Big Opinions: Four Mothers. One Topic

ISSUE · 02

A friend of mine has a brother whose wife once told her about some very serious, scientific-journal-level research into the effects of screen time on children. Yes, I also lost track of the family tree somewhere around “brother’s wife.”

The summary my ADHD brain retained was: screens before three = VERY BAD.

This was before I had a child, so naturally I made a solemn promise that our future baby would not be exposed to screens. I made my tech-working, very screen-dependent husband promise too. I even considered removing our enormous television from the living room. That wall would look much better with Michel Majerus’s Progressive Aesthetics on it. I did not, and still do not, own said artwork, but that felt secondary.

The television stayed. The rule remained. No TV. No phones. No YouTube. Nothing. Our child would essentially arrive at primary school as Bamm-Bamm Rubble and discover modern civilisation from there.

That was the plan.

Five days after giving birth, I turned on the television. It was 2:45 in the morning. I was breastfeeding. Again. My newborn had absolutely no idea who he was, let alone who Olivia Pope was. So I decided this probably didn’t count.

And that was how it started.

Curiously Delulu, Leeds, United Kingdom, Substack: Curiously Delulu

“Screen time is for lazy mums who can’t set boundaries.”

That was Curiously Delulu’s opinion before she had a child.

Then she had one.

Her mornings now start with a sound somewhere between a screech and a scream. There are little legs to wrestle into shiny disco pants while she’s wearing the same leggings she’s worn for seven years. Vegetables have apparently left the building. One morning she looked down and found a melted chocolate brioche in her crotch. No idea how it got there.

At which point the light from the iPad starts looking less like bad parenting and more like divine intervention. “Screen time is the little slice of sanity you didn’t know you needed.”

These days, she doesn’t regulate it. Sometimes ten minutes of screen time buys her ten minutes to reset before returning to the level.

She also wonders whether we’ve made screens into a uniquely modern parenting failure. Her generation had Saturday morning television; parents have always found ways to buy themselves a universal time-out.

By the time screens became something else mothers were supposed to have a strong opinion about, she’d already spent enough time feeling judged about breastfeeding, baby-led weaning and co-sleeping. Her words: “My fucks had already been spent.”

And somewhere in there, the mother holding the iPad stopped looking lazy. She just looked tired.

“I think screen time says more about us than it does about our kids.”

Sometimes the kid doesn’t need the screen.

The mother does.

Current screen favourite:
Britain’s Got Talent auditions. Hearing this I might start watching.

Jessica Siân, Wales, United Kingdom, Substack: Parenting Outside the Crowd

At a family wedding last year, Jessica handed her son an iPad, a stylus and a massive bowl of Rice Krispies. He drew a fire truck. Half the cereal ended up crushed into the floor. The ceremony continued.

A few years earlier, Jessica had been the woman wondering why small children needed screens at restaurants. She didn’t have a screen-time policy before children. She didn’t think she needed one. Her kids would watch TV “on the odd occasion,” whenever she deemed it acceptable. There may have been some judgment involved.

Then she had children. It turned out that thoroughly cleaning a house while making sure nobody climbed out of a window occasionally required assistance from the television. Then came long car journeys. Restaurants. Illness. Bad weather. Deadlines. There was also her husband, who’d grown up with a very different relationship to screens and didn’t share all her opinions.

Another small pre-child oversight: there would be two people making the rules.

These days, there is no daily screen-time allowance in Jessica’s house. Some days there’s more. Some days less. She and her husband choose what the boys watch, sometimes educational, sometimes calming, and accept that illness, bad weather or a deadline might mean more TV that day.

Jessica has stopped trying to find the screen-time rule that will work forever. What works during an illness might not work six months later. What works for one child might not work for another.

The rule, essentially, is to keep rethinking the rule.

It’s also changed how she sees the parent holding the iPad. She used to wonder why they needed it. Now she knows there might be a long car journey, a deadline, a child who needs to sit through a wedding ceremony, or simply a parent who has reached the end of their available options.

Jessica now sees families pull out an iPad at restaurants and, instead of judging them, smiles.

“I often smile in empathy.”

Current screen favourite:
Silent videos of people setting up caravans in remote places.

Aurinna Weisman, Valencia, Spain, Substack: Haus of Weis

Aurinna’s eighteen-month-old doesn’t use an iPad. Her father can spend up to twelve hours a day on a laptop in their living room. This is not quite the screen-time problem Aurinna had anticipated.

Before becoming a mother, she wasn’t militantly screen-free. She’d grown up watching television in Finland. TV was fine. For Aurinna, not all screens were equal. Television was one thing. A tiny child with their own device was another. “What the heck are you doing? Why does your two-year-old have a phone?” Then she unexpectedly became a mother herself.

Her daughter is now eighteen months old and, so far, Aurinna hasn’t had to eat many of those words. There’s FaceTime with family in Finland. She enjoys looking at photos of herself, which feels reassuringly human. Peppa Pig occasionally gets ten minutes during teething or boredom.

Once, during travel, Aurinna resorted to YouTube. Ten minutes later, her daughter was bored with that too. Not exactly the electronic nanny she’d been warned about.

Aurinna still doesn’t believe every difficult moment requires a device. At restaurants, she’d rather try toys, snacks, conversation or the increasingly radical concept of letting a child be bored. The screen remains off the table.

The problem is what’s happening around it. Both Aurinna and her partner work from home. He’s a game developer. His job can mean up to twelve hours on a laptop in the living room. Aurinna has her laptop. They both have phones. Her daughter doesn’t spend much time looking at screens.

She spends quite a lot of time looking at her parents looking at screens.

And suddenly the rule becomes harder to define.

Keeping an iPad out of an eighteen-month-old’s hands is relatively straightforward. Explaining why the adults always have one isn’t.

Current screen favourite:
Peppa Pig! Also classical music concerts. Which feels like a respectable counterweight.

Yasmin, The Unhinged Mom Edit

These days, at two and a half, screens aren’t casually on in our house. But sometimes I’m exhausted and The Jungle Book (1954, obviously) becomes childcare. Sometimes he develops an octopus obsession and I find myself on YouTube showing him how they move, where they live and what they look like.

Imagine my algorithm.

I’m actually pretty happy with the amount of screen time he gets. It’s nowhere near the absolute zero I once promised. This woman also considered removing a perfectly good television for a painting she didn’t own.

Somewhere between Olivia Pope keeping me company at 2:45 a.m. and an octopus documentary becoming educational material, the rule softened.

The guilt didn’t.

I still remember that one sentence from research I never actually read, conducted by someone I cannot accurately place on my friend’s family tree:

Screens before three = VERY BAD.

My son is two and a half.

Six months to go.

“Our house will only have beautiful wooden toys.”

We were very sure about this too.

Have a strong opinion on this one? Drop me a comment and I might contact you for the next issue.