“Kids? Guys? We have to get dressed for school! Where are you?”
I stumbled down the hall, looking into their rooms. Only Mary needed to be rescued from her crib and as I helped her use the toilet I could hear the familiar SQUEEEE SQUAWK CRASH of Angry Birds SomethingOrOther being played in the living room.
“What are you doing!? Are you even dressed?! It’s a school day. You don’t wake up and turn on the tablet!”
Some days I think we’re doing all right on the excessive media and screen time front and other days I’m not so sure.
Just yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued new media guidelines for children. LiveScience has a good overview, but even more striking than the guidelines are some accompanying stats. Eight-year-olds spend an average of EIGHT HOURS a day using some form of media while teens are clocking 11 hours or more. There’s no reason I can think of that those numbers would be significantly different in Canada.
The recommendations include bringing the average screen time down to two hours from eight for the eight-year-olds, monitoring your kids’ media intake, not providing TV or internet access in bedrooms and establishing internet curfews and rules about phone use at dinner time. They also reinforce the no screen time at all before two years of age guideline, but we already follow that rule all the time. *cough, cough*
Well, sheesh. A person’s got to shower and cook dinner. We try.
And I think that’s the most important thing, really. Because what those stats tell me is that a large number of families really aren’t trying. Either they are not aware that too much screen time can be detrimental or they simply haven’t made the effort to limit it for whatever reason.
Goodness knows there are reasons. Many parents work long hours and it’s incredibly difficult to monitor your kid’s every move. All of these shows and games and apps are designed to be compelling. The kids want to be on the TV or the computer or the iPad. I know. You come home from work exhausted and just need to get supper on and the last thing you feel like doing is fighting with your child over screen time. I know.
The AAP also recommended that parents watch TV and movies with their children so they know what they’re are consuming. I don’t do that. I almost never sit down and watch TV with my kids and, to be perfectly honest, I have no plans to start any time soon. Should our interests and TV-watching schedules ever overlap, then sure. But my kids are two, five and seven and they watch children’s shows on Disney Junior, Treehouse, YTV, TVO and Netflix. We have one TV in the living room so I can keep an eye on what they’re watching and I can see what’s been viewed on Netflix. Sesame Street Classic? Awesome. Barbie? Not so much. But I simply don’t have time to sit down and watch with them and as long as I have an idea of what kind of content they’re viewing, I don’t think it’s necessary.
The biggest culprits in the media glut our kids are exposed to are the tech marketers, though. On the one hand, parents are too busy to monitor their kids every move, but on the other, they are bending over backwards to buy their children “must have” devices. I receive endless pitches for so-called educational apps and games and nearly every marketing campaign wants to drive kids to some website or other. We have one TV and one Samsung tablet that my kids have access to. My husband and I each have laptops we use for work that the kids can’t use. We each have smart phones they can’t use. We don’t have a video game system. But it still feels like too much some days.
Listen, I don’t really care if your kid has an iPad or an iPod or a computer or an Xbox or a TV in his room. Individually, we all make the decisions that are best for our families and if you’re reading this blog you’ve probably already considered the parameters around which your children can use tech.
Collectively, however, we’re raising a generation of kids who spend the vast majority of their time hooked on screens and that is disturbing. Even more disturbing, I don’t know what we can do about it.
6 replies on “Hooked on screens”
I was shocked when I read the eight and eleven hours a day statistics in the paper this morning, but I believe they’re true. Even when we are diligent about monitoring our kids’ screen time, it’s amazing how these distractions creep into every area of their lives now. I was not happy to find out that my oldest son watches movies every day at school during lunch, “so that they don’t talk”. :( Disturbing, indeed. I’m thankful that my kids also love books….
That’s just it. A few minutes before school, a “movie day” at school, some time fiddling around on a phone or iPod while during your sib’s dance class, TV before bed … it adds up QUICKLY.
Wow, Lisa. The movies at lunchtime so that they don’t talk bothers me. That goes against everything I believe about healthy eating. I think community while eating is important, not shoving in as much food as you can while staring mindlessly at a screen.
I feel exactly the same way you do about it, Annie. We don’t allow tv watching at our home while we eat because we really believe in the importance of conversation and connection over meals. (Also, shouldn’t we be teaching our children to pay attention to what and how much they’re eating?) The kids only get 20 minutes to eat lunch; I don’t understand why it’s such a problem that they talk with each other while they’re doing so (especially since they’ve often been working quietly most of the morning beforehand). I think I’m in the minority in my opposition to this, though, unfortunately.
The installation of the SmartBoards in our school classrooms has been great in some ways, but it makes it too easy for kids to be “plugged in” too often there now, I think.
I took the number of waking hours that my child spends outside of school per week (i.e. before school in the morning, after school in the evening, and all weekend) and that comes to 53 hours (based on 10 hours of sleep per night, the minimum recommended for an 8 year old). Take 53 and divide it by 7 days and you get 7.6 hours per day. So even if my child spent every waking non-school hour on screens, it wouldn’t add up to an average of 8 hours per day. I’m perplexed .
[…] Can we unhook our kids? Playground Confidential discusses U.S. figures showing eight-year-olds spend eight hours per day in front of some kind of screen. New guidelines recommend reducing TV time to two hours, not allowing TV in the bedroom and establishing curfews around smartphone use at dinner time. Hooked on screens […]