Screentime Facilitates Your Child's Alienation from You

In my previous post, I wrote about how my pediatrician said her top concern for children today is spending too much time on electronic devices. I think it’s significant that this is her number one concern. Perhaps it should be one of our top concerns too. I’ve been pondering this issue and what we can do about it. Let’s talk briefly about why excessive screen time is problematic and why we allow it.

Here are just three of the many reasons excessive screen time is detrimental for children:

The more time a child spends interacting with a screen, the less time he is spending interacting with his parents. This weakens the foundational relationships in a child’s life. This is not insignificant. Your child needs YOU more than anything else in the world. Remember this, and prioritize yourself in your child’s life. If the moments you would have spent playing with, laughing with, teaching, consoling, and listening to your child are siphoned away to a screen, your child will develop differently. And you may not like the result.

Most online/digital activities are designed to make your child a serial consumer. Have you ever seen a child who was happy to stop playing a digital device or have one taken away from him? I’ve never seen it. Even when a child plays a game or engages with a program for an extended period of time, it never seems to be enough. The drive to play, to consume, to engage, is nearly inexhaustible. And although I don’t use the word “addiction” lightly, digital addiction (meaning compulsive use that infringes on normal life) is a true danger.

If a child is gaming or watching, she isn’t running, reading, creating, working, or playing. Digital media represents perhaps the biggest time suck in all of recorded history with the least benefits to show for it. While gaming or consuming digital content does engage the mind and body on some level, it doesn’t invite the user to contend with the real world using his or her real body, senses, intellect, and muscles. This invites weakness and lack of mastery in all these areas, which sets a child up for feelings of inadequacy and failure in real world scenarios and blunts their creative possibilities.

To be fair, there are many noble, fun, and educational uses for digital media of all sorts. I use them myself and so do my children. I’m not on a campaign to outlaw all movies, all games, and all videos. And yet, with American children spending an average of 5-7 hours a day consuming some type of media, the ratio of screen time to real time seems grossly out of balance.

Why We Do It

Parents are often the ones who facilitate, allow, or initiate digital engagement for our children. There are several main reasons we do this:

·        We think it’s our job to entertain our children

·        We are busy or absent from our children and need something to fill their time

·        It keeps the kids quiet and peaceful

·        We don’t want our child to be the odd one out who doesn’t play online games

·        It just doesn’t seem so bad

·        We want to spend time on our own devices

Consider each of these reasons and see if any of them apply to you. Lean in and honestly consider if you are facilitating your own child’s quiet, gradual alienation from you and encouraging their reliance on digital devices and content. Then consider what you are willing to do about it.

Next time we’ll talk about additional alternatives, solutions, and strategies!

With love,

Kimberly