Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

According to Standford professor and author Nir Eyal, indistractable is the most important skill for the 21st century. This is because of the rise in omnipresent technology made to hook users as addicts. When someone learns how to be indistractable, they become immune to the risk of being hooked on a technology that sucks away their time.

Due to the fact that smart AI will soon permeate everything from our cars, to our refrigerators, to even our closets and bathrooms, there will be two types of people in the future. Those who are controlled by technology and those who are not.

As parents, we want our children to be the latter. Which is why going through these six steps to help raise children to become indistractable is so important. Eyal walks through these steps using a conversation with his daughter as the example in this CNBC article.

Below is a short summary of his suggestions for your reference.

Six steps to help your children become indistractable

1. Explain to your child in simple terms that too much screen time comes at the expense of other things.
2. Provide your child examples of other fun and beneficial things they like to do and how they have less time to do those things when they overuse technology.
3. Teach your children about the tricks that technology companies design into their products to make users addicts. Tricks such as notification messages, streak tracking, video auto-play, and continuous scroll are all examples most are familiar with.
4. After you child understands these basics, ask them how much screen time per day would be healthy for them at their age?
5. Make sure they understand completely how much time they are requesting and the pros/cons of that much screen time. Then confirm once more the amount of time.
6. Finally, request your child to create a plan to make sure they don’t go over that amount of time. While you can help, the more autonomy you give them in this step (as well as step 4) the more ownership and buy-in they will have.