Susan* bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought, ‘Why not let him get a jump on（趁早做...）things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session（治疗中的交谈过程）. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades — and his technology teacher had raved about（鼓吹...）their educational benefits — so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired（有着沙色头发的） boy who loved reading and playing baseball.
She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assuredher was “just like electronic Lego（乐高，一系列的玩具）.” Remembering how much fun she had as a child building and playing with the interlocking plastic blocks（一种玩具）, Susan let her son Minecraft his afternoons away.
At first, Susan was quite pleased. John seemed engaged in（投入于...）creative play as he explored the cube-world of the game. She did notice that the game wasn’t quite like the Legos that she remembered — after all, she didn’t have to kill animals and find rare minerals to survive and get to the next level with her beloved old game. But John did seem to really like playing and the school even had a Minecraft club, so how bad could it be?
Still, Susan couldn’t deny she was seeing changes in John. He started getting more and more focused on his game and losing interest in baseball and reading while refusing to do his chores（家务）. Some mornings he would wake up and tell her that he could see the cube shapes in his dreams.
Although that concerned（使...担忧） her, she thought her son might just be exhibiting an active imagination. As his behavior continued to deteriorate（恶化）, she tried to take the game away but John threw temper tantrums（小孩发脾气）. Hisoutbursts（爆发）were so severe that shegave in（屈服）, stillrationalizing to herself over and over again（一遍遍地劝服自己，可以理解成自欺欺人） that “it’s educational.”
Then, one night, she realized that something was seriously wrong.
“I walked into his room to check on him. He was supposed to be sleeping — and I was just so frightened…”
She found him sitting up in his bed staring wide-eyed, his bloodshot（充满血丝的）eyes looking into the distance as his glowing（亮着的） iPad lay next to him. He seemed to be in a trance（入迷）. Beside herself with panic, Susan had to shake the boy repeatedly tosnap him out of it. Distraught（心急如焚的）, she could not understand how her once-healthy and happy little boy had become so addicted to the game that he wound up in a catatonic stupor.
There’s a reason that the most tech-cautious parents are tech designers and engineers. Steve Jobs was a notoriously（臭名昭著的，这里表示的应该是褒义，著名的）low-tech(低科技）parent. Silicon Valley tech executives and engineers enroll their kids in no-tech Waldorf Schools. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to no-tech Montessori Schools,as did Amazon creator Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales（as did... 这里是一个倒装，表示“...也是”）.
Many parents intuitively understand that ubiquitous（到处都是的）glowing screens are having a negative effect on kids. We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and thewandering attention（游离的注意力） spans when children are notperpetually（永恒的）stimulated by theirhyper-arousingdevices. Worse, we see children who become bored,apathetic（冷漠的）, uninteresting and uninterested when notplugged in.
But it’s even worse than we think.
We now know that those iPads, smartphones and Xboxes are a form of digital drug（电子毒品）. Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex（前脑皮层）— which controls executive functioning, including impulse control —in exactly the same way that cocaine does（这就跟海洛因一模一样啊！）. Technology is sohyper-arousing（超级有吸引力）that it raisesdopamine（多巴胺，一种脑内分泌物） levels — the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic — as much as sex.
This addictive effect is why Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, calls screens “electronic cocaine” and Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” In fact, Dr. Andrew Doan, the head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the US Navy — who has been researching video game addiction — calls video games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (Greek for drug).（这段讲的是，“电子海洛因”给出的各种不同叫法，但都体现出了其毒品似的上瘾性质）
That’s right — your kid’s brain on Minecraft looks like a brain on drugs.No wonder we have a hard time peeling kids from their screens and find our little ones agitated when their screen time is interrupted（这里有一个句型。No wander... ...也就不奇怪了。 大意：所以我们很难能把孩子从屏幕前拉开，即便把他们拉开了，他们也会很生气。这也就不奇怪了。）. In addition, hundreds of clinical studies show that screens increase depression, anxiety and aggression and can even lead to psychotic-like（类似于精神病的。还记得昨天的sun-like吗？） features where the video gamer loses touch with reality.
In my clinical work（临床工作）with over 1,000 teens over the past 15 years, I have found the old axiom（谚语）of“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”（一盎司的预防的价值比得上一磅的治疗！所以要先预防啊。不要先污染后治理......)to be especially true when it comes to tech addiction.
Once a kid has crossed the line into true tech addiction, treatment can be very difficult. Indeed,I have found it easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.（戒除毒瘾要比戒网瘾更简单...)
According to(根据...）a 2013 Policy Statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 8- to 10 year-olds spend 8 hours a day with various digital media while teenagers spend 11 hours in front of screens.One in three（三个中有一个，即三分之一）kids are using tablets or smartphones before they can talk. Meanwhile, the handbook of “Internet Addiction” by Dr. Kimberly Young states that 18 percent of college-age internet users in the US suffer from tech addiction.
Once a person crosses over the line into full-blown（全面的）addiction — drug, digital or otherwise — they need to detox（戒瘾）before any other kind of therapy can have any chance of being effective. With tech, that means a fulldigital detox— no computers, no smartphones, no tablets. The extremedigital detoxeven eliminates television. Theprescribed（规定的） amount of time is four to six weeks; that’s the amount of time that is usually required for a hyper-aroused nervous system to reset itself. But that’s no easy task in our current tech-filled society where screens are ubiquitous.A person can live without drugs or alcohol; with tech addiction, digital temptations are everywhere.（戒网瘾的难点所在）
So how do we keep our children from crossing this line? It’s not easy.
The key is to prevent your 4-, 5- or 8-year-old from getting hooked（上钩~，很形象）on screens to begin with. That means Lego instead of Minecraft; books instead of iPads; nature and sports instead of TV. If you have to, demand that your child’s school not give them a tablet or Chromebook until they are at least 10 years old (others recommend 12).
Have honest discussions with your child about why you are limiting their screen access. Eat dinner with your children without any electronic devices at the table — just as Steve Jobs used to have tech-free dinners with his kids. Don’t fall victim to “Distracted Parent Syndrome” — as we know from Social Learning Theory,“Monkey see, monkey do.”（模仿理论）
When I speak to my 9-year-old twin boys, I have honest conversations with them about why we don’t want them having tablets or playing video games. I explain to them that some kids like playing with their devices so much, they have a hard time stopping or controlling how much they play. I’ve helped them to understand that if they get caught up（被卷入...)with screens and Minecraft like some of their friends have,other parts of their lives may suffer: They may not want to play baseball as much; not read books as often; be less interested in science and nature projects; become more disconnected from their real-world friends.（看看，这就是整天玩电子设备的坏处！）Amazingly, they don’t need much convincing as they’ve seen first-hand the changes that some of their little friends have undergone as a result of their excessive screen time.
Developmental psychologists（成长心理学家）understand that children’s healthy development involves social interaction, creative imaginative play and an engagement with the real, natural world. Unfortunately, the immersive and addictive world of screens dampens and stunts（两个词有阻碍的意思）those developmental processes.
We also know that kids are more prone to（倾向于） addictive escape if they feel alone,alienated（不合群的）, purposeless and bored. Thus the solution is often to help kids to connect to meaningful real-life experiences and flesh-and-bloodrelationships（血和肉的关系，就是家人之间的关系啦）. The engaged child tethered to creative activities and connected to his or her family is less likely to escape into the digital fantasy world. Yet even if a child has the best and most loving support, he or she could fall into the Matrix once they engage withhypnotic（具有催眠效果的）screens and experience their addicting effect. After all, about one in 10 people arepredisposed（有...倾向的，容易...的）towards addictive tendencies.
In the end, my client Susan removed John’s tablet, but recovery was an uphill battle with many bumps and setbacks along the way.（这句话很好啊。恢复是一个爬坡的过程，一路上你会有很多艰难险阻。学习也是啊！）
Four years later, after much support and reinforcement, John is doing much better today. He has learned to use a desktop computer in a healthier way, and has gotten some sense of balance back in his life: He’s playing on a baseball team and has several close friends in his middle school. But his mother is still vigilant（警觉的）and remains apositive and proactive（这两个词都有积极的意思） force with his tech usage because, as with any addiction,relapse（重新入坑）can sneak up in moments of weakness. Making sure that he has healthy outlets, no computer in his bedroom and a nightly tech-free dinner at the dinner table are all part of the solution.