Tag Archives: Television

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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.

Related articles

• Why should children under 14 not have a computer or laptop in their bedrooms (wiki.answers.com)
• Progress From Portland on Improving Kids’ Healthy Behaviors (blogs.wsj.com)