Monitoring is better than Monitor-off!

I recently came across a TED talk by Sara Dewitt. She is a vice president at PBS Kids Digital with a background in children’s literature. In the talk, she discusses the very controversial and volatile topic of screen time for pre-schoolers. This is one area in fact, where the parenting styles of my husband and I seem to be constantly at loggerheads. I’m always the one rueing the fact that there is too much screen time, and he insists that we are a-ok as far as screen control is concerned. So amidst the never-ending disagreements, discussions and compromises, we seem to have on this topic, Ms Dewitt’s talk was a welcome perspective. She shines some critical light on why exactly is screen time so feared by some parents (like me).

There’s one aspect in particular which struck a chord with me – that parents’ biggest concern is that too much screen time will isolate the child from them in particular, and society in general. We’ve all read that scary article where a boy wakes up in the middle of the night with nightmares induced by the steady stream of media he absorbs on the iPad. We also notice that children do tend to focus on the screen wholeheartedly – sometimes not even blinking. And this can reinforce our fear that they are becoming too involved with the virtual world and getting disconnected from reality. But if you step back and consider the bigger picture, it isn’t just the presence of a mobile or tablet or television that is the problem. It is the usage of it – how much, what all, and in what form – that can push the device from being a useful companion to a draining parasite.

How Much?

Moderation, like for most things in life, is key here. Letting a seven-month-old sit with an iPad for 6-7 hours in a day is illogical by any standards, but letting her watch two or three nursery rhymes to keep her still during her massage may be okay. Adjusting a child’s park-time to suit the tv schedule of their favourite cartoon sounds too absurd, but letting him watch half an hour of a child-friendly show before the family sits down for the 9 o’clock news may be okay.

A few hours a week, or maybe only a couple of hours on the weekend, or only while having dinner, or only when eating at restaurants. Either one is okay. Whatever you chose should be what works best for you and your family. Just be sure to keep a periodic check on yourself and your children to make sure that the screen is not eating into other well-rounded activities that your little one needs.

What All?

Content is king – may be a marketing mantra, but it is also a great parenting mantra! A child’s brain is like a sponge, but without a filter. They’ll very quickly pick up the good and the bad. So be careful what you show them. Super-heroes may be on your little one’s mind, but the movies from Marvel and DC universes have a lot of violence for a two-year-old. A comic Bollywood movie may be tagged family-friendly, but do you really want them to be laughing at sexist patriarchal jokes that may be strewn amidst the song and dance?

My two and a half year old enchanted us with his daily vocabulary consisting of words like expedition, disappeared, pterodactyl and ferocious. But I also know that he may pick up disobedience and bad manners from a show like Peppa Pig (What, didn’t you ever think of the little piggy as harmful?!)

The best way to keep control on content is pre-screening with your most critical parent-eye what your child is watching! We don’t let our baby watch anything without either one of us having vetted it. And we make sure to skip scenes of movies and shows that may seem inappropriate for his age. Luckily the husband and I are animation fans from our pre-baby days so we enjoy watching kid-friendly movies and shows with him. But even if you’re not, don’t let him/her blindly watch something just because it’s “popular among kids”.

In What Form?

In our house, rule number one is that if he cries or throws a tantrum for a screen – the tv or mobile or iPad – he is not getting it. Some tears will be shed of course, but the damage will be less permanent than facing the consequences of having an addiction on your hands in the long run. It gets difficult for grandparents and outsiders to see this sometimes, but we always strictly abide and let him cry it out. The tantrums don’t last, but the message for him does. It shows him that there is a limit to what and when he can watch, and more importantly that he can live without it! (They all can; trust me.)

We also have follow-up conversations about what we watch. I believe this is one of the great advantages of stories – they build the imagination. To make sure that your toddler isn’t passively gulping what’s thrown at him, try and incorporate activities and playtime around the stories he’s watching. For example, our bedtime stories involve characters from all the movies he’s been exposed to. Shrek will be helping Supergirl find a missing dragon one day, and Moana will be chasing Tom and Jerry through the jungle while avoiding Sher Khan on another.

His limited and controlled time on the mobile is not spent on YouTube videos, but on some interactive edutainment apps like Kidloland Nursery Rhymes, EduPaint by CubicFrog, Train Colors (shapes & colors for toddlers), Snuggle Stories, or the iStoryTime Library.

Let’s be realistic with ourselves, we are all living in times when a screen is ubiquitous. On average, people spend more than 4 hours each day on their mobile phones alone[1]. Computer screens and television eat up additional waking hours. When a child sees this kind of usage around them, can we really expect them to be totally isolated from technology? We’d rather let our son watch 20-30 minutes of television on most days, than have him feel it is some special manna from heaven that only adults can get. Or that he needs to work extra hard to get rewarded with screen time.

Screen-time is going to be an inherent part of his life as he grows up, might as well give him small doses now to keep it from becoming a big disease in the future.

Highly recommend listening to the entire talk by Sara Dewitt; I’ve linked it here