This will come as a surprise to 0% of parents…but living out of hotel rooms for a month meant our kids had more screen time than usual. But now that we’re settling into our new home in Finland, I decided they needed a major detox.
Let me start by saying this: I’m of the mindset that screens, themselves, aren’t a terrible thing. The issue is the cost opportunity and exposure. Those are my two primary concerns.
Cost opportunity: What opportunities are they missing out on because they’re spending time on a screen instead?
These opportunities could be strengthening their imagination, learning new skills, time with friends, learning to sit at a table, etc.
Exposure: What are they being exposed to on their screen that I would not like them to be exposed to?
This might include obvious things like bad language, violence, and poor role models, or less obvious things like excessive consumerism, overstimulating/hyperactive pacing, or unhealthy beauty standards.
Like most things in life, I aim for the grey. I have no interest in influencers who say letting my kids watch a little T.V. will ruin their brains, and I don’t think zero restrictions is the way to go either.
And when I feel like I’m about to lose my minds at my kids, I always remind myself it’ll scar my kids less to watch an extra few episodes of Bluey than it will to have a mother who resembles the lava monster from Moana.
Sure, it’s easy to say, “Well what did mothers do for all of time before they had screens to help them??” But that’s a ridiculous argument, if you ask me.
Before televisions, parents had far more complex communities that helped and entertained children, from intergenerational households to literal villages. Suburban neighborhoods didn’t start popping up until the 1800s, and didn’t grow rapidly until less than 100 years ago in the wake of WWII. Guess what else gained popularity right after WWII?
Televisions.
I think it’s irresponsible and unrealistic to hold our lives up against the lives of people who had entirely different realities. Plus, televisions initially offered a lot of good, from providing voters more access to the candidates who represent them to highly-strategic educational shows for children like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. Unlike a lot of the entertainment slop today, these first children shows underwent vigorous testing to create the best retention for teaching literacy, numeracy, and emotional intelligence, particularly to low-income children who were often home alone as their parents worked multiple jobs.
(I first learned about the history of Sesame Street in the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Highly recommend!)
Today, the fast-paced nature of mind-numbing T.V. shows and addicting video games hold a lot more pitfalls than when screens first came on the scene. Plus, handheld devices suck kids (and adults) into vortexes of isolation and an intolerance for the real world. Which is why, for our family, no handhelds was the rule for a very long time (with the exception of airplanes or car rides over two hours long).
Last Christmas, my husband felt strongly about getting our kids a Nintendo Switch. I was strongly against it, but my husband said they could play it on the T.V….and he was excited about it, too. I was not happy with the decision, if I’m being perfectly candid, but I also respect that my husband is a parent, too, and we won’t always be on the same page. So they got the Switch.
We have rules around it, and back in Alaska, they did primarily play it in pairs on the television. But as we made the transition to Finland this summer, the boys started playing the Switch on the handheld device, itself, because it wasn’t hooked up to the T.V.s in our hotel rooms. And when they weren’t on the Switch, they got more time on the T.V. than usual, too, because I was just trying to keep my head above water.
Of course they still played outside most of the day during our hotel stay back in Alaska, because they still lived among friends. And when we were in the hotel in Helsinki for two weeks, I took them out every day for different adventures and playgrounds. Still, they were getting more screens than usual, especially of the handheld variety.
When we got to our new home in Rauma, I reached a breaking point with the screens. My 5-year-old asked for it the second he woke up. My 8-year-old complained of boredom every second he wasn’t on a screen. (My 6-year-old daughter doesn’t like screens, in case you’re wondering why she’s being left out.) And I finally lost it: That’s it!!! I’m taking all screens away for two weeks!!
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