Don’t panic! Here’s how to make screens a positive in family life
A few years ago we started reading The Secret Garden as a bedtime story to my older daughter. For an American, the Yorkshire dialect was rough going, until my husband hit on the idea of going to YouTube. There, we found a video of an angelic girl showing off her authentic Yorkshire accent. We also helped our imaginations with image searches of the moors
This was around the same time that my daughter was obsessed with the Scottish “warrior princess” Merida from the movie Brave. She watched it again and again, had a copy of the heroine’s blue dress and a toy bow and arrow. We adopted some lines of dialogue into our family repartee, chiefly “How do ye know ye don’t like it if ye won’t try it?” – a key phrase for the dinner table.
These are two small examples of something parents don’t talk about too much these days – the joy of screens. We hear more about our obligation to limit, scold, and monitor, lest our children be cyberbullied or addicted to digital twaddle. As Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics, who leads a research project called Parenting for a Digital Future says, when parents seek advice on media, “they tend to find 10 ways to say don’t, but no ways to say do”.
There is an art to parenting with assistance from screens, weaving new media into family life – and it can have many benefits.
For my book The Art of Screen Time I surveyed more than 500 parents to see what they were doing at home. And I talked to dozens of experts on media and developing minds. The rubric I came up with to think about how to handle screens is cribbed from the great Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. He slimmed nutrition advice down to: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I use “Enjoy screens. Not too much. Mostly together.”
Enjoy screens
Seymour Papert, a pioneer in educational technology and personal computing, fought hard for laptops to be used in schools. Why should children have their own devices? “Well, the simple answer is that I have one,” he once said. “It’s the prime instrument for our days for intellectual work.”
Parents who smile on a child playing with Lego, colouring with crayons or reading a comic book, sometimes feel uneasy when she or he is busy with the digital equivalent. The quality of the media they are using matters, of course. But the mere fact that it is electronic media shouldn’t automatically discount its value.
We want our children to pursue their interests and to excel – in the arts, design, business, science. They will need technological fluency for any of these fields. They will become fluent if they have the opportunity to explore electronic devices as tools for creation, discovery and connection. And to have fun with, because children learn by playing. Most children still spend most of their screen time watching videos. That is not bad in itself, but invite them to explore other uses – from decorating greetings cards to using a coding language like Scratch Jr, to using YouTube to research how a volcano works.
If your child has a passion for particular TV or movie characters, you can help them extend it into different kinds of play. Henry Jenkins is a scholar, enthusiast for new media and an advocate for the creative possibilities of fandom. When his son was young, Jenkins developed a bedtime story routine with him. One night he would tell his son a story and the next they would make one up together. Often it featured characters from the boy’s favourite TV show at the time, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. They would type it up on the computer, add illustrations and email it to grandparents, “A whole publishing operation,” Jenkins recalls. Today, his son is a budding screenwriter.
Not too much
Here’s what I suggest as the crucial complement of enjoyment: don’t use screens as a default timekiller or background noise. In 42% of US households with children, according to the most recent survey by Common Sense Media, the televisions are on “always” or “most of the time”, whether anyone is watching or not. The constant blaring interferes with parent-child conversations, which has been shown in turn to hurt language development. It also distracts children from their play.
Even if screens are not harmful in themselves, notes the paediatrician Dimitri Christakis, they can cause harm when they push out other necessary activities. Children need to play outside and move their bodies; eat without interruption so that theyin order to tune into their physical hunger; read with as little distraction as possible, and interact with other humans in 3D space. They need screen-free bedtime routines, too. The bluish light shining directly in their eyes from handheld devices shortens and worsens their sleep.
Parents are busy. We turn to media to keep kids quiet. But children also need time to continue on their own, to become bored and then find something to do without the help of screens. That needs to be part of the daily routine whether you’re three, 13 or 33.
Cultivate children’s ability to amuse themselves from a young age and you will be doing them a longterm favour. If you need to wean them away from new media, offer an incentive: say, you can watch the show after you play for 15 minutes on your own. Gradually lengthen that time to 30 minutes.
All this creates a bonus for you. When your children are absorbed in their play, you can magically find moments to check your own email or texts without rudely shutting them out.
And by the way – the “not too much” rule means your phone should go down as well, for the most part, when around the people who actually live in your house, as opposed to virtual presences. Children will do as we do, and not as we say, in this as in most matters.
Working on my survey, I found many parents really struggling with this. Very few – 15 out of more than 500 – said they “strictly” limited their own tech use around their kids. “I sometimes listen to podcasts with one earbud in when interacting with them,” one parent reported.
A mother of a two-year-old, who rated herself a three, slightly more controlled than average, on a scale of one to five in terms of limiting tech use, wrote: “When I’m caring for my daughter I only look at my phone or computer if I receive or need to make a call, send a message, or look something up.” That could really add up. “I find myself checking the phone under the table,” wrote a mother of a baby. “It feels disrespectful to my son and also like a clear double standard.” I’m not perfect on this measure myself by any means. Sometimes it’s justified. Right now, I’m on deadline, clacking away at a laptop while my older daughter plays on an iPad next to me. But at other times it’s just a bad habit, made worse by notifications and apps built to suck you in.
One recommendation from Danah Boyd, an expert on youth and social media, is to narrate precisely what you are doing when you pick up your phone around your kids. This lets them understand the reason and creates a bit of accountability. “Let’s check the weather.” “I’m texting Mom to pick up milk.” “I’m looking at a picture of my friend Gloria’s new baby – do you want to see?” Or you can even get them to participate using voice search or a speaker device.
Mostly together
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ latest guidelines on healthy media habits for our youngest children stress “joint engagement” and “avoiding solo use” of devices. To developmental psychologists, joint engagement means, for at least part of the time, treating a cartoon or app like a picture book: sitting on the couch next to the child, pointing, repeating and reinforcing what is said on the screen. This is the best way for children to learn from what they watch. Research shows they can learn plenty of positive things this way: letters, numbers, even social behaviours, such as how to make friends.
A powerful story of parenting together with screens is told by the Washington Post journalist Ron Suskind. He published a bestselling memoir that became a documentary film, Life, Animated, about his son Owen, who is on the autism spectrum. After following a typical developmental path until he was two and a half, Owen withdrew, regressed and became largely nonverbal. During this time, however, he became obsessed with Disney movies. He would watch and rewatch them, parroting the dialogue. Over time, with the guidance of therapists, the family took advantage of their son’s so-called “restricted interest”. Owen’s parents and brother impersonated the characters and acted out the dialogue alongside him. In this way they were able to reconnect with him. Over time he recovered the ability to speak.
I hear some parents groaning. The Suskinds had a special situation. But most of us look to media to give ourselves a little break. Do we really need to be superparents in our only downtime? Is there now an overachieving way for better-than-you parents to do TV as well?
Not necessarily. You don’t have to practise joint engagement every waking moment. When kids are old enough to look through books on their own, they’re old enough to watch or play on their own.
Just don’t forget to take an interest in what they’re doing and engage them in conversation about it on occasion. If all they ever hear is “Turn that rot off!” we won’t learn much about what they’re watching and why they like it. We need to listen, ask questions and offer our own opinion, too.
This is called parental mediation of media. It can have a powerful protective effect. And what we don’t say is as important as what we do. Studies by Erica Austin at Washington State University show that college students who recall their parents laughing heartily at beer commercials, for example, are more likely to drink heavily.
As Henry Jenkins, professor of communication at the University of Southern California, pointed out to me, we support our children when they play football or French horn not because we want them to become professionals but because we think it’s important to support their interests. Their new-media pursuits are just as worthy of our attention. If such pursuits are serious enough to be scared of, they’re important enough to be curious about. We can help children interpret messages in the media, and if we have an open dialogue about their pursuits online, we’re more likely to spot trouble if it comes.
Anya Kamenetz is the author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life, published by Public Affairs
If children’s online pursuits make us scared, they’re important enough to be curious about