Let's Talk About Screen Time

I know this is not the first obstacle you think of in being a father, but it is an ongoing struggle of mine. When my son was born, I did the normal neurotic parental thing and researched the hell out of the do’s and don’ts of parenting. One thing that seemed to be inconsistent was about screen time. All the information was consistent in that too much is not healthy. However there were inconsistencies in amount of time: 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 0 minutes and even it’s okay just as long as it is family time spent in front of the screen. Why so many different guidelines?

I decided to ask our pediatrician his thoughts. I had noticed he had a developmental chart in his office that suggested no more than 30 minutes of screen time a day. That seemed pretty rigid – even for me. So I asked, “What is your opinion on screen time? Does it affect a child’s development, speech, or social development?” I remember him looking at me as if I were some kind of TV Nazi creating an agenda on how to ration out screens … not too far off. He replied that screens aren’t bad – they may even help a kid in a Spanish speaking home to speak English, or in some houses, it may be the only interaction with someone speaking to the child. And, as I learned, the TV can help provide a much needed rest for the parent.

Ok my kid was only two at the time and I was getting what the Doc was saying. Plus it was easy to manage screen time at that time of his life. And then….

The next chain of events seemed to happen so fast it seemed like it was over night. Do you remember when your kid couldn’t crawl and you wished they could – then when they do, you miss the crawling and are now tired from chasing them around everywhere? Well, this is similar. Sometime around the age of 4 ½ I remember being woken up around 6am on a Saturday to my son playing crash derby with his cars by my bedside. I remember making that fateful wish like Jennifer Connelly did in the Labyrinth for the Goblin King to come for the child – NO! I wished he knew how to work the TV remote and just let me sleep. And it was like POOF – there was silence.

When he first learned to use the remote it was not too bad. We recorded kid shows on the DVR for him to watch. But then he learned to work the Roku remote and then learned how to navigate YouTube using the Roku. The next thing I know, my kid is waking up at 5:30am on a Saturday to watch some obnoxious 30 something year old man child play with toys and playing Minecraft and shouting “what the flip.” Oh, that was it! If I could just take back my wish … oh what were the words to say??

Through dangers untold and hardships un … oh what was it again???

No magic words were going to change this. I had to have a talk with my son about the content and how the content affects his behavior. We took YouTube off of the Roku, and I bought a mesh routing system for the internet that allows me to block and monitor content. As my son is 6 and nearing 7 years old, he is still drawn to screens and is currently obsessed with anything Super Mario. So we try to use the screens to our advantage. We give extra screen time for rewards (if he has done something to earn it), and we take away screen time as a consequence. And let me tell you – nothing motivates that boy than the potential of loosing screen time. There still are battles as he would rather watch TV than go out and play with other kids – and it can drive me nuts. Sometimes I’m close to calling the goblins to take my kid outside … but I have to be careful what I wish for.