We know the screens are coming for our kids. We have even tried to board up our houses and hoard our weapons against them, but we are powerless to stop them. We know that we have only so much time before we are eventually overrun and the screen army takes our children. It will happen, not just because the makers of screen content are stronger than us, but because they are infinite. If Bluey doesn’t get our kids, then Roblox will, or Minecraft, or YouTube, or TikTok, or Facebook… lol! Just trying to lighten the mood.
I see the screen-based threats lurking all over my home, but far from eliminating them, and in spite of myself, I have welcomed them. I wake up in the morning with a phone in my hand, take it to the toilet, take it to breakfast, walk around the house with it and so on. I try to exercise restraint, so as to be a positive role model, but too often I am forced to engage in post hoc justifications at the point I finally hear them say, “Daddy! Are you listening!?”
Recently, I came across a 2021 study by the University of Auckland, which revealed that seven out of eight Kiwi kids exceed recommended recreational screen time guidelines. The only thing that surprised me was that it wasn’t eight. The problem is that, sometime in the last few years, screens have become overwhelmingly more powerful than academics in shaping children’s behaviours.
To label screen time as a single thing is, of course, ridiculous – television is both David Attenborough talking about plankton and a MAFS husband talking about the size of his wang. So why do we talk about them as if they’re the same? Because it’s easy. Parenting is already hard enough without having to prepare a complicated spreadsheet displaying the respective values in order to calculate the times allowed for various screen-based activities.