He calls the devices «electronic family members» that are both a curse and a blessing. The result of the survey is clear: the majority of schoolchildren and parents alike would like more undisturbed family time. And yet today it is a matter of course to check your mobile phone whenever possible.

Love and affection need a face, no smartphone or tablet can replace feelings. Jesper Juul therefore appeals to all families to take time out together from electronic media. The parent-child relationship is based on dialogue and leads to frustration if the children are put off because a call comes in.

Jesper Juul's recommendations for dealing with smartphones and the like in everyday family life:

• Make sure you inform your friends, family, colleagues and employer that you are not available at all times. Help your children to do the same if necessary.
• All meals are phone-free zones, this also applies to meals in restaurants and to the waiting time before the food is served. (Added value: More tips)

You can read the full article by Jesper Juul with more information about family time and electronic devices here.

My inspiration for this article was a survey conducted by Danish television this spring with 1600 13-year-olds and a similar group of parents. Like many other experts, I was asked by hundreds of parents how the use of smartphones and tablets affects children's social skills and brain development. Because brain researchers from different countries continue to publish extremely different results, opinions and recommendations, I have held back until now. However, the overwhelming consistency in the thoughts and experiences of these Danish teenagers and parents have inspired me to write this article.

The electronic «family members» draw so much attention to themselves that it is unhealthy for family relationships.

I call electronic devices «family members» because they attract a lot of attention and are changing the culture of families in ways that are unhealthy for the love-based relationships between adults, siblings and parents and children.

The survey concluded that a majority of school children missed their parents and wanted to spend more uninterrupted time with them. The same was true for parents. And I'm sure we would get similar responses from partners.

This survey was conducted at the right time. As we will soon have reached a point where the majority of young adults will no longer be able to compare their family experience before and after the introduction of smartphones.

For various reasons, a majority of adults have convinced themselves that their lives must follow the beat of emails, messages, posts and texts and employers, friends, business partners seem happy in the assumption that we are available seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

The same even applies to very young children and their social network. These factors are such a serious problem that we need to change our way of thinking.

Relationships between adults: When togetherness is given up

Ten years ago, the majority of adults found the use of mobile phones during private visits, meetings and meals annoying. Nowadays this is hardly the case any more and if it is, it mainly affects young people (under 50) and they are embarrassed to comment on it, it is simply uncool and old-fashioned.

Every deep friendship or love relationship needs continuity and undisturbed togetherness in order to become resilient and develop all its potential nuances and strengths - just like plants need fertiliser. This is nothing new.

We know from couples who have lived together for seven or more years that they feel alienated, lonely, unhappy and frustrated if togetherness only happens when there are problems or crises in the family.

It is even worse if even these emergency sessions are not possible or are far too short and solution-focussed. At this stage, both partners experience a feeling of emptiness and a lack of meaning. We are functioning very well, but we are not living, they say.

It is not so important what causes the lack of continuity and undisturbed togetherness. Before there were smartphones, it could be the television, work stress, perfectionism, commitments outside the nuclear family, hobbies, etc.

Children do not process their emotions in this intellectual way.

All these factors - including today's smartphones and tablets - are not the real reasons for the loss of intimacy and meaning in our deep relationships. The real reason is in our heads and that is good news because we can change this situation ourselves, regardless of the decision of others.

It's also what many couples do every day when one of them receives a cancer diagnosis or their way of life is jeopardised in some other way. When our lives are surrounded by death, it often makes us make wiser decisions.

Parent-child relationships: «Sorry, darling. I need to take this for a minute!»

Every day and in the few hours that children spend with their parents, the following happens more and more often: Children want to ask their parents a question, they want to tell them something or respond to something their parents have just said, and the answer that follows is: «Sorry, darling, I have to take this»; "Sorry, but I've just received a message from work that I have to answer.

It won't even take a minute, I promise"; «Can you wait a minute... I have to...»; «Oh no, I forgot to switch off the phone, now I have to answer it.»

Missing your parents, even though they are there, has far-reaching consequences.

In the short term, this behaviour frustrates the children. Contrary to what many adults believe, however, the children do not feel rejected. There is no such feeling.

When adults say they feel rejected, it is because they feel something that makes them believe they have been rejected. Children do not process their emotions in this intellectual way.

If their parents reject them, they simply feel sad, disappointed or angry. What children always do, however, is start to adapt to the adult's behaviour.

At first they step back and hope, and eventually they give up and stop trying. At around the age of three, children then start to copy the behaviour of adults and focus on their own screens - e.g. tablets, TV and later their own smartphones.

When children from this recent survey say they miss their parents, this feeling is a cocktail of several different emotional responses and formative experiences:

I feel helpless!
They feel helpless because they can't express many of the stories and emotions they want to share with their parents under this time pressure. And they need a sense of security, intimacy, discretion and active, supportive empathy. Even if they feel helpless at this early stage, they still trust that their parents know best and follow their guidance.

I am confused!
Every time a parent breaks contact with the child, even for a minute or two, the child's mind wanders and the flow of consciousness is disrupted. The result: the children's apparently poor short-term memory often frustrates the parents, and they conclude that what they wanted to say was not important in the first place. «Feeling confused» thus develops into «feeling stupid».

I can't trust you!
The child makes the very precise observation: «Something else is more important to my parents than I am.» This robs the child of their growing and vulnerable self-esteem and crucially and dangerously, their sense of worth in their parent's life. No matter how many times a parent repeats «I love you», apologises and makes romantic promises for the future (like: I'll make it up to you): The damage has already been done.

In the early years, children choose to believe the words of their parents. This eventually leads them to a point where they begin to doubt their own feelings. Another big part of their self-esteem is lost.

I'm lonely!
In their ten or twelve year learning process, children feel lonely every time parents choose to prioritise their smartphones and for many children this loneliness defines their existence in other social contexts too. The most common impact for pre-adolescent children is a general loss of confidence and hope that any adult will take the time to listen to them and help them articulate how they feel and who they are.

As soon as puberty sets in, these children will generally withdraw from family life and seek closeness, appreciation and understanding elsewhere, which very often happens on internet platforms. We know from hotlines for children between the ages of 6 and 16 that many children have come to the conclusion that their parents don't have time to sit down with them. This is not necessarily the objective truth, but the children's experience and conclusion.

Young adults: misdiagnosis of depression

Psychologists and counsellors working with sixth formers, students and other groups of young people aged between 16 and 25 report a rapidly growing number of clients who are lonely, depressed, suffer from anxiety, have a social phobia and act in self-destructive ways.

In general, they speak of a feeling of alienation from their parents since they were very young. This isolation has robbed them of the opportunity to feel and express what is going on in their souls.

We are already at a point where many of these young people will become parents themselves and will most likely pass these difficulties on to their children, leading to a frightening increase in children and adults with serious mental illness.

The nature of human relationships takes a lot of time

The etymological origin of the English verb relate is: to tell oneself to another. A personal relationship is a way of being together in which we share our thoughts, our story, feelings, experiences and dreams; here and now.

It is in the nature of relationships that they swing back and forth like a pendulum between closeness, fusion and separation. When our need for closeness is satisfied, the feeling of needing distance arises and when this feeling is satisfied, we need closeness again, and so on.

Our lives as partners and family members would undoubtedly be easier if our needs were synchronised. But they are not.

One of the best ways to experience your inner clock is to take a three-week family holiday with no planning beforehand. The planning for each day is only done in the morning and there should be days when nothing is planned at all.

The secret and the healing ingredient here is to be together and free to follow the inner clock. Such an experience makes it easier for adults and schoolchildren to adapt to the more unnatural rhythms of everyday life.

In addition, we now know that our feeling of loneliness is not caused by others, but by our own way of life.

To do justice to the nature of human relationships, we need time together. Family islands, so to speak. Without smartphones.

Emotional and intellectual intimacy often needs two to three hours of togetherness to grow and blossom. This aspect of a relationship needs the kind of stillness and emptiness where «catching up» is followed by a comfortable silence.

At this point, we hear ourselves saying things that we have never said before and/or didn't even realise we were thinking. This happens in the relationship with our children (individually) and often creates new insights and wonderful new developments.

Today's way of life makes it extremely difficult for the nature of relationships to develop and flourish. However, we can create islands of togetherness where we can reboot our relationships, provided we don't bring our smartphones to the island.

If we do this, our family will become an archipelago of separate islands with nothing more than electronic communication.

For relationships to move from infatuation to meaningful closeness, we need to spend as much face-to-face time together as possible.

We don't need to sit and talk for this to happen, but we do need to play and work together; dance and move together; cuddle and make love; cry and comfort; cook and eat together; familiarise ourselves with each other's musical tastes, need art, fairy tales and the opportunity to be alone.

There's a reason we rest our heads on each other's chests - the sound and feel of the other person's heart is the ultimate experience of not being alone.

This is the main reason why so few long-distance relationships survive and why moving home every week is so difficult for children.

For a few brief moments, we hoped that e-mail, chat and Skype would be able to compensate for the physical distance, but they can't do that.

They are valuable work tools, but for relationships with people we love and rely on, they are a poor substitute. There's a reason we rest our heads on each other's chests - the sound and feel of the other person's heart is the ultimate experience of not being alone.

We can use our smartphones to record someone else's heartbeat and listening to it is comforting - especially for babies - but in no way as good as the real heartbeat.

We need to change our way of life

Over the last four to six years, there have been experiments in certain countries in which children have been banned from using their smartphones at school. Families have tried living completely without their smartphones for a week, a month, etc.

The positive feedback from all age groups was overwhelming. The learning curves at school were pointing upwards and both parents and children were enthusiastic and quickly acquired a taste for all the things they could do together.

These experiences and the growing awareness that our pace and priorities are not serving us well give me hope that a massive lifestyle change is possible.

Of course, every family has to create its own culture and rules, but please note that this project is not about protecting the children from possible brain damage, it is about achieving a better quality of family life, closeness and intimacy.

It's about making ourselves accessible and available to our neighbours, while being unavailable to the rest of the world.

Don't wait for a new trend to emerge out of our misery - conspire with your children and other families in your neighbourhood and decide on a two-week experiment.

Make an assessment after two weeks, make certain adjustments if necessary and inform everyone that three months is the minimum trial period. Share your experiences on Facebook or other social networks and help create a lasting movement.