As parents, we are responsible for making sure our children get proper nutrition, plenty of exercise, a good education, and so on. We read articles and books on all sorts of difficult parenting topics, including the modern problem of managing screen time. Some of these articles give us a glimpse into how the experts handle screen time with their own children. It can be a very tricky balancing act!
Case in point: my son is currently obsessed with learning Spanish using an app called Duolingo. Of course, I’m ecstatic that he wants to learn Spanish. We are already a bilingual Franco-American family, speaking mostly French at home, and now we are all “playing” Spanish on our iPhones and iPads. But I’m also worried about the amount of time this child would like to spend learning Spanish if left to his own electronic devices.
My son is almost six years old. He’s smart and curious and very passionate about whatever his interest of the month happens to be at any given moment. Right now it’s Spanish. He even confessed to me before bed one night that he has a hard time falling asleep because he’s thinking about Spanish. Fab has been reading Harry Potter with him before bed and said that he isn’t even listening to the story because he constantly interrupts with “papa, did you know…?” phrases about Spanish! I wish I could say I recognize myself not at all in this story, but he definitely follows in my footsteps on this one. My brain is constantly spinning about something, particularly when I am really into one big thing.
Like I said, it feels silly to complain about your kid being so eager to learn. But at the same time, if I let him follow his heart to it’s obsessive conclusion, he would spend every waking moment on the iPad making me help him with his Spanish lessons. Surely playing an educational game is better than games purely for entertainment, though, right? Or is it? That’s just the first of my questions as we settle into this new phase in our son’s development.
When a child has the lofty goal of learning a language, do the same screen time limits apply? Does educational screen time have the same effect on kids’ behavior as non-educational screen time? Are we discouraging his love of learning by refusing to let him spend his entire weekend learning Spanish on a tablet?
I did some reading, some thinking, and some discussing with a few people, including Fab. Our son has a five-month-old sister he’s still adjusting to, remarkably well for the most part, but it IS an adjustment. He has become SO excited and wild at times that we really don’t know what to do with him or how to handle him. As a result of having a new baby in the house, he has definitely gotten more screen time.
But does the extravagant behavior stem more from the new sister, the added screen time, or both? Or maybe it’s just because he’s almost six and he is tired of controlling himself all day at school, as one friend suggested, so he’s fresh out of self-control when he gets home?
So, we’ve been looking high and low for solutions. Ones that work!
Here’s what I found:
Tech giants like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates famously help get us all addicted to screens, but keep their own kids away from them while they are young. That definitely seems to make a statement.
However, experts in fields from pediatrics to sleep research to anti-violence who are also parents, do not necessarily recommend a zero-tolerance to technology approach. Let’s be real – sometimes we really need those screens to help get through the day!
This newish article from the NY Times talks about how more and more tech people are sounding the alarm bells about how bad screens are for kids:
“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”
New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018
To the author’s credit, a skeptic is also interviewed and casts doubt on the alarmist views of some of the stricter tech parents. It’s true that we don’t know enough about the effects of all the fast developing technology that runs our lives now, but it’s also true that if you go back a couple of centuries, many people were concerned about the effects of novels on young people, especially women. Now, we’re all desperate for our kids to enjoy reading novels, or just about anything really!
Times change and so do our habits. Change isn’t necessarily bad, just scary.
Personally, I’m not big on hard time limits for daily screen time. For one thing, schools have kids using screens. Is it some days? Everyday? I don’t even know. Should that count? No…probably not, but that bright light and graphics is still stimulating their eyeballs or whatever during that time.
Say you decide 30 minutes is the limit, what do you do when your kid is in the middle of something when the bell dings? I don’t like just stopping when I’m doing or watching something. I want to get to the end of my chapter or lesson or game or episode. What if you are in a bind and just need some uninterrupted time to work on something yourself and what if you need more time than the preset limit? See how quickly things get complicated?
Experts don’t really even push for a hard fast limit on screen time – in one report from UNICEF, they recommend the “Goldilocks approach,” where parents put more focus on what kids are doing than how long they spend doing it. Obviously, six hours per day is a bad idea, but maybe 25 minutes is also going to be problematic. Moderation in everything, right?
When he wants to watch garbage shows with no real redeeming qualities or lessons to be learned, there is a limit – usually one episode for a total of 25 minutes. But if he’s watching Octonauts or this silly show Bat Pat on Netflix that actually has really sweet lessons about how to be a kind, considerate human in the world taught with monster stories, then I’m a little more generous.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends a limit of one to two hours of screen time per day. The school also asks that we limit screen time on school days.
As with most things parenting, it seems that this is yet another thing that each family has to figure out individually. What works for you might not work for me. Some children (and some adults) are more sensitive to the addictive qualities of screen devices. Maybe a policy that works right now will need to be tweaked in a few months…
So, with all this in mind, what in the world did we decide to do?
Well, things got so out of hand right before our recent trip to France, so we had to do some serious screen fasting for a few days before he was allowed to watch movies pretty much non-stop on the eight-hour flight to Paris. If we hadn’t made him turn it off and try to sleep, he probably would have pulled an all-nighter and been an absolute wreck to get through customs and onto the train.
While in France, we mostly kept him away from the iPad, which was made easier by all the people and places we were visiting. Now that we are back, we have not yet let him get back on the iPad, not even to use Duolingo. But I’m sure we will find a compromise soon. I think that we will go back to a strict one lesson per day policy IF and only IF all goes well and behavior doesn’t become to obsessive and frenzied.
I’d love to know what kinds of limits you set, if any, and how it has worked out for you. Please share in the comments.