We Zapped 87% of Tantrums in 4 Weeks

See if this low-risk intervention works for your child, too! (Waitlist = 0) 🤩

It couldn’t be this simple, could it? 

After everything we’ve tried? 

To be sure, everything from ABA to SLP and OT¹ has helped along with vision therapy, special schools, diet changes, supplement protocols, medications, visual schedules, and rigorous daily routines to rival West Point. 

Some of them quickly, but only a little. Like when I dumped all the bananas in the garbage after getting back one kid’s food sensitivity results. Most of the constant itching stopped instantly, almost like magic. 

Yet, most worked incrementally, over long, drawn-out periods of time, so that it’s easy to forget what it was like before. And I can’t help but wonder (and get mad at my husband for wondering): Would time and maturity have done this anyway?

But this 4-week screen fast has been almost like flipping a switch. 

From revving on high, like that emotional tachometer craft they have your kids make with a paper plate in therapy to show how “in the red” they feel. Down to a nice steady hum, almost. 

Which is why I’ve been holding my breath for the last couple of weeks. 

Will this stick? 

You see, on May 20, we announced to our kids that our family was going to do a screen-fast, effective the next morning. No Netflix, no Switch, no DVDs, no YouTube, tablets, or laptops. (Our kids don’t have phones anyway, so at least we didn’t have to pry those out of their clenched little fingers.) 

A therapist we were working with recommended the book Reset Your Child’s Brain by Dr. Victoria Dunckley, D-U-N-C-K-L-E-Y, he spelled it out for me. And that we should give our kids a solid break from screens over the summer. When they’re home and wouldn’t be getting the hours of requisite screen-time at school every day.

It’s a “four-week plan to end meltdowns, raise grades, and boost social skills by reversing the effects of electronic screen-time” (I hadn’t even told him about the tantrums yet), and if I’m honest it sounded just a little too good to be true. 

At the time, I almost blew it off. Thinking that our kids get so little screen-time at home as it is, that it would hardly make a difference in their behavior. 

However, I love nothing if not an assignment and a radical intervention/transformation, so I had to take a peek.

Thank God I did. 

One of the best things about the book is that she has you spend the first week tracking challenging behaviors before you even start the screen-fast. (This is a strategy I plan to implement in all of our future experiments.)

So now, I’m not just writing to you saying, “Cutting out screens really improved our child’s behavior.” 

Instead, I can tell you exactly how much:

• One of our children went from an average of 76 minutes of tantrum behaviors per day down to 24 minutes in the first week (a 68% reduction). 

• And only 13 minutes per day in the second week.

• In week three, Daddy forgot the whole thing at the dentist’s office and let them watch half an hour of movies while they got their teeth cleaned, and we’ll just say…we got our proof of concept.

Then we got a visit from strep throat. 

Plus, it was the last week of school, bursting with field trips, parties, and treats. Much less than this would have caused a serious uptick in tantrums before.

Still, we had only an average of 10 minutes per day in the third week (an 87% reduction). 

Before the screen-fast we were dealing with an average of 76 minutes of tantrums per day. By the end of the third week without screens, these challenging behaviors were down to only 10.1 minutes per day (an 86.7% reduction!)

Just because I’m nerdy like that, I also tracked how much screen-time this particular child was getting before we started: an average of only 45 minutes a day. 

That’s well under the average four to six hours spent by children ages 8-12 reported by the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Yet, it was obviously causing serious harm to our child’s brain.

(Quick side note. No, I don’t think screens are causing children’s autism, ADHD, anxiety, etc. Victoria Dunckley explains this well in her book, based on her years of clinical experience working with children as a psychiatrist: Some more sensitive, neurotypical kids exhibit symptoms similar to these conditions just because of screen exposure. Whereas symptoms are intensified for kids like ours who do have a legitimate diagnosis.)

What I haven’t been tracking (but SO loving) are all the extra pats on the arm, strokes on the cheek, and Mama, I love yous I’ve been getting. 

::

After reading about the amazing transformations coming out of the author’s clinic, I knew there was no way I could wait until school let out to get started. 

However, I knew I would have to get my husband on board if it was going to work. 

But I felt a little sheepish about introducing him to yet another one of my crazy plans. To tell the truth, I was a little reluctant myself, thinking about taking away something that our little ones enjoy so much — that I enjoy doing with them.

And in fact, when I explained to him on our next monthly date night all the really important reasons our particular kids need a break from screens, and that one of our therapists had recommended it for them, that was his biggest question, without being at all unsupportive. 

Are we really going to take away another thing they enjoy?

Gluten, dairy, most sugar, blueberries, bananas, and Brussels sprouts (ok, I don’t think they’re too sad about the sprouts)…and now screen-time? Aren’t their lives hard enough as it is? 

Isn’t there at least this one area where they can have fun and be like “normal” kids? 

But I explained that even neurotypical kids are affected by screens (and sugar for that matter). Our kids just happen to be the canaries in the coal mine, whose little nervous systems get overloaded faster and warn everyone else as to the ill effects of modern life that are coming for them. 

Besides, if an iPad in every child’s hands is fun like dealing out a cupcake for every holiday from National Hug Day to International Donut Week in a childhood diabesity epidemic is fun, then do we really want any part in it? 

And I know, I know that iPads are an almost ubiquitous coping and reinforcement tool for autistic children everywhere. 

But here’s what Dr. Dunckley says in the book: “In fact, since the advent of the iPad, I find myself saying to parents of autistic children: ‘For your child, the iPad is the devil.’”

So we decided to move forward with the project.  

I spent a little longer than the one week recommended in the book to make the needed preparations for our upcoming screen fast and track baseline behaviors. Maybe I was dragging my heels a little, too, waiting for the right moment to tell our kids. 

When we made the announcement around the dinner table, there were definitely some tears. And some, but, but, but-ing

I tried to be reassuring. 

Tried to include them in exactly what it would look like and help them buy into why we were doing this. 

Per Dunckley’s suggestion, I asked them what they thought a good way to use screens was. And how they felt when other people around them were using their phones. 

A. noted that if someone had a phone, they should still pay attention to you when they’re with you. 

And E. talked about how it’s like the other kids his age, who all have tech in hand, are on another planet. 

For them, it seems too much screen-time is all about disconnection. 

And when we stop to think about it, we grown-ups know that to be true, too. 

Our little one asked if we could finish the Aristocats movie together that we’d started earlier in the day. We did. And when it was over, she cheerfully brought the remote and put it away into our new tech basket without any prompting from me. 

It was almost like she knew, even before I did, how much this change would help our family. 

That first weekend, I was prepared for the worst. A long day stretched out ahead with all four of us home and nothing much planned aside from friends from our small group visiting for dinner later that evening. 

I was prepared, as the book said I should be, to spend all day filling the boredom gap that TV and gaming used to fill with alternative activities as they made the transition. 

I was shocked at how well things went. 

They played outside. Dug holes with their cousins. Built LEGO.

One kid brought out an Ace Hardware craft that had been sitting in her room since 2020 (you know the year) and pounded in every nail herself. 

The other one dug out a cooperative play game he got for his birthday almost a year ago and made us finally learn how to play it. 

And we all loved it. 

The next weekend, with no one to play with, our youngest wrote the most adorable and poorly spelled note to all the neighborhood kids inviting them to a fort-building party in our yard, and asked Daddy to deliver copies to all their houses. Snacks were promised. 

They almost all showed up and had a screen-free blast together. 

Once the option of screens was off the table (or out of their hands), a whole new version of childhood seemed to open up in ways we as parents were too afraid to hope for. But part of me wonders if deep down (in the recesses of their cranky little tween hearts that they would absolutely never express) this is really the life our kids wanted all along.

::

If you’ve been withering for 99 weeks on waitlists, waiting to get your kids the help they need (or even to get a diagnosis to then get on the waitlist to get them the help they need. 

Or you’re in services, but it’s tough for therapists to target the challenging behaviors you’re seeing at home. Or the changes are happening but at a crawl.

If you don’t think you can live one more day with your kiddo’s meltdowns, rages, and all-around misery.  

And especially if you’ve seen the remote get flung at the TV one time too many when it’s time to transition off screens. 

There is hope. 

Because just as there isn’t just one cause for the difficult symptoms of autism, ADHD, anxiety, and other neurodivergent diagnoses, there isn’t just one solution for most kids.

But here’s why that’s good news. 

Every little effort we make for our kids adds up. 

Usually slowly, over the years. And once in an exciting while, quickly with dramatic results, as we’ve experienced during this screen-fast. 

Though the whole alphabet soup of therapies can be helpful. Medications and nutrition, too.

The simple changes we as parents can make at home can also make a big difference in our family’s quality of life — right now.

What if you could…

• Drastically reduce your child’s challenging behaviors this month (without languishing on a waitlist in some receptionist’s dusty bottom drawer)

• Spend more time enjoying being a mom – and less acting as your child’s defacto therapist

• And still cook dinner in peace, sans iPad (without perfecting your one-handed pumpkin juggling act)

• All alongside a supportive little community of other NeuroMoms who “get it.” 

Ready to give it a try? 

If you’re too busy and exhausted and you can’t even think about reading 384 pages packed with scientific research and detailed instructions for doing an intervention at this scale, let me help! 

I’ve boiled it all down into a few simple checklists and worksheets to make it easy for you. It’s the 31-Day Skip the Screens Challenge Kit with all the resources you need to make a screen-fast happen for your family. And this month, we’ll be going through it together.

I hope you’ll join us!

::

As for us, we’re not planning to even consider reintroducing screens until the end of the summer, when our kids have had a nice long break both at home and school, giving their brains a chance to heal and reset. 

Will the results we’ve seen so far continue? Will the challenging behaviors decrease even more? Will they go away completely? Will this be as effective as the Great Banana Brushoff of 2021?

Stay tuned for updates.

For now, I think I’ll let out that breath I’ve been holding and enjoy this season of peace along with all the extra kisses and cuddles.

3-Months Without Screens (Our Screen-Free update) >>

1. ABA: Applied Behavior Analysis (Behavior Therapy), SLP: Speech Language Pathology (Speech Therapy), OT: Occupational Therapy (Support for Learning Daily Living Skills)