Digital Wellness or Anxiety: Mind the Gap!

digital wellness2

If you’ve ever been on the London underground, you’ll have heard the phrase “mind the gap”! The one between the train edge and the platform edge. I’ve been thinking about that phrase recently – and the problem of choosing between digital wellness or anxiety for our children. 

We need that gap to be there – recognised and protected – so our children grow up able to choose to step into the digital world deliberately, with understanding and common sense.

So let’s have a closer look at what’s at stake.

Digital wellness, POPP and anxiety

In marketing, you find people telling stories in the POPP format. Briefly, this means they tell you 

  • the problem you have, 
  • the opportunity there is to solve it, 
  • possible steps you need to take to do that, and 
  • then make you a promise that they can do it for you. (Yeah, OK, we don’t always believe them!)

We know the problem – helping our children learn to choose well: between digital wellness or anxiety.

There’s an opportunity this decade to solve it.

And then there are those possible steps to doing just that!

Marketeers always make the steps sound hard – if they were easy, we’d have solved the problem ourselves by now, and they want our business!

As parents, however, we know already that those steps to solving the digital wellness or anxiety problem will be hard. We also realise that no one but us is going to take them! 

But take them we must. The nation’s children are full of anxiety, and the anxiety problem stems very much from their lack of digital wellness.

So – let’s define digital wellness in recognisable terms.

What is digital wellness?

The irony here is that as we name digital wellness traits, we'll probably recognise an element of digital ill health in ourselves! Never mind. Let’s plough on.

The age a child can manage these will vary, of course, but symptoms of a digitally well child  include:

  • Being able to leave the phone behind and go out and play without FOMO.
  • Not pleading to take a phone to the restaurant “to play a game while you lot talk boringly”.
  • Accepting that phones will not be in bedrooms all night.
  • Knowing that real friends are those who do not expect an answer immediately, and who do not think you're sad if you're not online all the time.
  • Recognising the prearranged and artificial “look” of influencers and selfies posted online.
  • Knowing how social media algorithms provide an echo chamber of views that agree.
  • Starting to self-regulate how many hours they spend on their devices.
  • Understanding the dangers of predators and sexual exploitation online – that there’s good and bad stuff on the internet and how they should protect themselves.

There are many others! You could likely finish the list yourself.

How does digital wellness free your child from anxiety?

Digital wellness and anxiety cannot co-exist. For example, if you can leave your phone and go out and play, you’ll not be constantly anxious to stop play and get back to it or keep wanting to check a message.

Again, if you start to understand how filters make people look the way they think they should look, you won’t anxiously check your looks all the time.

If you can enjoy time with family, knowing they’ll make it fun for you too, you wont be anxious about not having a game or film to fiddle with while on a day out.

However, this isn’t an all-or-nothing issue! “Lack of digital wellness” and “anxiety” tend to join forces powerfully towards the mid-to-extreme end of phone usage. There’s plenty of time before then!

So – here are a few things we can start doing from an early age to maintain a gap between digital health and digital anxiety:

  • We can help them stop things growing to that level by allowing them some (monitored) time on it. Best not to use it as a reward or punishment because this defeats the aim of healthy use!
  • We can talk about needing good quality sleep and how the light emitted by the device prevents their body getting ready for sleep – so bedroom use is limited. 
  • We enable discussions so they learn gradually about how devices can become an addiction, like alcohol and drugs, or chocolate ginger biscuits (or whatever!).

And that’s the thing. Denial feeds addiction. 

If we make it “no devices”, the yearning and anxiety attached to digital stuff grows. Well, we wouldn’t accept that for ourselves, so it won’t work for our kids either!

The aim is to ensure 

  • device use is healthy, and
  • a choice can be made.

Do we want our children to have digital wellness or anxiety? Can we help our children accept, understand and willingly deploy this choice as they grow up?

Difficult questions! 

However, they can’t escape the digital world, so we need to establish this gap, this choice, early on and reinforce it as they grow up.

What (hard) steps can we take to give our children the gift of a choice between digital wellness or anxiety?

1 Show your child you understand how they feel about their phones or devices. 

They’ve grown up with them, after all, whereas many of us have lived at least partly with lesser access.

Ask about their perspective on it – what it means to them – and let this lead your conversation at suitable times about the need for boundaries and safety and making a choice between their digital health or anxiety.

2 Talk to your child’s school about their phone policy. 

If they allow mobiles in lessons, how do they take responsibility for ensuring children are not also texting on them under the table, bullying others, checking social media etc? Be straight and strict about demanding answers, not cowed!

3 Absolutely insist on a bedtime policy of no screens in the bedroom. 

It’s easier if you have a group of parents to insist on the same – find ones who agree with you and are resilient against children's begging and tears! Decent sleep and ability to learn go hand in hand. Poor sleep and anxiety also go hand in hand.

4 Join or start a group and campaign incessantly for the government to provide more effective safety rules for children online. 

With the latest improvements in AI, it’s the right time for this kind of safeguarding to be done properly.

And it’s certainly too late to wait for further evidence for and against.

A generation is being denied digital wellness and sold out to digital ill health as their anxiety levels rise out of control.

Mind the gap! Digital health and anxiety need to part company!

Back to the POPP idea.

  • The problem is the huge effect of anxiety showing up in our children due to digital ill health.
  • The opportunities are there to grasp this moment and make something happen before it’s too late for a whole generation.
  • The promise is a better future for your child.

The only thing missing is taking the possible steps to start sorting it out. Hard steps, admittedly:

1 Educating your child is easiest to start with but hard to keep up with when we, too, are mostly hand-in-glove with our phones!

2 Challenging the school is next easiest but it's still hard to get a consensus among the staff and parents.

3 Starting some firm rules at home – that’s second to hardest.

4 Challenging the government is hardest of all – but absolutely crucial when they’re intent on focusing on anything but the future generation’s health.

What’s at stake?

It’s you and me who see the high levels of anxiety in young people and want something better for them. 

Digital wellness, on the other hand, will lead to our children having a balanced and fruitful life – taking the benefits but knowing how to deal with the downsides of internet and device use.

So it falls to you and me to mind the gap between digital wellness and anxiety! We have to turn into marketers of the solution. Give it a go?

digital children cover

A book to consider

If you like a thought-provoking read, this is one to go for. It’s written by two specialists in digital childhood who really get how to balance things.

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