The Lifeworks Group, Inc.

By Dwight Bain, LMHC Families are being quietly dismantled by technology. Much of what we call ‘family time’ has been replaced by screen time and screen time pushes relationships apart. When you consider the massive amounts of time family members face screens, instead of face each another it is easy to understand why more screen time creates more conflict. Consider –   8 to 10 year olds are online or in front of a screen almost 8 hours a day. Those aged 11 to 18 spend more than 11 hours per day according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Kids and teenagers ages 12 to 18 spend nearly two hours a day texting. Perhaps the scariest trend about how technology is reshaping the family unit came from research conducted in partnership with the reThink Group and Barna Research Group ( www.Barna.com ) who discovered parents frequently are as dependent on their electronic devices as their kids. They found 49% of parents worry about technology and media ...

By: Dwight Bain, LMHC Brain hacking is what they call it; the engineering of behavioral code into an app or website to program you into getting "addicted" by the psychological process of continually checking a smart phone. Is this real? Yes. Is this legal? Yes. Is this going to stop? No. How is this possible you may wonder? 60 Minutes journalist Anderson Cooper found experts to answer that question in a very revealing TV special about the programming process that is commonly used to make you check your smart phone at least 150 times per day, with some people checking their phones over 1,000 times per day! You can watch the television interview to research this for yourself, but may not need to. Simply watch people around you in a restaurant, at church, in the car next to you in traffic or standing in line at the market.  People young and old are acting like addicts with their phones or tablets and if you try to take it away from them they get mad, if you...

Yep, it finally happened to me. 12 days ago I dropped my iPhone into water and experienced "Nomophobia" which is the phobic reaction to being without your cell phone, (no-mo-mobile-phone-phobia).   For the first time in my adult life I don't have a mobile phone, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t able to talk/text/FB/Instagram/Tweet/Post or watch baby panda's sneeze on YouTube. (Don’t judge until you’ve seen this adorable video).   Oh, and I found out that while my phone was dead, I'm actually more alive. Here's what I’ve noticed during these days of technology detox and full scale withdrawal. A lot of people are seriously addicted to their smart phones and sadly, I was one of them.   There are a series of very clever YouTube videos about the dumb things people do with smart phones, (missing the love of their life, not seeing cash right in front of them, running into trees, buildings, traffic, trains, all because they were watching ...