"Screentime" is a judgement of other people’s parenting
Let's all just acknowledge our kids watch TV
I’ve worked in children’s technology for 12+ years and a conversation we always have is how to get more parents to share pictures of their kids playing the games / shows / content we make. There are science games and reading instruction and math exercises made with incredible animations, extraordinary creativity, and filled with deeply thought through educational concepts, but the reality is parents will rarely share pictures of their children using these because the things we let our kids do on screens is direct shorthand for the way other people see our parenting.
Analog toys are shorthand for curated play, a parent with taste and respect for slow, attention-requiring activities. A child reading books speaks to quiet time and solace, active learning, perhaps they’re grasping at new vocabulary or story or characters and nurturing their prefrontal cortex. A child in the forest speaks to appreciation for the natural world, attentiveness to the minutiae of a spider’s web or a butterfly’s wings. It suggests a kid who notices and respects the earth and appreciates its change. A child scrambling up rocks suggests a kid with physical prowess attuned to the world around them with fortitude and grit. A child drawing on a blank page or putting on a puppet show or dancing to the music in their own head suggests a child who can independently entertain, whose creativity hasn’t been zapped out of them by the overstimulation of “Cocomelon,” whose true nature is allowed to emerge, unmitigated by technology.
There are situational exceptions, of course. Your family is taking an 8-hour flight to Paris, for example and of course the kids can cutely share that iPad all the way there. It’s a precursor to cultural illumination (Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, etc.) so a few movies on the plane won’t hurt. Or you’re in COVID isolation and there again, of course you need that TV. For sanity. Everyone’s. Let the kids rule the roost. Show the mess and all.
When we do show our kids in front of a screen, the contents are often curated to communicate taste or quirkiness. By this I mean the parent’s taste. To this I’m no exception, having shared a screen from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (Miyazaki is always acceptable) and the 1995 version of “Jumanji,” but not the kids watching YouTube Kids videos on autopilot of people making outrageous food-coloring-laden desserts. The idea is that when they do watch the screen, you’ve imbued or are actively imbuing your taste on your kids, that they won’t just fall prey to the most hyper-produced or most technicolor of the new shows and movies, that they will come to appreciate pacing, not need constant feedback and stimulation, and this will nurture them as humans.
There’s a fragment of truth in this, perhaps, but I’d venture to say that I and nobody else really have any idea how 2022 TV and screen production is really going to affect my kids. That they’re going to watch/learn/see hyper-stimuli anyways, they’re going to discover social media anyways, and that my job isn’t to pretend they’re not watching but to encourage watching and being self-directed in front of a screen as one of many normal things they do.
The judgement we place on parents of kids-who-supposedly watch “too much” TV — which, let’s be clear —is essentially all kids, is that they’re somehow inattentive, missing out on more edifying opportunities, or falling back on some lowest common denominator parenting. Yet these same parents —again, many of us — are involved enough to be concerned about how much TV our kids watch at all, meaning that we’re not those parents. I’d also venture to guess we consume a lot of TV ourselves, often of questionable quality, often for many hours at a time. Let’s accept that screens can be for kids what it often is for us—a normal way to unwind, get lost in a story, have a stake in a plot that’s disconnected from reality, or just kinda…be fun.
Recommendations for the kids:
To Read: The Everything Awesome book series by Mike Lowery (Sharks, Dinosaurs, Space) which takes big topics and makes them super fun for kids.
To watch: Bob Ross’s “The Joy of Painting” videos on Youtube. They are endless. My kids watched this “Island in the Wilderness” (Season 29, Episode 1) video yesterday and were mesmerized (as was I).
Bike: Ada just level’ed up to this 7-speed Trek bike and is on a biking tear. Great bike to learn gears/handbreaks with.
School lunch: PlanetBox lunchboxes are 30% off right now. I finally stepped it up to invest in one of these after too much leakage/breakage from other brands.
Recommendations for the grown-ups:
To read: The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is a gorgeous, heartbreaking short novel about a group of people who swim together at a pool when a mysterious crack appears at the bottom of the pool. It’s about how many people interpret the same information, about aging and loss and family and responsibility and memory and is incredible.
To follow: All the Harry Styles / Olivia Wilde / “Don’t Worry Darling” cast-in-Venice drama is really making my week.
To read/eat: A great newsletter about lunch from Julia Turshen, full of easy lunch ideas to make at home.
To read: A morning with Ayo Edibiri from “The Bear” (Hulu) which is one of my favorite shows of the year
See you next week-ish!
Thank you for writing this, I suppose I knew that screen time isn’t ruining my kids but hearing about others experiences helps normalize and take away the stigma of what is a very useful parenting tool and just a part of our lives.
I appreciate some of the sentiment here - what’s the point or purpose or value of judging others’ parenting - and anyway, what small fraction of parenting needs to be associated with screentime; there are of course myriad other related and unrelated elements! However, it feels to me like you’re saying that because kids will eventually play video games, watch endless hours of TV, get sucked into social media, we might as well just let them do it while they’re young. There are many, many things adults advocate for (or not) despite “not really knowing how it will affect” our kids. Many parents acknowledge that children’s screentime usage is mostly for them, the adults, to get a break (not a bad thing)— not because their children are relaxed and content after consuming hyper stimuli. My children certainly watch tv and movies, but they don’t have devices, they have no concept of all of the youtube things or social media, and they don’t yet play video games. Perhaps I’m not your targeted reader :) and i do think screentime can be educational and fun, but i suppose i think there’s more than a fragment of truth in your understanding of why some parents choose to wait for screentime to take over minds and lives. I know I’m constantly trying to get mine back!