Welcome back to this fourth in a series of emotional self-regulation, of being at our best when kids are at their worst. The theme for this week will be also echoed in what I've been telling you about in previous weeks. We've got this care professionals training coming up three hours Saturday, three hours Sunday.
It's just a couple of days away actually, so if you're interested, now's the time to push the go button on that. It's for care professionals, educators, people working to help parents be really at their best, be on their top game when it comes to working with kids. If you're listening to this after, by the way, if you're listening to this as a recording, you can still sign up for the interest list because we run this training once a year, this particular one.
We have a bunch of care professional trainings but this is one on emotional self-regulation coming right up and you'll see a link right below to that. So to this week, one of the things that is a real flash point for us as parents when kids are being challenging, provocative, upset is around screens. And there's an answer to this, and most of us are aware of it, but I just want to kind of look through the window at this issue in terms of our own self-regulation and what's going on and why this can get quite fiery, is that when kids, when we give them a screen, we know that they're receiving a ton of adrenaline, a ton of cortisol, that's all really well known.
But in a previous podcast, I talked about the parent predator and what I mean by that is that screens now are much of the content on a screen. So much of it is specifically designed to be exciting, to be rewarding, to give quick pleasure and to be leveling up, to be successful, and basically a release of dopamine within the brain. Nothing wrong with dopamine, but at that level that video games, shows, they're designed to make it pleasurable because then kids will want to come back and play, they'll want to come back and watch, and then the makers of these games make a ton more money through selling the game or through product placements and advertising in the show.
It's about money, it's not about caring for our kids, it's about profit. But the problem with this in terms of our emotional self-regulation and what we're facing as parents is that when we take away the screen, you might remember from a previous podcast, what happens is that dopamine is in our ancient, ancient past, was released when our nomadic ancestors would get to a place where it was safe. There was enough water, there was enough shelter, there was enough food, and hunting and gathering, and dopamine would be released, and it was in a sense saying, stay here, be safe here, and dopamine was released.
Now when we're a good parent in the sense where we curate a screen and now we take the iPad away from a child, turn the computer off, the television off, we can face some pretty intense, everything from whinging and complaining to really intense stuff that can go on. And it's almost like some children go into being little beasties, they react with such intensity, and it's because of the removal of their safety. So we're no longer the good protective parent, we're the predator parent.
Our children are seeing us as dangerous, and the irony of that is that we're trying to keep them safe. Then, and this is the emotional self-regulation piece, then it's really hard to stay balanced and centered, because our kids are sometimes just out of themselves, or just won't release the TV show, the computer, won't give it to us, won't give back the phone, will fight us, and a lot of issues where parents lose it is all screen-based. And you know what, it's not the child's fault, it's that we put the screen in their hand in the first place.
We're kind of setting ourselves up for issues, and even broader than when we try to take the screen away, it has broader issues. For example, a lot of situations flare when we ask a child to do something, like clean up their room, put away their toys, whatever it is, depending on the age of the child or teenager. And if they're used to a lot of dopamine in their system, which is exactly what screens are designed to do, kids programming and gaming and stuff, that is not pleasurable, and it's not rewarding.
And so we kind of again set ourselves up, because they're not going to do, or they're going to push back hard, or kind of drag their feet at worst, at best rather, to not do what they're being told to do, because they are starting to be wired, and I mean that like hardwired, for pleasure and reward that comes easy. And cleaning up a room, cleaning up the bathroom, picking up the towels that they dropped, that's not pleasurable, it's not rewarding, and they won't do it. Or they'll argue about doing it, or they will say they'll do it, and then they won't, which can be just as frustrating when it's done over and over, it's cumulative.
So in that sense, it really does build up and build up within us frustration. But hiding in plain sight is the fact that screens have set us up, right? Because they're not going to want to do this stuff. They're either going to be upset because we've taken the screen away, because of the dopamine, the adrenaline, the fun, the cortisol, or the things that we need to do just to get through a family day, just all contribute.
We don't sometimes realize, I think, or give enough credit to what's happening at those heightened, significantly heightened levels of dopamine in a child's system that is causing them to push back, that is then causing us to feel unseen, to feel that we're not valued, to feel that that child's not taking part in what it is to run a family, and it's a perfectly reasonable instruction to help clean up whatever it is. And if we want to break the cycle of being set up in this way, we need to seriously pause and wonder what place screens have got in our family life, and start dialing it back really significantly, more than otherwise we might think, because these shows are an instant and heavy hit of dopamine. Maybe not all of them, but my goodness, anything produced over the last 10, 15 years, the makers of these shows know, and gaming and stuff, know all about this.
It's not an accident. So if we want to take, you know, back emotional control of ourselves, then it's really important to avoid and lessen the amount of times you get flares of behavior from kids through the day, or refusals through the day, and that can be done by really significantly dialing back screens if they are already in your home. Okay, so that was the last in the series of these four little mini-series of podcasts around emotional self-regulation.
Excuse me, I've unpacked this a lot more in the Being At Your Best When Kids Are At Their Worst book, if you want to go into a little more depth. But again, if you've got friends who might be interested in the care professionals training that is based around all this stuff we've been talking about this month, then yeah, refer them to that link below, where they can get more background in this, care professionals, educators, and so on, to help parents really be at their best. Okay, that's it for now.
Bye-bye.
