How to Craft an ‘Indistractable’ Summer Schedule for Your Kids - Nir And Far

How to Craft an Indistractable Summer Schedule for your Kids this is Nir Eyal with the near and Far Podcast and with me, as always, is Nick Gray. How you doing Nick?

I'm doing so great. Welcome new listeners and people on LinkedIn Live. We're going to be reading Nir's newest article about how to craft an indistractable summer. And if you're just joining, I read the articles and then Nir is going to chime in with some bonus content, great ideas and research, and a little bit of a behind the scenes. This is like in the writer's studio almost. So I'm excited about that. Let me get started. Here's the new article how to Craft an Indistractable Summer Schedule for your Kids Help them make the most of it by Becoming Indistractable the end of the school year is a magical time. Kids have made it through a grueling year of groggy early mornings, rigid class scheduled piles of homework, and endless extracurriculars. Finally, they have the whole two months of sunny freedom. It's a well deserved break, but this gift of time can easily be squandered if left to their own devices. During these months, kids will often turn to, well, their devices. No parent wants to return home from work to see their offspring on the couch watching TV or playing video games or scrolling on smartphones and wonder, have they been doing this all day yet? Adults also have to go to work. They're not available to micromanage how children spend their time. And that's a good thing, because the better option is to delegate that job to kids. Summer is an excellent opportunity to teach kids to control their time and attention. The precious skill of becoming indistractable that will transfer to the next school year and to the rest of their lives. Here's why adults should help kids design an indistractable schedule for the summer. Summer is Kids time to shine. It may seem counterintuitive, but kids have a much better shot at learning to control their time and attention during the summer break than during the school year. That's because during the school year they're not really given that option. What they do and when is decided chiefly for them, but the summer break is their turn to decide. It also offer kids a chance to soak up the three psychological nutrients they need to become indistractable, which they often lack in schools. These nutrients were identified by Richard Ryan and Edward Deechy, renowned human behavior researchers in their self determination theory for psychological well being. Number one, autonomy. That's the volition and freedom of control over their choices. 2. Competence. The mastery, progression, achievement and growth. 3. Relatedness. Feeling important to others and that others are important to them. Children need these nutrients to grow into capable individuals who can manage their attention and time. If they don't get sufficient amounts of these nutrients, they seek them in distractions, overindulging in social media and video games. Unfortunately, most formal schooling in the United States and similar industrialized countries strips kids of the necessary psychological nutrients.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is the frame that we're going to use to talk about this. And I think this is a critical frame to understand not only our children's behavior, but also our co workers behavior, our own behavior. This theory called self determination theory, it's a theory in terms of the way that a scientific theory like the theory of gravity might be a theory. It's pretty well established. It's probably the most well known theory of human flourishing. This, this theory of self determination theory. Every psychologist in the world knows about self determination theory as proposed by Desi and Ryan. And so these three, what I call psychological nutrients, they did all the research, they get all the credit for coming up with autonomy, competency and relatedness. I tried to make it something that people can understand the importance of by calling them psychological nutrients or psychological vitamins. Meaning we all know about the macronutrients we need for our body, right? We got fat, protein and carbohydrates. We all learned this at elementary school, that for a proper diet we need these three things for our bodies to thrive. But we don't learn what it takes for our minds to thrive, for our psyche to thrive and for psychological well being. Children, adults, doesn't matter. We all need these three psychological nutrients of autonomy, competency and relatedness. If you do not have those three nutrients, if you are deficient in those three psychological nutrients, you will go looking for them in one place or another. This is called the needs displacement hypothesis, that if you are not getting what you need psychologically in one area of your life, guess what? You're going to look for those psychological needs in other areas of your life. And when it comes to our children, this is incredibly important because what I think self determination theory shows us, and I've talked to Desi and Ryan, the authors of this theory, to hear this from their mouths directly, is that we know that children are going to these online spaces and sometimes spending way too much time in these online spaces. Not because of the, of the online products themselves, but because of what these products are providing them and what they are providing them is a nourishment of these psychological vitamins because they are not getting what they are, what they need offline. So they're looking for these needs online. And we're going to talk about that more in a minute. As Nick reads through this article, that's a very important framework to think about, not only for your children's life, but for your life. If you find that you are compelled to do things that you later regret, you're spending too much time online, too much time on the news, too much booze, too much Facebook, whatever. Ask yourself which of these three psychological nutrients you might be missing. And then for our kids, how can we supplement those psychological nutrients in a healthier way by using this amazing opportunity that we have as this summer break, that many people get to make the most of that time by nourishing those psychological nutrients.

This article was designed to be written for summer schedule for kids, but I have a feeling that I'm going to get as an adult, that I'm going to get a lot out of it because what you were saying that if I'm spending too much time on my phone, what am I missing from these three things? And I like what you coined about the psychological nutrients. Let's get into those three psychological nutrients. Number one, autonomy. Kids don't have the autonomy to make their own choices at school. Teens in the US are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as our mainstream adults. Twice as many restrictions as active duty US Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons, according to the research of Robert Epstein, author of a 2007 article titled the Myth of the Teen Brain. Barbara Rogoff, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, hypothesizes that children give up control of their attention when it's always managed by an adult. Kids can become conditioned to lose control of their attention. And since they don't get autonomy from school, they turn to their devices to find it online, thus becoming highly distractible.

So, really important point. Let's just reemphasize this for a minute. Did you all hear that? The teens in the US are subjected to 10 times as many restrictions as a mainstream adult, twice as many restrictions as an active duty US Marine, and even twice as many as restrictions as incarcerated felons. So this is something to consider here. You know, if you think about it, there's only one place in society where we can tell. Sorry, two places. Two places in society where we can tell people where to go, how to dress, what to think, who to be friends with what to eat, where to sit, and that's school and prison. And so let that sink in for a minute, that if one of our psychological nutrients is the need for autonomy, children, adults, all of us, we need to feel like we have control over our decision making. And if you don't, right, if you put people in cages, they act like animals. And so whether it's in prison, whether it's in school, where kids are told what to do all day, they're going to want to control their own choices. They're going to have that need for autonomy. And so by the way, this is why you see this myth. You know, we all think that somehow teenagers have these brains that are messed up, that are still developing and that's why they act all crazy.

No.

Did you know that in non industrialized countries, kids don't rebel? Right? So this, this myth of the teenage brain, that somehow the brain of the teenager leads them to rebel, that they're, oh, they have all these hormones. It's a total lie. It's bullshit. Because we see that in non industrialized countries. It doesn't happen. It happens in industrialized countries because industrialized countries have institutionalized education where we make kids sit in seats and be good little children all day long. And so what happens when they get out of school? They want to rebel. They want to have autonomy. Because again, if it is one of.

Our core psychological needs, I'm nodding my head like, I understand as a 41 year old single male with no children, I'm like, yes, yes, that that is happening.

Well, you probably experienced it in your own life as well. I mean, you know, either, either you or kids you knew rebelled. And so I think the, you know, we, we, we all, I certainly felt this. And I did well in school, right? Like I went to a good college, I went to grad school, but still I, I remember that feeling that, that pit in your stomach of being told what to do all day. And I myself used video games to kind of escape reality so I could feel in control of my life.

That's really interesting because I sought the same type of control. I wanted to rebel like that. Yeah. Okay. The number two psychological nutrient is competence. Few kids feel competent in classrooms today. A primary culprit is the emphasis on standardized testing. In many countries, standardized testing is a one size fits all approach that doesn't account for differences in development, learning and intelligence types. A child who isn't doing well in school and doesn't get individualized support will start to believe that achieving competence is Impossible, so they stop trying. Then that child will turn to outlets that make them feel competent, like video games, apps, and other potential distractions. Number three. Relatedness. Free play and spontaneous socializing with peers are formative parts of growing up. However, kids spend so much of their time at school doing homework and participating in extracurriculars that they rarely have time for unstructured, unchaperoned socializing. That's why they spend so much time on their devices, seeking communities and interactions in online forums. It's not a given that the summer break will feed children these psychological nutrients. Kids specifically need an indistractable summer. They need to be empowered to decide how to spend their time, do activities that make them feel competent, and build relationships with friends. If they have that, their interest in devices is likely to wane. But they need help from adults to design an indistractable summer and bring it to fruition. Help kids design an indistractable summer Creating an indistractable summer begins by sitting your kids down to discuss their goals and values and how to make time for them. I'm sure you imagine your kids groaning in despair at the thought of scheduling summer. But an indistractable summer is not a punishment, a chore, or yet another exercise to control kids. It's a plan for making sure they have the summer they want. Without a clear plan, many kids are left to make impulsive decisions that often involve digital distractions. So follow these steps to build an indistractable summer with your child. Now, before we get started on the steps of how to build it, I just want to ask for near. Have you ever done this with one with. With your kid? Or have you seen people who've done it? It seems, I mean, I kind of like it, actually. I love the idea.

Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's.

So.

I have a teenage girl who is about to turn 15. And it's interesting. Whenever I tell people that I have a teenager, one of the first reactions is like, oh, that must be so hard. They're so rebellious. It's so difficult. And I don't know what they're talking about. I mean, I feel incredibly fortunate. Thankfully, she's healthy. And that's. That's the most. You know, that's a criteria that I think. Unfortunately, not everybody has the luxury of a healthy child, but somehow we think that, that every child has to be rebellious and hate their parents and not want to discuss this kind of stuff. And I found just the opposite. I find that as a parent, the more agency and control I give My child when she's ready for it. Right. Of course, there's some things that you can't let a very young child do that you can let an older child do. What I found consistently is that I'm always surprised by one, her ability to do, to rise to the occasion when she has increased freedom. But also I've always been surpr that. That. That she craves that right. That when she wants that freedom, giving it to her is so beneficial, that from. From her perspective, she wants that. That responsibility. And, and what's been interesting, actually, since I've been living in Asia, I live in Singapore now, even though I grew up in. In the States. What's interesting is how different culturally.

Children are treated. You know, in America, we have this sensibility somehow that children should always be protected, that, you know, stranger danger. You have to teach kids that the world is a very dangerous place and that they have to stay very close by, and we have to constantly monitor them on their phones to make sure that they're in the right place, the right time, and that, you know, nothing could possibly hurt them. And that is so not the culture in many areas of the world. You know, here in Singapore, children as young as 5, 6 years old ride the public buses by themselves to get to school. Granted, that's, that's. That's also a testament to how safe it is here and the fact they have such great public transportation. But. But it's also a testament to this. This.

Cultural recognition that kids should deserve to have more autonomy and freedom and choice in their lives. And so that's something that we've tried to really provide with our daughter as much as we possibly can, as long as she's safe and she's capable. We ask ourselves, look, is this fear that we have that she's not ready, is that founded in fact? Right. Like, how many of us know that in the United States this is the safest time in history to be a child, that child abductions are at record lows. Right. That we don't realize how safe children are today, that it's much better to give them this autonomy and freedom than to keep them closed in? Where, when we do that, when we say to kids, well, we gotta keep you safe. You have to be inside. What other choices do they have but to overdo their time spent on social media or video games? Because they're not outside, they're not having the joy of having their own autonomy, competency, and relatedness like we talked about with these psychological nutrients, because we didn't give them the option to make the most of their time. If we stick them inside, well, big surprise. They're going to play video games and go online all day. So this has definitely worked for me and my family in our experience, and I hope it works for others as well.

Well, let's figure out how to follow these steps to build an indistractable summer with your child. Step one Figure out how kids want to spend their time. Uncover their goals, values, and interests by asking them what qualities or attributes do you admire and want to embody yourself? What activities will help you fulfill those values? What do you want to accomplish by the summer's end? Or in general, what activities are you interested in doing? The things your kids come up with might surprise you. They may want to establish a running routine to get in shape for soccer tryouts in the fall. They may want to learn a new skill like playing an instrument. They may want to volunteer their time to those in need. Other ideas they have, like playing video games, may come as no surprise at all. Adults can help kids think about the full range of possible values by introducing them to the three life, themselves, work, and relationships. This will encourage kids to think about not only the value of having fun and enjoying life, but also values like being healthy, which means eating nourishing food, exercise, and sleeping enough being a good cousin, sibling, or grandkid, which means calling relatives or spending quality time with them and being disciplined about pursuing new interests. Step 2 Create a time boxed schedule to help kids turn those values into time. Now that kids have identified their values, goals, and interests, ask them how much time they want to dedicate to each related activity. You may not like your kids answers like how much time they want for playing video games, but it's important to honor their input and respect their control over their time. If they try to assign too much time to video games, don't prohibit it outright. Instead, provide them with research on why that much screen time is unhealthy. My wife and I don't enforce a strict bedtime for our daughter. Instead, we make it a point to expose her to research findings showing the importance of ample sleep for adolescents, and she concluded on her own to cut screen time after 9pm Once your kids know how much time they want to spend on each activity, introduce them to timeboxing, an effective time management technique. Have them schedule their activities into the time boxed calendar. Not every minute of every day has to be planned. Kids can kick off their indistractible summer by scheduling just one or two activities a week, and those activities can include Free play. But adults should enforce the idea that once an activity is time boxed, kids have to stick to their commitment to help children learn self regulation. We must teach them to make time for traction by setting aside time for their values, goals and interests.

Yeah, so just to pause here, one of the things that I encourage parents to do is to let their kids schedule time for video games or social media, whatever it is that they enjoy doing that you might bristle at. By giving them that time on their schedule, you do two things. One, you give them the autonomy to plan their time, to ask them, how much do you think is enough? So when my daughter was very young, I think she must have been five, six years old, she was spending a lot of time on her iPad. And so we talked about, hey, you know, the price of all the time you're spending on your iPad is the cost, the opportunity cost of not spending time with your friends or with your parents or reading a book or going to the pool or doing something fun. That's the price of spending so much time on your iPad. So we asked her, even at 6 years old, how much time would you like to spend on the iPad? Given that you want to do all this other stuff in your life, you want to spend time with your friends, you want to go outside, you want to do all this other stuff, how much time do you want? And so you would think kids would say, oh, I want to spend all day, but that's actually not true. That if you give them the choice and they know that, hey, the cost is I can't spend time with my friends. I don't have time for the other things I like to do in my life. And they will most of the time, make a pretty good suggestion. And so my daughter's suggestion was two episodes. Two episodes. She meant Netflix shows, like, you know, age appropriate kids shows that she was watching on Netflix. That's about 45 minutes. Well, I don't have any problem with 45 minutes. But what we did was we enabled her to set her own schedule and to monitor her own schedule. I said, fine, you know, if you want 45 minutes a day or two episodes, that's no problem. But how do we make sure that you stick to your goals, that you do what you say you're going to do? And at only six years old, she realized, she suggested this. She said, look, daddy, you know, there's this. We, we used to have this microwave that was below the kitchen counter. So even when she was, you know, yay high at six years old, she could reach this microwave. And so she could use the timer on the microwave, it had a timer function and so she could put in 45 minutes. And then when the timer went off, she knew it was, it was time to put the iPad away. The beauty of this is that now I didn't have to be the police officer, right? I didn't have to tell her to put away her iPad. She taught herself. Now what she does, she actually uses Amazon Alexa and she says set a timer for 45 minutes and that's her YouTube time or that's her TikTok time. Like she can go ahead and use those, those things, but she has to monitor her own schedule. The reason this is so important is that number one, she decides for herself and number two, she gets practice self regulating. Because when we as parents step in and tell children where to be and what to go and what to think and what to wear and what to eat and what to do, they don't get that practice for themselves. And of course that's what happens at school as well. So the more time we let children self regulate, the more practice they get self regulating, the better off they'll be for the rest of their lives. Because you know they're going to need this skill in college and in their job and beyond. The other benefit that I didn't mention in this article that's super important is, is that when you schedule that distracting activity, that activity that's indulgent, that's fun, that's a treat, when it's scheduled, it no longer becomes a distraction. You turn distraction into traction by scheduling it. And your brain doesn't have to constantly think about it. So what happens to many children is that they're constantly thinking, when can I go online? When can I play that video game? When can I go check social media? When they know, oh, it's in my schedule, it's coming up, it's at 7:30pm after dinner, whatever that time is on their schedule that they decided along with you. Now they don't have to think about it all the time. They know it's coming up.

That's neat. That by time boxing it, it really turns distraction into traction. Step three, enable kids to pursue traction. While giving kids control of their time as essential, they still need help with logistics. Some activities, like learning to play guitar through YouTube, are easy for kids to do while home alone. But other activities happen outside the home and kids don't have the ability to do those unless they're old enough to drive and have access to a car or can take public transportation. Do you live in a rural place where your kids can't really leave your property without getting a ride? If you can't drive them, help them organize a carpool with other families or teach your kid to use available public transportation safely. Kids also may need adult help in researching and booking the activities they want to do, like sleep away camp, volunteering at a shelter, or joining a sports team. Summer isn't just an opportunity for kids to become indistractable. It's also an opportunity for parents to learn to relinquish control to their kids. By helping your kid to design an indistractable summer, you're helping them to flourish into a more mature individual who's ready to take on the world. Remember, the goal of parenting isn't to raise a child, it's to bring up a future adult.

Thank you Nick. I appreciate it. And just for everyone listening in as well as tuning in on LinkedIn, so appreciate you listening, recommend that you go to my blog nearandfar.com there are all kinds of resources there. There's many, many, many articles about children and technology and my philosophy on how to raise indistractable kids. There's also a chapter book, Indistractable, specifically on this, I think it's the most important chapter of the book on how to raise indistractable kids. We go much, much deeper into the psychological nutrients, into self determination theory and explore not only how to help kids have an indistractable summer, but how to have an indistractable life. And so if you're interested in that, please do check that out. Indistractable how to control your attention and choose your life. And with that, thank you for tuning in to the near and Far podcast. And then Nick, if it's okay with you, maybe I'll take just a couple questions here that are coming in from LinkedIn.

Yeah, great. As you queue up those questions, I want to give a plug for Indistractable. I just looked it up on Amazon. The book Indistractable, which Near released at the end of 2019, has over 5,000 ratings on Amazon with an average rating of 4.5 stars. This is incredible. The number of ratings and the quality. If you haven't checked out Indistractable yet, be sure to check it out. You can find these bonus materials and sign up for his newsletter@www.nearandfar.com. that's N I R&A N D FAR F A R.com check it out for his weekly newsletter. It's a really good newsletter. Let's go to LinkedIn. Yeah.

And real quick though, before we do that, I have to give a plug to you as well, Nick. If you haven't read Nick's amazing book called Two Hour Cocktail Party, it is fantastic. It is all about how to have more fun, joy, connection, talk about these psychological nutrients of compet relatedness and autonomy. One of the best ways you can feed your psychological nutrients is to host people at your house, have those parties, have those social engagements that you've been hearing other people having fun with. If you find that something you want to bring to your life, which I highly recommend you should, please do, go check out Nick's book Two Hour Cocktail Party. I've read it. I love it. Everyone should read it.

Nir helped me pick the title by the way, and he was such a godsend in helping me with the editing and everything. So it's got the near sign of approval. Let's hear what our LinkedIn folks are saying. By the way. Right back to one of the newsletters if you get one, if you have anything for an Ask Me Anything, we're probably gonna do it soon because I'm actually gonna go try to visit near here in the next month in Singapore. Maybe we'll do the Ask Me Anything live. That might be fun.

Yeah, that'd be fantastic. Okay, so we've got a few questions coming in and so there's it reminds me we should give a few disclaimers. So one question here is that there's too many things online that make it unseen safe to leave a kid unattended with their device. Unattended, I should say, with their device. That is absolutely right. So one of the rules here that we I should mention a disclaimer here is that you want to make sure that all content that kids are exposed to is age appropriate. So the kind of stuff that you would let your 17 year old see is going to be very different from what you would let your 7 year old see. Of course we have to monitor that type of stuff. When my child was was younger we had all kinds of filters and making safe, safe surfing tools. The good news is that many of these tools are free or darn close to free. Many of these come pre installed with your browser to turn on Safe Search, for example, to make it kids safe. So absolutely, parents do need to make sure that that the content that children see is age appropriate. What? But you know, I used to hear more about that problem of oh, what if they see something that's inappropriate online? I don't hear about that problem as much anymore. I find that more and more parents know how to use these tools to make sure their kids don't see something inappropriate. But one of the things that's very important to do as well is to make sure that your children know that they should come and talk to you about anything that makes them feel uncomfortable. To have that open line of communication is very, very interesting. It's very, very important. I should say another thing that I think is, is important to realize is that as the difficulty of screening out content, I think, has decreased. Right. That it's become easier to screen out that content. The question I hear more and more is how do I make sure that kids aren't spending too much time online? And so that was the majority of what we're discussing today is even if it is age appropriate, if it's, let's say, Fortnite or.

Watching YouTube videos, if the content is age appropriate, how do you just make sure that kids don't spend too much time online? And so that should also be supervised or at least discussed, per this article, around how we set boundaries that the child themselves creates. Right. So that they're part of this process. It's not something that we as parents dictate and say, here's what you're going to do and here's how much time I'm going to let you have. It's a process of how much time do you think is appropriate for you, how much would allow you time online as well as time to do the other things that you enjoy in your life.

That's great. Well, thank you for submitting some questions and thank you for listening. If you have a minute, will you rate us in whatever app you use to listen to the near and Far Podcast? It'd really mean a lot. Click that rate button, let us know. We'll give you a shout out in the next episode. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you next week.