Not all black and white in Books v Screens debate
MY only hate, sprung from my only love. When it comes to my relationship with Book Week, we are truly starcrossed lovers.
The only thing that equals my passion for reading is my fury for creating character costumes.
Which is why, this Friday, my children will be dressed as a Minion and some French fries. That’s right, one is a character from the Despicable Me film franchise and the other an inanimate item of junk food.
The truth is that after six years of literary dress-ups, they’ve run out of characters they care about. And I’m too tired to force some creative inspiration.
Yet I have no doubt that if this was Netflix Week or YouTube Day, they would have been planning their costumes for months.
Which makes me wonder … have I failed as a parent?
It’s a question I often ask myself when I consider their reading habits. Why don’t they devour books like I did when I was their age?
It’s not like I don’t model reading, we made a point of reading to them every night when they were younger and the only request I will never deny is to buy them a book.
They don’t NOT read, they just don’t love it like I did.
But screens … well, there’s a love story for the ages.
And, despite decades as a faithful paramour to the published word, I have to admit my own dalliance with a digital mistress.
I now have subscriptions to
Netflix, Stan and Foxtel, plus I’ve indulged in a few free trials with Amazon. Meanwhile, my e-book expenditures have been drastically reduced. Instead of reading a couple of books a week, I’m down to a couple a month – at best.
If screens can woo this diehard bookworm, no wonder the children have been seduced. Not that I’m granting full consent, I still insist that the kids read every night for at least 30 minutes, but I can see why it’s their second (or third) choice.
And while, like most mothers, I’m always ready to accept that I’m doing a crap job as a parent and have inadvertently – if permanently – screwed up their lives, I’m just not convinced that screens will kill our kids.
In fact, sometimes I can see that screens are even a better choice than a book. As a reader, you are always passive, with a screen you can actively create your own content. My own children can shoot, edit and publish videos that far surpass my skills even as a former Film and TV student (granted, that was in the late 90s).
That’s not to say that I don’t (try to) limit my children’s time with devices, but this constant narrative that every minute spent with a screen is another nail to the brain is doing my head in.
We may be the first generation of parents to deal with this deluge of digital devices, but we are not the first to worry about technology. Everything we argue about iPads, our parents and grandparents questioned about television – even down to concerns about eyesight.
And the answers, unlike that ‘idiot box’ of old, are not black and white.
While every week we seem to hear more bad news and negative effects of screens on kids – including a report just yesterday from University of Queensland researchers that “parents are risking the future health of their children by ignoring screen time recommendations” – the truth is that many of the studies are contradictory, and some are even positive.
In fact, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in London has since concluded that a causal chain between screen watching and bad outcomes cannot be established and cannot definitively say that there is a threshold for screen time use after which it is harmful for children.
Navigating the right path for our kids is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and my choice is to allow them to explore the creativity that devices can provide – the ability to make their own content, to watch YouTube tutorials from artists and scientists (no really, they love that stuff) – but also, to ensure they frequently put their screens down … and sometimes pick up a book.
It’s not a perfect science, but hopefully it makes for a happy ending.
Read Ann Wason Moore every Tuesday and Saturday in the Bulletin