Like many new parents, I once had a lot of anxiety over screen time. Brain development, you know, attention spans, etc etc. I no longer do, for a few reasons:
1. I did a rough calculation of the amount of tv I watched as a kid and a teenager.* I had parents who did not have a tv without rabbit ears until I was 8, and strictly limited usage when I was very young, but the exceptions added up: some news and maybe a cartoon in the morning, news and Jeopardy and some prime time: the absolute baseline had to be three hours. The summers my sister watched soap operas and I watched because the tv was on, add in another couple hours for that plus more morning and afternoon cartoons. Cable came in junior high and I think five hours is a reasonable baseline. Some of this had a lightly educational component, some of it was arguably informative--I watched the Berlin Wall come down live--but my familiarity with Press Your Luck, One Life to Live, Doug, or DuckTails didn't really do anything to aid my mental development.
2. Despite all this, I earned a PhD. Like many PhD holders, I am a collection of oddities. My tv viewing in childhood (and current love of sports) is by far the most normal thing about me.
3. Worrying about screen usage can have counterproductive effects, especially as children age into wanting to occasionally defy their parents. I have never in my life had a nickname, because I learned the secret to never getting a nickname: you simply must no-sell it when it is first applied; you cannot react in any way, ideally you ignore it completely. The varying enthusiasm of childhood interests is best met the same way: the thing you're secretly glad that they're into must be treated exactly the same as the thing you absolutely hate, because children (accurately) think it's funny to drive something into the ground if it produces a reaction they think is humorous.
Favorite animals, colors, tv shows, youtube personalities, books, movies, video games: they will all change. One day you'll be watching Singing in the Rain for (no joke) the 600th time, and then it's 2025 and you haven't seen it at all in a year and it hasn't been requested in five. There was an intense, grade-wide argument for one of my children on dragons versus unicorns; they don't argue about it now. Sometimes my kids get bored of their devices and read or work on their art instead. They get new things in various types of experience put in front of them regularly, they see Dad with his pile of books and foreign language movies and that's an example of what they'll think is normal, or at least possible. I'm playing the long game, the only one that's really available to me.
*And college. And grad school, for that matter, where I'd watch movies I'd dvr'd until about 2:00am and then get back to writing my dissertation.
No comments:
Post a Comment