Here’s a short list of common sentences that, when said, doom the speaker to spectacular failure:
“That looks easy enough.”
“Instructions are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“When I have kids, they won’t spend all their time just staring at a screen!”
Every new parent has declared that last one with the kind of foolhardy confidence that would make Florida Man proud. It’s the “Hold my beer,” of childcare.
I started with high aspirations around screen time and failed miserably, too. A single cartoon per day just so I had a moment of quiet slowly expanded into 2 per day, then 3. Then Covid happened and the official household policy became “No, we still can’t do anything. Go watch 17 hours of ‘Octonauts’ and try not to think about it.” Between remote work and cabin-bound boredom, everyone in our house started living with a screen from dawn til dusk. I’m pretty sure my dogs were binging old episodes of “Lassie” after I went to bed.
Eventually we got to go outside again and the screens started controlling our lives a little less. That is, they controlled our lives less until a few months ago when I did something idiotic that restarted the whole problem: after a thousand requests, I finally caved and bought my 9-year-old daughter Sloan a small tablet for her birthday.
I expected her to fall face first into it, which she did, but I was also expecting her to eventually stop using the thing as much once the novelty wore off, which she didn’t. Not even close.
In fairness, it was a really rough summer for kids activities, so I wasn’t too hung up on her spending all day with the tablet at the time. Like most of the country, Tulsa was dangerously hot, and no one was spending much time outside. It’s not like there was a plethora of better outdoor options for her, particularly since Sloan shares my DNA and is therefore able to get sunburnt at night under a heavy cloud cover.
…But now we’ve reached the point where I’d prefer she chance it on the sunburn, because this new screen has introduced a deluge of just the worst content. Stuff that made me realize that the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as kids’ TV that I grew up with never went away, they just changed shape. Also, they moved to YouTube, which feels way worse, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.
I’ll admit there’s great content for a kid to find online. There’s art apps that really bring out a kid’s creativity, science shows that put Bill Nye to shame, games that teach while still being fun, and more.
…But there’s also the other stuff. Once you have a kid with a tablet you learn just how much digital detritus is out there that see kids as an audience with poor sales resistance and low standards for quality.
Endless games designed to trick kids into making microtransactions? We’ve dealt with those. Unboxing videos funded by toy companies? Yup, those too. Reaction videos TO reaction videos? Nobody at any age needs that in their life. I don’t know what the sales gimmick of terrible kids’ songs with sped up vocal tracks is, but can’t imagine the intentions of whoever made “It’s Hailing Taquitos” are anything less than sinister.
If I have to have this in my life, you do to.
So between the unhealthy amounts of screen time and the influx of low quality media, I think the only thing that’s keeping me from just yeeting Sloan’s tablet down a well is that I’m absolutely no better about my screen use than she is.
I’m not proud of that confession, but yeah: everything she does, I do too. Head constantly buried in a screen? I do that. Playing mobile games designed to show me commercials every few minutes? Gonna plead guilty to that one, too. Watching reaction videos to reaction videos? No…but reading think pieces about other think pieces probably doesn’t put me in any position to be critical of their video equivalent.
Plus, unlike Sloan, I’m on social media, which my wife and I at least had the forethought to prohibit. Comparing a few kids’ mobile games to Twitter and Facebook is like comparing the energy you get from a sip of herbal tea versus chugging a Big Gulp cup full of cocaine. It’s digital addiction on a whole other level.
What kind of position am I in to tell her to put down the tablet if I’m saying it with a smartphone in my hand? When I was a kid, a favorite saying of adults was that TV and video games would “Rot your brain.” If I say that to Sloan about her tablet, what am I implying about myself? Clearly, so long as she sees me with my nose buried in my phone, I don’t actually believe what I’m saying. That’s no way to teach positive habits.
Maybe the problem isn’t clickbait videos or shady apps; maybe the problem is me.
I don’t intend to give up my smartphone, and I’m not implying that you should. What I am admitting, though, is that my kids are going to take a lot of their cues about how they interact with technology from me. Teaching my kids about healthy limits probably involves a lot more teaching myself healthy limits than I’ve wanted to admit.
…That and maybe issue a blanket ban on songs with sped up, autotuned vocals, because if I hear any more of that chipmunk voice I’m gonna be ready to dismiss all of recorded sound as a failed experiment.
Inessential Reading 