The confusing messages around screen time

There was an article on the New York Times last week which caused a bit of a stir. It stated that children’s screen time has been “soaring during the pandemic”, a trend that has the potential to cause addictive tendencies among teens.

Reading something like this can obviously cause a visceral, emotional reaction for parents, adding more worry and guilt to a time already filled with uncertainty and stress.

Several academics took issue with it. Sociologist Dan Carlson tweeted: “Screens saved lives and parents’ sanity. Shut up.”

Psychologist Rachel Kowert wrote: “…it is far more moral panic than actual information,” also pointing out that there remains a lot of debate about long-term effects.

Perhaps aware of the backlash, the parenting newsletter of the New York Times published a piece focusing on the “Upside of screen time”, citing cases where screens helped school children feel connected to their friends.  

As a parent it can be hard to interpret some of these conflicting messages, especially in amongst the chaos of doing three jobs at once in some cases: parenting, home-schooling and paid work. It’s asking parents to do the impossible and many have reported colleagues and managers as being far from understanding. Faced with these pressures, more screen time is somewhat inevitable.

In our case, we are lucky to have childcare, but we have lost after-school care for our eldest (3.5) during lockdown as we cannot mix bubbles, meaning our preschooler’s day ends at 3.15. This week her nursery was shut completely because of staff illness. 

I shift my working day to start earlier but my husband and I regularly both have late afternoon meetings. As a result, she now watches a selection of friendly Dutch shows to free us up. This comes after we largely avoided TV at home altogether for the last 18 months, mostly because it caused more tantrums to be worth the momentary break. After a while it was out of sight, out of mind. Our youngest isn’t interested.

For S, we only allow it the afternoon and she also understands it’s not for every day but it’s still hard to stop without a fuss. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find her not only speaking more Dutch to me but asking about what she’d been watching and repeating words and phrases she’d heard.  

It’s harder and harder to speak only Dutch to her when she responds so often in English, but I’m relieved to find research showing that quality content can actually help improve language. It’s just the quantity of watching - especially if it is unsuitable content for children - that can have negative effect.

Children’s television makers often include educational elements in their content.  Some shows can enhance learning, some can impair it. This tallies with other studies showing that toddlers can learn new words when watching television, but the younger they are the less likely this becomes.

The popularity of video calls has rocketed and while we know children learn better in real-time conversations, studies show that toddlers can learn from stories read over video calls too. We recently trialled reading books over a video call with my mother and S loves it.

I don’t want to gloss over the fact that evidence shows that screen time can reduce creativity, sleep and can increase obesity, but it’s clear that screen time encompasses many different forms and not all of it is bad. It’s how we engage with our children before, during and afterwards that matters, (as I wrote about here – BBC Future: Why not all screen time is the same for children).

Engaging during screen time is not a luxury many have. Those who need to work may be relying on the distraction. Women especially are dropping out the workforce in staggering numbers; reducing hours or quitting altogether and this must be taken into account. Happier parents make for happier children too.

The message is far from “all screen time is bad”. It’s definitely not all good, but each situation is vastly different and we’re operating in unique (read: impossible) ways. Those of us who have the luxury to be worrying about screen time are usually already operating form a place of relative privilege.

This situation won’t last forever and, as such, I’m OK with Bing explaining to S the benefits of cleaning up a mess – which she delights in telling me about afterwards… It’s one less thing we should feel guilty about right now!

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I’d love to hear how your are navigating screen time, or any substitutes you’ve found for self-play with minimal intervention. Our latest? Kitchen sink baths! Yesterday this filled up two hours of fun.

Get in touch, you can simply reply to this post. I’m also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Pre-order my book The Motherhood Complex on Hive, Waterstones, Foyles or Amazon.

***The gorgeous illustrations I’ve used so far come from this animation by Pierangelo Pirak - which we’re turning into a kids book. I’ll write more about that another time.***