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Unless you’re willing to commit to a no-screens house, screen time is one of the major battles of modern parenting. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of ours with a toddler was lamenting the degradation of her earlier rigid no-TV standards and saying that her son already knows how to open Netflix on his iPad. While my kids don’t own anything with the magical “i” prefix (yet), I see my students struggling with the screen time quandary, which has heavily influenced my own thinking. Screen time is one of the issues that continues to evolve and unfold as children grow older, so that every time you think you’ve got it knocked, it mutates again.
The first decision in the screen time battles is when to start allowing any screen time at all, whether you’ll follow the AAP recommendation against allowing it under the age of two or not. New parents especially spend a lot of time and energy worrying about this one and its possible effects on their little cherub. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that this is the easiest screen time battle they will face, a mere skirmish compared to what’s ahead.
The second battle is over how many hours of screen time you will allow, while the third battle concerns what you will allow those screen hours to be spent consuming. These are the battles you will continue to fight on many fronts, and the ones your children will resist most vigorously. Will you record all the shows so you can skip commercials? Will you allow shows that you personally don’t like (I banned SpongeBob, to my children’s chagrin)? What rules apply when they are at someone else’s house? Are children allowed to watch when adults aren’t in the room? Will you set up parental controls? Will you allow online games like Webkinz? Will you let your girls watch Jersey Shore when everyone else does, Mooooooooooom? There are also stickier areas, such as whether you will friend your children on Facebook or how much digital privacy you will allow.
The fourth battle, and the most modern one, is over the number of portable screens you’ll allow, and what rules you will attempt to impose. These are the screens adults have the least control over in many ways, and I know many teenage girls who are sleeping with their cell phones under their pillows, set to vibrate in case they get an important text during the wee hours. I also know girls who text at the table and update Twitter on the way into church. Cell phones help us feel safe when we’re driving, and my own school requires students to have laptops for schoolwork, so these devices are harder to eliminate, and must instead be moderated.
So far, we have conquered some of these issues and continue to face others, but the next looming one, I believe, will be whether or not we allow screens in the bedrooms. Right now, I only use my laptop in my bedroom if I’m doing a marathon of grading, and neither of us use our phones very much in our bedroom. When I was growing up, my mother had a strict no-TV-in-bedrooms rule for my sister and me, and I always thought I would follow it myself as a parent. Now that the potential number of screens has increased so much, with at least one arguably educational (computers), I know this will be much trickier for us. However, in watching my own students, I see reasons every day for keeping the bedrooms screen-free, and at this point, we are going to enforce this with our own kids, when the time comes.
Do you have screens in your bedrooms? How do you handle it? I’m interested in answers for both children and adults.
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We have a pretty strict no TV in the bedroom rule. At the moment, I also have a one TV in the apartment rule….although Cory has tried to get me to bend on that one. I just think that having only one television forces compromise, compassion and communication….if we also had one in the office, it would be far too easy for us to spend entire Sundays in front of seperate screens (especially during football season). So for now, we are a one television family.
We are also a “one TV” house, though someone keeps agitating for a basement “man cave.”
My girls had no TVs in the bedroom, too. It must run in the family. I don’t agree with those who say, “Watch TV with them, and discuss where a show goes wrong”. Why watch it in the first place if it is crap? I will confess to unwinding occasionally with “Say Yes to the Dress”…When it comes to TV, less is more.
My mom used to watch “Beverly Hills, 90210″ with me, I think to see what I was so interested in, but with only the one TV, we never watched much that she didn’t know about, which now I think was good!
We are what most people consider hard core. We are totally against personal devices, though we do have one phone among us, one ipad and one laptop. We aren’t anti-technology but we are very cautious consumers and more interested in the utility than the entertainment aspects. Both of us work in fields that have been transformed by the introduction of computers in the past two decades. We are literate and skilled users. But also critics of blanket tech obsession, pretty convinced there is more to life.
To answer the bedroom question in specific, the ipad and the laptop occasionally make their way to our bedroom, but mostly just for reading. Our tv isn’t huge but it’s bigger than the laptop screen and lives in the living room. We just don’t use the phone much at all and still have a landline, one handset of which lives in our bedroom, one in the kitchen and one in my office.
So, in general, the kids are expected to entertain themselves with unplugged options for the most part. Though they still get to watch a video several times a week, we prefer the option to experience shows live or at a movie theater. And the movies at home are turned off when we say, not when they’re done (much easier with video and netflix than it once would have been with fleeting broadcasts). If they come home from school with something they are supposed to do on a computer (which still strikes us as silly for 1st graders and marginal for 3rd), we sometimes say yes sometimes no. We don’t have a specific time budget for screen time, and try to adapt to whatever else is going on. Though it’s hard to keep track of since they seem to watch a ridiculous number of movies at school. When they ask if they can do something on the computer at home (other than looking up something that has come up in conversation, which we do together), the answer is mostly no. I actually have started requesting Ezra use the internet to find information about a museum we might like to visit or about trip planning. Those are like mini research assignments and are mainly about getting him to know where to look for different kinds of information.
They do get turns with the ipad during each others piano lessons and in doctor’s office waiting rooms. When we travel, it provides audiobooks, not games. And I only put games on there that are non-commercial and seem to have some redeeming value. They also see their parents reading phsyical books and newspapers as well as e versions.
I’m actually going in to meet with the 3rd grade teacher later this week to talk to her about how the note she sent home about giving kids skills they will use when they enter the workforce is fairly unrealistic in light of the types of things she’s having them do (online quizzes, drills and classroom blogs). I’m going to talk to her about things that would be both more age appropriate and more realistically beneficial to children unlikely to enter the workforce for another decade: programming, logic, history of technology, media lab awareness, keyboarding skills. To be honest, none of these things even necessarily involve a screen, though they could.
What we do need to do eventually is set up a screen workspace in our living room that will be available for the kids when that does become an (intermittently) more viable choice. And in fact, now that Autocad is finally available for the mac, I may get around to drawing up the new shelving/storage/media wall for that room.
I find it really helpful to have a different perspective (beyond the usual completely unconscious consumption) that’s provided by the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, materials from the Center for the New American Dream and discussion courses from the Northwest Earth Institute. That will give you a healthy bulwark of resistance to anything like Webkinz which is just about allowing your kids to be tricked into doing the marketing work for the companies.
Sam, we’ve drawn a hard line against Webkinz or Club Penguin or any online games like that, as well as not allowing the girls to visit websites for shows like “iCarly” where more marketing will be happening. For us, since we met in graduate school for cultural studies, we are naturally suspicious of anything trying to use our kids as focus groups, or get them to be spending money online. For this reason also, we are much more restrictive with computer time, because it’s harder to be over their shoulders the entire time knowing what they are seeing.
Been thinking about how to do this…I have no frame of reference because we had no TV in the house growing up, no cell phones yet, etc. That being said, my mom is not convinced that books are any better in some ways. They are just as absorbing and contributed as much fighting as other moms experienced over TV. I used to get up in the morning and go to the bathroom to “take a bath” where I would run water and lie on the bathroom rug and read. Or the time I mowed my mom’s garden while reading and not paying attention. Now my mom has such a hard time getting my older niece to put the books down to get dressed, etc. Books might be a more active form of learning, but you can easily find the same level of debasement and debauchery in them as you can on TV. That being said, we have decided to have the same rule Alison had growing up which was no TV M-F. Internet rules are much harder I think because of the necessity of using it for schoolwork. For ourselves, we do not play on on phones/ipads/laptops until after bedtime. But, we have a long road ahead:)
As someone who read all the “Flowers in the Attic” books, I would certainly agree that not all books are high-minded or noble! My mother used to scold me for walking up and down stairs with a book in my hand, and I still have trouble not eating and reading at the same time. We do allow M-F TV, but as the girls have gotten older and busier, it’s not really very much. We allow more on weekend mornings so we can sleep in! As for not using screens while they are awake, I admit that is certainly an area where we could do much better.
Our bedrooms are all upstairs, and screens pretty much don’t go upstairs. Sometimes E will take a laptop up to play music in her room, and sometimes I will take one upstairs to work in my bed if there is too much chaos downstairs, but phones and iPad all plug in downstairs at night and stay there, TV is in the study downstairs (my huge pet peeve is TV in the living room – only once in my entire life, and that was because of the location of the cable hookup), laptops are in the living room. It’s funny, because we struggle in general with screens, and pretty much fail (I have a feeling most of your commenters would be appalled by us, but we also have older kids, and as with so many hardcore resolutions, things change…), but this is the one thing we are hardcore about. Even the teenager complies. It’s just the way it is.
I imagine it gets hugely harder the older the kids get, both in terms of peer pressure and more time abroad.
I did want to clarify one thing. While we have something called a tv in our house, in the living room even, we get neither broadcast nor cable programming. So it’s just a device that can be used to show videos.
Our kids see people who “watch television” when they visit one set of grandparents.
Sam, do you think this was an easier stance to take for you all because it doesn’t seem to be a big sacrifice for you personally? What I mean by that is that I am a longtime movie fan and would have immense trouble giving up shows I love, from “Project Runway” to “The Wire,” but this doesn’t seem to be the same for you, from what you say. Is that true, or an I misreading you?
Probably. We used to watch tv, but gave it up when we moved here 8 years ago and haven’t really noticed anything lacking. When we travel, we get to check in and confirm that we aren’t missing anything. For people who want to catch something, a lot of stuff is now available through streaming, either Hulu or Netflix. Certainly The Wire falls into that category. But I suppose if you’re looking for shared culture with other people who also watch the latest of whatever is showing, you’d be out of luck.
I know you’re so much more attuned to popular culture than I am even as an academic interest. I tend to figure that if something is really worthwhile, it will still be really worthwhile when I finally get around to it. In fact, I’ll have less trouble distinguishing the wheat from the chaff. But I am also probably (problematically) too attached to the concept of high art and don’t mind dismissing a lot of stuff out of hand.
I do love movies, but don’t lose a lot of sleep over all the great films I miss each year just because of a busy schedule. Just lots of good stuff to get around to eventually.
Becca, I think we all draw our own lines and are more wavery on others–the area where we are worst is probably the adults limiting our own screen time the way we limit the girls! I spend a ridiculous amount of time attached to my laptop, partly for work but certainly not entirely, and this has been an ongoing issue for me, feeling not too hypocritical. I also think (and tried to express in the post) that this issue looks very different to parents of 3 year olds, 9 year olds, and 15 year olds, which is most clear to me as a teacher of teenagers.
Yes, I feel my own hypocrisy too.
No TVs in the bedrooms. We are a one-TV house. My elder daughter now has a cell phone (but not one hat “does” anything and a netbook which I allow in her bedroom but that was not allowed until high school and lots of familiarity with how she used her screen time in middle school. It is all very hard, yes.
I foresee many screen conversations in middle school–I like your idea of really having your Eldest earn the privilege of having the netbook in her room because she’s been responsible earlier.
Also, the netbook (which is for homework) really has such a small capacity that she can’t use it for any screen time she’d actually want!
We have one tv in the basement with cable and netflix. We have a family computer in the living room–the main area of the house. My husband and I record our favorite shows and watch after the kids are in bed. We also use the tv for watching movies from netflix or shows I’ve recorded for the kids. They really don’t understand that we have cable. When we lived with my parents for a year my oldest became proficient at using the remote and finding Noggin or Disney shows to watch. At that time we restricted the shows they were allowed to watch, especially on Disney (only Phinneas and Ferb, Good Luck Charlie, Penguins of Madagascar) and banned certain shows like Spongebob (that was not made for kids!).
Now in our own home, the girls generally do not have time for using the computer on school nights between dance and homework and helping with dinner. The first grader sometimes gets homework done early and is allowed some time playing online games including the ones her teacher sets up with their weekly spelling words. The girls’ favorite online games are American Girl and GamesforGirls where they choose to follow recipes and “bake.”
On Sat. and Sun. mornings the girls still get up earlier than we parents want to, so they go on the computer together and watch shows or a movie on Netflix. At 6 and 9 they are very good about watching shows they know they are allowed to watch or rewatching movies we’ve approved. We can see all of their Netflix activity even if we’re not right there. If they are unsure about a movie, they ask first. Once we are up on weekends, we have breakfast, then it’s time for chores–cleaning bedrooms and straightening house–then the girls play together or with our neighbors.
New electronic devices are entering the house this holiday from family: a Kindle for the 9 year old and VTech tablets for both. So now we’ll be limiting those. Reading already interferes with the 9 year old doing her chores and she sometimes sneaks reading after she’s been put to bed. Like you, Jackie, she loves to read while eating. I predict the devices will be used in the car and as rewards once homework or chores are finished.
I disagree with Sam with regards to the skills the third grader teacher wants the kids to use online. Yes, keyboard skills are imperative and my kids are learning this in school, but applying the keyboard skills by doing journaling on the computer gives the kids motivation. The journaling wouldn’t have to be done in an online blog, of course, though blogs can be private. Just using Word at home allows the kids to practice typing skills. I’m not really sure what he means by “programming.” Unless you’re going into computer engineering, programming is not used by most people, but computers are.
Teaching high schoolers, I have seen screens become a crutch rather than a supplemental tool. I teach art and sometimes have to inforce that students NOT use the internet on their phones to help them brainstorm. Other times I let them look up images to draw. When someone says, I want to draw a zebra, they need to know what a zebra looks like to do so. In the past, artists and art teachers would have files of magazine clippings to look at and how-to-draw books, but now it’s all easily accessed online. However, this sometimes puts a damper on the students’ own creativity, which I find lacking in my students. I go back and forth about allowing internet in the art classroom.
When I was a kid, my mom told me it seemed that the difference between her generation and mine was that she was pushed to study and memorize lots of information, whereas my generation was taught more about where to find information. I still think that is the situation, though for me it was using the actual card catelog in the library and now it’s more about using the internet effectively. With all the recent plagiarism at my school, though, it’s obviously not be used effectively.
One phrase my kids are familiar with is , “I’m not her mom, I’m your mom.” They understand that other kids are allowed access to shows and games they are not and they accept it pretty well.
Lauren, we love “Good Luck Charlie”! We have a group of shows set to record that the girls are allowed to watch, and they know what they are not allowed to watch. I think your mom’s distinction is really important–memorization is a skill that we just don’t focus on as much any more in education, I think. It works great for me because that has always been a weakness of mine, but it does mean that we have to think about teaching in very different ways.
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