Gifted Kids and Screens: Sink or Swim

Today’s post is the third and final part of a special three-part deep dive covering digital technology for gifted and neurodivergent kids. I’ve made part three FREE for everyone.

Start here if you missed part one or part two.

In this final part, I’m covering:

• How to help your children and teens build a healthy relationship with technology over the long haul

• Warning signs that you, as a caregiver, have a technology problem

• A simple, 5-step framework for creating a family media ethic and plan for your differently wired family

• Strategies to help your kids enjoy technology more while using it less

When I talk with parents of gifted and neurodivergent kids about screen time decisions—whether to use AI, whether to allow their children to watch certain shows, whether device use is interfering with school—I invariably find myself talking about swimming pools. The connection may not seem obvious at first, but any parent who has taken their child near a body of water will readily understand.

Drowning is a leading cause of childhood death. Most parents know they must be vigilant in monitoring their children in the bath, while swimming, or at the beach. Eventually, many decide that their children must learn to swim, both for safety and because it’s easier to enjoy life when their children are prepared around water. Very few of us question the dangers or the solution.

Yet despite many parents understanding that digital technology can also pose significant risks to their children, instead of teaching their children to “swim” with tech, they often do one of two things:

1. Ban all digital devices in their homes

2. Allow unrestricted access to digital technology and media

Why do we treat this issue any differently from water safety?

I’ve worked with parents who don’t own a television, don’t allow their children to use computers, or physically lock up technology in their homes. I’ve also spoken to parents who leave the television on all day, give young children cell phones, and don’t monitor what their kids do on those devices. Neither of these extremes is typically the most useful strategy.

Readers of Beyond Gifted know that I explicitly avoid judging parents—our jobs as parents are hard enough, and families have good reason for their decisions—but I’m definitely curious when parents make all-or-nothing decisions.

For many parents, restricting technology seems like the only solution after watching their neurodivergent kids struggle with tech use. Others feel like it’s a hopeless battle, so they might as well give up limits altogether. Still others assume that if their child is gifted, they will have the good sense to stay safe online or choose high-quality media without oversight (unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily the case).

Restricting technology makes good sense when you have young kids who can’t meaningfully engage with it, and many research-backed organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend this practice.1 While many parents can manage a low-tech routine until their children reach elementary school, despite our best efforts, our children will eventually be exposed to screens—whether at a friend’s house, in school, or in the workplace. We want them to be prepared when they do.

Most families I work with want their children to be wise, informed consumers of digital media. They want their children to use technology meaningfully and in moderation, to stay safe from questionable people and material, and to keep screens from taking over their lives.

Yet, paradoxically, for this to happen, children need some access to technology. They need practice to understand how it all works, how their actions reverberate, and what is and isn’t safe. We can’t teach a child who has never touched water to swim. We also can’t teach these skills if we’re not equipped to navigate the waters ourselves.

Many adults lack basic knowledge about digital technology or privacy. Technology companies have intentionally obfuscated the risks for years, so that we avoid seeing information and media literacy for what they are: matters of safety.

Instead, we treat device use as an issue of willpower, a matter of personal preference, or something that can’t possibly be that harmful. If it turns out all this technology use was bad for us, well, brain rot is just an accepted part of modern life.

Compounding this problem, because technology has advanced so rapidly in the past few decades, many of today’s parents were handed their own devices, like smartphones, before any real guidance or warnings were available. We’re used to winging it and figuring it out on our own, and we’ve carried that ethos into our parenting. Many parents today don’t even realize that evidence-based tools and frameworks exist to help make device decisions less fraught.

Before you can help your child develop a healthy relationship with technology, it’s important to evaluate whether your own tech use is a problem. Here are six problematic behaviors that may suggest your relationship with technology needs tweaking:

1) You use devices while driving

This is probably self-explanatory, but thousands of people are killed each year using cell phones in cars. If you’re tempted to use your device while driving, try this: Tell your family where you are going and when you’ll arrive, turn off your device, then store it in the trunk. You can power back on as soon as you’ve arrived.

2) Your bedtime is continuously sacrificed to devices

If you can’t maintain a consistent sleep schedule because you feel compelled to do, tap, or view just one more thing on your phone at night—leading to an ever-later bedtime—this signals a problem.

3) You take your devices everywhere

In the bathroom, by the lake, in the car, while not awake… this is starting to sound like a Dr. Seuss book.

4) You respond to notifications at all hours

Two of the best things you can do to reduce your phone usage are to turn off banner notifications at the top of your screen and badge notifications, which are the annoying little red dots that show up on apps. Just turning off badge notifications has been shown to significantly reduce screentime.2

5) You’re always on and always available

We live in a time when bosses expect us to answer their calls at all hours, while also working increasingly long days. Don’t do this! Use away mode to silence notifications outside of work hours, and use your cell phone’s do-not-disturb function to limit your availability broadly. When you’re on vacation, put up an away message and truly stick to it. If these steps make you anxious, know that it will take some time for the anxiety to dissipate, and that the anxiety will potentially ramp up before eventually getting better. Working with a therapist while implementing these steps can be helpful.

6) You spend more time with social media figures than with your real family

If you find yourself endlessly scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok—that’s by design. Even the creator of the “endless scroll” feature feels sorry he ever created it. Social media is one area where the technology is just so addictive that it may be easier to give it up altogether. However, if you can’t do that, limiting your use to a single platform can help decrease novelty and curb your device use over time.

If you find any of these apply to you, consider taking some small steps to curb your device use. You didn’t create this problem, but parents do need to learn about the effects and potential harms of too much device use. In the meantime, it’s worth monitoring our use, both because our children are watching and because it’s tough to hold the line if we aren’t walking the talk ourselves. This article provides some information on legislation currently in the works in the U.S. regarding kids and tech.

Once you’ve evaluated your own screen use, you’re ready to think critically about what place digital technology should have in your family.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) isn’t a perfect organization, but I do appreciate its technology framework, The 5 C’s of Media Use. This framework isn’t entirely new; it was modeled on the work of education researcher and journalist Lisa Guernsey, featured in the video below, who has researched and written extensively on digital tech for kids.

Here she is, speaking about her original technology use framework, upon which the 5 C’s were built:

The first step in the framework encourages you to consider your child's specific needs, proclivities, habits, and vulnerabilities when making technology decisions. As I noted in part one of this series, gifted and neurodivergent kids often differ from typical kids in many ways, particularly in their use of technology, so we need to keep those differences in mind when making technology decisions.

The second step of the framework, “Content,” asks parents to actively participate in selecting media content, understand what their kids are consuming, and help their children recognize the messages they are being told. In part two, I covered strategies for evaluating the content your child consumes.

The third step cautions using technology to help children self-soothe, fall asleep, or cope with difficult feelings (i.e., to “calm” themselves), but eliminating technology for this purpose can feel impossible for neurodivergent families. One way to adapt this step is to think about how technology can be used mindfully for calming: instead of scrolling Instagram on an iPad, perhaps your child could use it to call a supportive friend or family member when they’re upset, or watch meditation videos. Ultimately, we want our children to have a wide-ranging toolbox of emotional coping strategies, so it’s better to ensure that your child feels capable of choosing among many options rather than simply pulling away tech tools altogether.

Step four, “crowding out,” might be one of the most important steps in the framework. As I covered in part one, it can be helpful to reframe screen time so you’re not reducing something that is enjoyable, a means of regulation, or an escape for your child. Instead, consider adding things into your family’s life that might be more fulfilling and naturally crowd out screen use, like friendships, hobbies, sports, crafting, or relationships with family.

The final step, “communication,” often comes naturally for gifted and neurodivergent families. Many bright minds like to process and share with others what they’re seeing, reading, or learning about. This step emphasizes the importance of engaging with your children in ongoing conversations about technology use and the media they consume, which builds critical-thinking and media-literacy skills.

For age-specific 5 C’s guidance, here are downloadable PDF toolkits. You can also visit this helpful article.

It’s much harder to get children on board with a plan that feels punitive. If you’ve ever started a strict new routine only to find yourself rebelling against it, you’ll understand why imposing technology limits can feel terrible to kids, particularly if they have no say in the matter. This is doubly true for children and adults who identify with the experience of persistent demand for autonomy, or PDA.

To get your family on board with the plan, I suggest starting with strategies that actually increase the pleasure your family derives from technology. Just as eating a really delicious piece of rich cheese or chocolate can feel more satisfying than the “diet” options, engaging in more thoughtful, rich technology use can help you use less of it.

• Help your child learn to curate their content by blocking problematic themes, “liking” positive content, skipping past upsetting media, and turning on filters.

• At home, avoid having the television on as background noise, as this can interfere with language development in young children and overstimulate sensitive kids. When you watch TV, make it an intentional movie night for the whole family or a special program everyone looks forward to together.

• Wait to expose sensitive kids to material meant for older teens or adults. While they may be cognitively mature enough to handle these programs, gifted kids’ emotional maturity often develops at a different pace.

• When you have a child who experiences a divergence between their emotional maturity and their intellectual maturity levels, think about their “lowest age” when selecting media—that is, the lowest “age” of their cognitive or emotional maturity—and stick with programs meant for that age group.

• Choose from high-quality media sources (strategies for this are detailed in part two of this series).

• Select one or two meaningful social media platforms where you don’t experience distress, and skip the rest.

• Ensure your child knows that you have unrestricted access to review their messages, search history, and accounts at any time.

• Ensure parental controls are enabled on all devices, and routinely monitor what your child is watching. Better yet, view content and media alongside them and engage in discussions about what you’re seeing.

• Skip most technology at school. If possible, advocate for phone and device bans at your child’s school and avoid 1:1 computers for each child in class. Research demonstrates that these just aren’t very effective in traditional school models and can be actively harmful.3 If your child is in an online or hybrid school (as many gifted kids need), this will obviously look different.

• Consider the timing of technology use. Delaying giving your child a phone until high school, limiting technology use after 8 pm, and setting specific no-tech times, such as at dinner, church, bedtime, or during special occasions, can increase the joy your family experiences while in the real world.

It’s tough to help our children “swim” with technology if they aren’t given sufficient experiences to do so. However, it’s helpful to understand your own technology-related behaviors before working to establish a family screen-time ethic.

The 5 C’s Framework is one tool to help your family make thoughtful decisions, as it considers your individual child’s needs, the content they consume, whether tech is replacing valuable calming skills, crowding out other important areas of their life, and whether you’re communicating about their tech use.

Finally, before removing all pleasurable technology from your family’s life, consider the many ways you might actually increase your family’s pleasure from technology so that tech use is more mindful, positive, and ultimately limited.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this series or found it useful, I’d love to hear about it. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, and feel free to share with a friend who needs it!

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🧠 This article took a lifetime of lived experience, a graduate degree in gifted education, 15+ years working with gifted folks, and 12 hours of research, writing, and editing to create.

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I’m a gifted education and career consultant specializing in supporting bright, intense, and creative minds from childhood through adulthood. Whether seeking school placement for a gifted child, navigating career choices as an adult, or exploring your gifted identity, I offer personalized, compassionate support grounded in gifted-specific training, education, and 15+ years in the field.

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