Screen Time Schmeen Time

Kid brains, the power of language, and my dad's secret love of Dawson's Creek.

Like most Americans born after 1945, television played a major role in my formative years. When I was little, it was scarce; an occasional episode of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, a Saturday morning cartoon here and there. As I got older, and my older siblings got older, we had more access to the good stuff. I got pretty much all of my cultural and political knowledge from staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live (it continues to be a surprise to me how many important people and events I only understand in satirical form). Like so many other goofy ladies, my adoration for Mike Meyers and Molly Shannon made it clear to me that there was only one thing I could do when I grew up. Except for me, it was: become a sarcastic school psychologist.

the first time i saw a real picture of george h. w. bush, i was super confused that he didnt look like this

Later, we watched 90210 and Melrose Place with my babysitter Isabel, who tsk tsked at all of the sex and drama, but wouldn’t miss a minute. My father, who thinks the Sunday crossword is low-brow, would sit on the living room couch sorting through bills while we watched Dawson’s Creek, his feigned mockery belying his detailed knowledge of the characters’ lives (“That is not going to make you happy, Pacey!”). Many families have fond memories of sitting around a television set together, and of course there are not fond ones, too. After my mom moved out, and we somehow pirated a neighbor’s cable, I spent hour after hour zoned out, depressed, in front of the TV, watching MTV and waiting for my life to be different. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

I recently read an academic paper a friend sent me on the impacts of the language we use to describe public schools, because, you know, that’s what I like to do for fun. The author writes, about phrases like “failing public schools”: “Language has the power to shift policy in dramatically different directions because different ways of framing an issue steer the mind towards certain solutions while excluding other possible solutions.” The dramatic directions, in this case, are towards education policy that blames individual entities, such as teachers, schools, and families, for the conditions, upheld and exacerbated by privatization and late-state capitalism, that actually lead to school failure (though that failure is certainly exaggerated).

I keep thinking about the phrase “screen time” and what it does to our brains to see it and repeat it and read articles about it and say things like “we try to limit screen time in our family.” The framing it presents is one of time, an idea our society is obsessed with measuring and capitalizing on, and the solution it presents is one of reducing or controlling time. Emily Oster writes well about how most of the studies linking increased minutes in front of a screen to some kind of bad outcome are just correlational: there is very little evidence that screens cause problems in and of themselves. But why do we treat screens, as we often troublingly treat sugar, like some kind of one-to-one influence, where every drop added into our children’s systems constitutes some increased imaginary poison? Why are we obsessed with screen time? In my work life, when parents ask me for advice about their child’s screen usage, I tell them to think about it in context of the whole kid. It’s less about how many hours they are logging on a screen, and more about how they are using screens, how else they are spending their time (are they learning how to interact with others, moving their bodies, using their imagination), and if they seem relatively happy.

How can we really say that 90 minutes of watching SNL with your siblings, enraptured, is objectively worse than 30 minutes of Paw Patrol? Or 15 minutes of spacing out in front of MTV, wondering if you’ll ever be happy? And doesn’t the use of time as a measure of whether screen viewing is good or bad distract us from the fact that we use screens for very different purposes at different times?

Are we using our children and their butts on couch as the unit of measurement, when in fact we should be self-reflecting, or looking outwards onto our own culture? When I find myself freaking out about my kids’ screen time, it’s usually about my own frazzled, dissatisfying relationship with screens. It’s about how when my phone is dead, which it often is because I do not take care of phones (my son reminds me that, although my phone is not broken at the moment, I will break it soon), I am disturbed to notice how often my body reaches for it anyway, like a phantom limb. It’s about how gross I just felt on that Zoom meeting I didn’t pay attention to because the internet is endless and I’m thinking about installing a new medicine cabinet and it turns out there are several different shapes and kinds.

My children, on the other hand, spent the whole day being read to and learning a song about going fishing and playing a recess game where someone named Ronin is a dinosaur and tries to eat everyone else. They’re happily recharging, thanks to Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. Anxiety about kid’s screen time, especially when they are young and not yet doing much other than watching, is often a proxy for our own unhappiness with screens, which we are less willing to change or control.

doing the things recommended in this book will annoy your friends but it’s kinda nice

People often lament the use of screens in very young kids, which, yes, I get it. A toddler is looking at a phone in a stroller, a baby cries on the bus and someone shoves a screen in front of them. Listen. I’m an educational psychologist. If you give me three beers and a microphone, I will happily preach for hours about the vast holiness of a child’s mind. I am all about toddlers learning to be bored and observing the world around them, babies being responded to with eye contact and all that shit, but the question I always think about is, what do we think these screens are replacing, like, in reality?

So many parents in this country don’t have the time, energy, or frankly, hopefulness to do these things that we think are so essential for child development, or do them as much as they would like. I don’t think we were all perfectly doing these things before smart phones, and certainly not in the past 50 years, as our country has gotten to be a worse and worse place to raise a child, especially if you don’t have a ton of money. Feeling nostalgic about the time when kids played in the street instead of playing video games is all well and good, but a lot of bad things happened in the streets, and in those homes, too, and we forgot to build a world where kids are protected from abuse and adults get the mental health support they need to be loving parents and you know your neighbors and you go to school with the kids on your block and yes the proliferation of screens has likely contributed to things being how they are now but it is not solely responsible for our children not being able to magically turn off their devices and step into a world that gives them all of the connection they need.

what we imagine kids would be doing if they weren’t on a screen

Last week, my kids got their first bonafide television. Our apartment is mostly just one big room, and I didn’t want a TV to be the centerpiece of said room, and my kids stay up late and are nosey about what we do at night, which they can always hear because of the aforementioned small size of our place. But this year, it stung especially hard that the NBA playoffs had to be beamed to us on a tiny computer monitor, and we’ve started watching family movies all together that are sometimes actually tolerable, and it seemed like it was time. And, though I’m ashamed to admit it, I took some sort of pride in the fact that we didn’t have a television. So getting one felt like an important step for me in slowly fending off the parenting police that live in my head and tell me that I should receive some kind of trophy for not having a television or a slap on the wrist for tossing my children in front of the TV when they ask nicely, when I can no longer stand interacting with them, when I need to have some privacy to examine my boobs for lumps I am certain are there, or simply for no reason at all.

what this clutch, game-changing giannis block looked like on my laptop

The TV is here, it is kind of glorious, and it isn’t the center of my family’s solar system. But I still look for absolution, not from myself, who would never be kind enough to grant such a thing, but from other parents, from the literature. After writing all of this, I think I may stop my google searches and experiment with a timeless view of television consumption. What might I notice if I stop mentally logging my children’s hours in front of the television like days spent in bad-mom prison? Maybe the other things they are doing. Maybe whether they are relatively happy. Maybe that there are worlds to be built, connections to be made, solutions to radical frameworks, and that the thing standing in the way of actualizing them is not a screen but my own damn self, wanting to get an A in parenting.

How do you make meaning of your child’s relationship with screens? As the great Linda Richman would say, “Talk amongst yourselves….”

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Need more screen time?

I am probably not the first person in your life to recommend the cartoon Bluey (Disney Plus). It is the only show where I’m really disappointed if my kids watch an episode without me. We all dance during the opening credits sequence.

The people who make it have more talent in their little fingers than all of the creative team behind Paw Patrol combined. It’s an Australian show about a family of suburban dogs that is really about the pains and joys of childhood, which also includes the pains and joys of parenting, which is all just a microcosm of the meaning of life. It celebrates raising children as a true art form, but even if you don’t have kids you should watch it.

Some standout episodes (under 10 minutes each) are: Magic Xylophone (play and sharing), Bike (secretly about growth mindset), Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound (illness, tolerating uncertainty and pain), Early Baby/Mums and Dads (solving problems, gender roles), Army (subtly celebrating neurodiversity), Grandad (sobfest about the passage of time).

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Also, this:

For a few years now, I have been getting emails from a Houston car dealership, that I can only imagine are meant for someone with a similar email address as me, named Chantrelle, from an employee named Jesse Sepulveda, who is obviously a retired porn star. This month, Chantrelle celebrated two years with her new Jeep Wrangler. Happy birthday Chantrelle, I never want these emails to stop.