It’s been a while since I posted anything, and while I suspect a blog like mine is rapidly becoming a type of dinosaur. This article (“Why it’s time to stop worrying about your children’s screen time during COVID-19” ) moved me to put some of my thoughts down – even if they might still be a bit scattered.
It isn’t time to stop worrying about screen time; but then, it was never time to ‘start worrying’ – worry implies anxious thinking rather than taking action. Screen time has become somewhat of a necessity during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean its documented effects are gone, and their impacts are probably more important than before. Screen time can affect sleep quality, and high sleep quality is probably the best defence against mental illness, including anxiety and depression, which are both at high levels in pandemic times. For reference, as of this writing, where I live, the Canadian province of Ontario, is in a State of Emergency, which is distinct from a Lockdown in… ways that aren’t necessarily all that clear to me. Suffice it to say there are no indoor places to go (libraries, gyms, extracurricular activities, schools) and outdoor ones are limited by capacity and pre-booking.
Not All Screen Time is Equal
The biggest takeaway from the article I linked at the beginning is that simply measuring screen time is an extremely coarse way to look at the problem. The kids are in front of their screens for school, so taking that away would simply be depriving them of an education, so that’s what I’ll call the first tier of screen time, and has the lowest ratio of risk to reward. I’ll break down some other categories as I see them.
- Zoom/Other Video Conferencing for Extracurricular Activities: Shark Boy is trying to stay in competitive gymnast shape through Zoom sessions. He does not really like it. We do have some mats and equipment that lets him practice some techniques, but mostly it comes down to grueling conditioning exercises. He’s 11 years old, and I have to hope that somewhere in that developing pre-teen brain there is the understanding of cause and effect, and the knowledge that conditioning is necessary to keep a body capable of doing the ‘fun stuff’ of flipping and twisting, etc. When restrictions were a little lighter, the Lightning Kid (age 9) started Karate and a local dojo and was really thriving with it. He’s got a great passion for all things ‘Ninja’ and for a while I had him signed up with an online ‘Ninja’ program run by one of his favourite YouTube Channels (more on YouTube in a bit) – but I prefer that our money goes to an accredited Black Belt in our community. Unfortunately, the Lightning Kid does not enjoy online Karate and has not attended classes recently. They both do German School on Saturdays over Zoom. We are also considering piano lessons in a virtual (or partially virtual, if possible) format.
- Movies/Television: Watching a movie or show as a family basically counts as quality time in my book, but it’s still screen time. Going on a walk/hike, skiing, swimming would all be better – but at least the communal nature of watching together (whether it’s all four of us, as siblings, or one parent one child) still makes for some bonding. I’ve also noticed from a sleep hygiene perspective that big screens from a distance interfere less with my personal sleep quality than small screens like phones/ tablets.
- YouTube: I feel like an old man saying it, but I think I hate YouTube. The kids will watch hours of it, but when I try to put on a DVD of a classic family movie (‘The Iron Giant’) to save our bandwidth while my wife tried to have a high-priority Zoom call, they got bored in 20 minutes. Apparently, the appeal of a narrative structure that was worked on by hundreds of professionals can’t compete with Millenials yelling at the top of their lungs (because it’s the only way they know how to make their content dramatic and exciting). Obviously, not everything on YouTube is bad, and I can’t detract from families and individuals who have achieved financial independence (or even outright wealth) through their content creation. It’s just that even when we monitor and restrict content to ‘family-friendly’ stuff, what they can put out there should still come with a ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ disclaimer. Pranking your parents, hiding important items, and of course, yelling and screaming are all unwanted incidents that have invaded our home through YouTube…. but don’t forget to Like and Subscribe to the Lightning Kid channel 😉
- Social Media: Our kids don’t have accounts on any platform (except the aforementioned YouTube and Facebook Messenger), but they can be affected by their parents’ consumption of misinformation, or simply the anxiety response provocation of a lot of what is found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Once we mention something alarmist out loud within earshot of the kids, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. While I believe in tackling issues with open communication, even with children, the pandemic has provided a non-stop stream of questions with no easy answers, and our kids have to cope with too much ambiguity already. We have to try to filter some of that unknown and unknowable from ourselves, and if not that, from ourselves.
- Video Games: Ah, the great evil of electronic media. While I think a hyper-realistic game like Call of Duty should be off-limits to all children except perhaps near-adults, and there is no Fortnite in our house, Shark Boy has been playing an online shooter that uses *eggs* with school friends as well as the incredibly popular ‘Among Us’. We have the strictest regimen for these – only with known friends, generally about an hour a week, only by appointment. I’ve been personally enjoying a fantasy RPG (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblvion) – which isn’t online and can be paused and saved at the drop of a hat in case I need to help chop vegetables or whatever else needs doing. I don’t recommend video games in the later evening for adults or children, as I think they are over-stimulating close to bedtime.
Structure/Obligations
When school was still in-person, we kept a morning checklist to keep the kids task-oriented and on time for school. It used to irk me that after years of doing it, we still need to order the kids and keep a written record of basics like ‘Eat Breakfast’ and ‘Brush Your Teeth’, but when the alternative is yelling and/or repeating oneself ad nauseam, you make your peace with the whiteboard. We’ve actually expanded the whiteboard checklist to include ‘Eat Lunch’ and ‘Outside Time’. Our kids also have some light chores like emptying the dishwasher, taking out the recycling, and putting away their laundry. I know some families are more hard-core about chores, and some don’t have their kids do chores at all. While the long term developmental benefits of having kids help around the house are good, my view is a little more self-serving and pragmatic when it comes to this. As parents, we already have the following duties:
- Teaching Assistants: While school is online, teachers can’t do things like look over their shoulders to make sure the work is being done properly, ensure students get to class on-time, hand out worksheets, or console students during a meltdown (at least not physically). That’s us, the parents filling that role.
- Housekeeping: Not every household had access to outsourcing these duties before the pandemic, but right now, I would guess the average household has seen an increase in how much they have to do housework – there’s simply more traffic in the house now that we don’t go to the office or school.
- Playmates/Babysitting: I honestly don’t know how parents of only children do it. When our kids aren’t on screen, they do play with one another, at least until something escalates and parental intervention is needed. When we’re not breaking up fights, we also act as entertainment/clowns/whatever (see the Lead By Example section)
- Job: That thing you do to pay the Internet bills.
With all that going on, the kids have to pick up some of the slack. In addition to homework, we’ll ask whether the chores are done as a way to interrupt or mitigate the total screentime.
Tell Don’t Ask
Did I say ask in the last sentence? I did not mean ask, because that doesn’t work as a means to interrupt the siren song of the screen. In my experience, you have to be willing to traverse the house to the child and physically disable the device or confiscate the remote, etc. I also have an app for each TV that acts as a remote so I can over-ride the screen. Our service provider provides an app that can monitor and control the Internet. I’ve put devices into different profiles including ‘TV’ and ‘School Tools’ which get controlled differently (rather than simply killing the Wifi entirely which could impact the adults’ ability to do their jobs). The TV profile gets disabled from 6 to 8:30 so the kids focus on being ready for school according to our whiteboard checklist and has an overall usage time limit. It seems like that time limit does not get enforced by the app restricting those devices after the time limit is reached, but at least I get notified and can take manual action.
Lead By Example
My phone has apps to control my kids’ screen-time, to monitor their school work. I check the weather on my phone to know how the kids have to dress for outdoor time. There are times when we are between obligations like meetings or preparing meals where we might look at social media as a means to pass the time that we can’t spend on something more constructive because the next obligation might come rushing around the corner. Let’s face it though, there are times we are straight-up doom-scrolling, and it would be better to put the screen away.
Every time we’ve gotten outside for a walk, hike, or anything, there’s been plenty of resistance, yet once we’re out the door, the boys start to play with each other exactly how you imagine kids should. Tag, maybe some roughhousing, running, jumping, climbing, and so on. I compare them to animals with a great deal of reluctance, but they resemble dogs off the leash so closely, I can’t think of any other comparison. I pointed out to them once that the way they were playing on our walk could just as easily be done in our backyard at any time. They just shrugged, because they’d never have come up with that on their own until we freed them from the lure of the screen.
Kids vary in their temperament, and we’ve been smart/lucky enough to have made getting outside a priority since our kids were babies, but I often think of this scene from the generally terrible movie, This is 40.
The problem here is that the parents try to quit electronics cold-turkey and force the kids to play outside in ways they’ve never been shown how to, and there’s very little evidence that they participated in the kinds of activities they suggested at any point. In the movie, Paul Rudd’s character was a cycling enthusiast and Leslie Mann had put in a lot of work with a personal trainer, but that doesn’t translate to their kids. What they needed to do was start getting their own hands dirty ‘playing with sticks’ themselves to engage the kids with the activity and model how it’s done. I don’t know how to make lettuce more appealing though.
We have some indoor activities too. While board games, yoga, and bedroom basketball can demand time from us as parents that is already in short supply, I think it does pay dividends in that they see there is more to life than screens even in quarantine. Sometimes they continue the games independently for a few minutes after the parents have left.
I’ll close out with a story of how the screen has actually inspired a non-electronic form of fun. The aforementioned ‘Among Us’ is basically a murder mystery where the players perform tasks around a space station while an Impostor lurks ‘among us’. We’ve created a ‘real-life’ version where little cards are drawn at random. The tasks are even geared toward cleaning up the house a little (though I’d caution against putting full-blown chores on the task list). The game needs at least 3 people, but 4 is better for making the logic and intrigue more fun and challenging.
What do you think? How hard should the limits on screen time be? Should there be flexibility depending on what kind of day it is, or does that lead to a slippery slope? Would you like to know more about ‘Real-Life Among Us’?
