Welcome to Running: A FEVER. My name is Michael Davis. This is a show about fitness, diet, and medicine. My goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life right up to the very end. It’s all about livin’ long and lovin’ life.
Happy New Year! This is our first episode of 2026. I hope you had a great 2025 and are ready to accomplish great things this year. For me, it’s always a moment of disbelief that another year has passed, seemingly so quickly, but I’m determined this year to pack everything good that I can into the stream of life.
Welcome back to Screen Time and Your Health, where we explore how digital life is shaping our real lives. So far, we’ve discussed how time in front of a screen makes us sedentary, how that inactivity affects our sleep, and what screens do to our brains. Today, we’re diving into something many families are struggling with—how screen time is affecting our relationships, our kids, and our peace of mind.
Have you ever ended a screen session with your child, only to be met with a meltdown? Or maybe you’ve looked around the dinner table and realized… everyone’s on a device—including you?
Let’s talk about the emotional fallout that can happen at these times, starting with the little ones. Increasingly, parents are reporting emotional outbursts, anxiety, and even social withdrawal in children after screen time. But what’s really going on?
Psychiatrist Victoria Dunckley says, “All interactive screen time stresses the central nervous system.” The child’s stress system is aroused, a system that nature intended to be used in emergencies (like coming across a saber-toothed tiger). Physical action—fight or flight—signals the stress hormones to stand down. But sitting in front of a screen offers no physical release.
Experts say this isn’t just about being cranky. Screens stimulate the brain’s reward system, and when that stimulation stops, kids can feel a kind of withdrawal. It’s not addiction—but it’s close.
But it’s not just kids. Screen habits are reshaping how families connect—or don’t.
Kyle Halderman, writer and father of three, said, “With children came more bills, more stress, and less time to unwind. To reclaim our individuality, my wife and I waved the white flag, installed smart TVs in our kids’ rooms, and gave them their own tablets. We got the reprieve we desired for a moment, but our concession created a plethora of new problems. My kids became spoiled and disrespectful as they got older.”
Sound familiar? This kind of ‘parallel play’—where everyone’s on their own device—can erode emotional closeness. And when parents are distracted, kids notice. They may act out, withdraw, or mimic the same habits.
So what can we do? The good news is, families are finding ways to reclaim their time and attention.
Hannah Matthews came up with some alternatives to screens to divert her children’s eyes and minds to something less stressful:
“Throwing rocks into a body of water [was] not an activity I ‘planned’ or ‘organized,’ perhaps, but one that has proven to be incredibly versatile when the siren song of the phone in my pocket gets too loud for my toddler’s short supply of patience and impulse control. He has loved: making different sizes of splash with different sizes of rock, trying to throw multiple rocks at once to see what happens, using both chubby arms to lift what must, to him, be Sisyphean boulders and shrieking with delight at his own strength, pouring cups of water with various numbers and sizes of rocks in them out into the puddle/creek/ocean/water table, and lining up and counting the rocks before sending them to their watery doom like some kind of tiny mobster. Not nearly as boring for me as many of his other self-directed screen time alternatives (watching traffic and commenting on the color of each car and truck, for example).
“Melissa and Doug Learn-to-Play Pink Piano. At first, this toy filled my son with rage. Mad that he couldn’t play ‘real’ songs, mad when I would try to help or play a song myself for his enjoyment… But eventually, he learned that he could make incredibly irritating and discordant sounds by banging the keys repetitively and passionately, for many, many minutes on end, and now it is a surefire tool with which we can dodge his demands for Elmo, Trash Truck, my nemesis (Blippi), or simly, ‘Video’ (or – even more primal – the little vroom vroom sounds he makes whenever he remembers that moving images of vehicles exist and are accessible to him). Now with the help of Melissa and Doug, whom I assume are a kindly married couple of elves tinkering away together in a woodship somewhere, we turn his vrooms into (equally primal-sounding) tunes.”
Here are a few other strategies that work:
– Create screen-free zones and times.
– Use parental controls—but also model the behavior you want to see.
– And talk about it. Make screen time a family conversation, not a battle.”
Digital distress is real—but it’s not permanent. With awareness and a few intentional changes, families can reconnect in powerful ways.
I hope you found this episode useful as you navigate the delicate balance between technology and togetherness in your family. Remember, if you’ve got the fever, keep it burning, and if you don’t, catch the fever, and I will see you next time on Running: A FEVER.
References:
https://zerotofive.net/parenting/why-kids-throw-a-fit-when-screen-time-is-up/
https://medium.com/thought-thinkers/how-screen-time-spoiled-my-children-edbc4c233a84
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/19/smartphone-alternatives-kids-toys