"Tablet! Taaaaaablet!”
For a while, this was the first thing my 2-and-a-half-year-old
said when she came downstairs in the morning, or after a nap. Lately, as she’s
become more apt to speaking in full sentences, variations have included “Mom, I
need tablet,” “I use tablet,” and “Tablet time!”
It was never my intention to allow my child to have
semi-autonomous YouTube time, at least not beginning at the tender age of
twenty months. At that time, though, she was firmly fixated on cell phones. The
option of keeping my iPhone out of sight made me twitch a little, driving home
just how much I’d been using it before. Once introduced to the tablet, my
toddler became less obsessed with the ever-ubiquitous smartphone. So, letting
her click around amongst kid-friendly videos amounted to the lesser of two
evils.
Don’t get me wrong; she still gravitates towards phones. If she
isn’t sufficiently engaged in a non-screen activity, and someone in the room so
much as glances at a device, she immediately asks to watch videos or look at
pictures. Once she's given pictures or videos to look at, that's all she wants
to do for (seemingly) the rest of her life.
It fundamentally scares me that she can be sitting in a room full of
toys and family members and would rather be watching a screen. Even if I guide
her toward a non-screen activity, I know it's only a matter of time before she
remembers that Mickey and Minnie are waiting for her inside the magical
touchscreen rectangle.
Desperate to impose some limits on the situation, I came up
with a system in which she gets three instances of video viewing per day on the
screen of her choosing. After each session, she colors in a box on a chart. The
length of the sessions are variable, usually based on however long it takes me
to finish feeding her baby brother or complete half a household chore.
Sometimes she turns the tablet off herself after only five or ten minutes,
while most of the time I need to give her a “last video” warning. Thankfully,
she understands that if she’s watching our biggest screen, the TV, I turn it
off when her videos are over.
So far, the system has seemingly conveyed that watching videos
is a limited activity, and not something we do all freakin' day. Still, I
sometimes get the sense that every minute she's not watching a screen is just
killing time between tablet sessions. Also, lest I give a toddler too much
credit, on more than one occasion she's asked for her third tablet session at 4
p.m., claiming to understand that she can't ask for videos later, only to react
with complete and utter despair when I point to the chart and deny her request
for more tablet at 6:30 p.m. Thus, I usually try stave off that 4 p.m.
viewing in the hopes that she’ll agree to “save tablet ‘til later.”
Given our predicament, my husband forwarded me a recent New York Times article addressing the slippery slope of screen
time for kids. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2013 recommended a
limitation of two hours of entertainment screen time per day for children over
2. Without contradicting this standard, the Times
piece discusses some preliminary studies indicating the existence of benefits
from “prosocial media.” The example the article uses is Skyping with Grandma,
saying that the positive effect of this activity is time with Grandma, and not
with Skype itself.
With our extended family living close by, Skype doesn’t get a
lot of use in my house. The analogous compromise we’ve made is allowing our
daughter to bond with visiting relatives by looking at photos or videos of past
events. My thinking has always been that this isn’t harmful if it’s kept to
short sessions in-between playing games, singing songs, and reading books. In
line with the Times article, I often
explain that “people are more important than videos” when curtailing electronic
activities. Nonetheless, it troubles me when she seems to associate certain
visitors with their devices, instead of other interactive experiences. I’m also
cautious about visiting with friends who tend to leave the TV on for hours at a
time or permit unfettered tablet use. I vividly recall my own mother telling my
friends and me to turn the TV off and do something else. “You can watch TV
separately at your own houses,” she liked to point out to her basement full of
preteen girls.
Aside from the usual “how much is too much?” question, the Times broaches the notion that screen
time tends to replace other more enriching activities. This is especially
worrisome for children under age 2, “who need direct human interaction to learn
and develop.” For older children, tablets and computers aren’t necessarily
detrimental in small doses, but every minute spent playing a video game or
watching a show is a minute not spent playing ball, interacting with
family members, or reading. Furthermore, the sheer volume of media available on
the Internet makes it a Pandora’s box of mesmerization once a screen is put on.
“I watch one more,” my daughter
sometimes tells me – several times in a row – when I’m trying to get her to
turn the tablet off.
This problem is what motivates me to plead with relatives to
keep their phones hidden while I actively pepper her with books, art projects,
sing-alongs, and outside playtime. This is no easy task, as our family members
have significantly increased their own smartphone usage over time, as has most
of Western society. (Unlike my toddler, their brains are sufficiently
developed.) I also need to consider my 4-month-old son, who will inevitably experience more screen entertainment at an earlier age. The looser I am with regulating his sister's viewing, the more premature exposure he'll get.
My hope is that pretty soon my daughter will be easier to
reason with about screen viewing. As she gets older and her life becomes more
routinized, we'll likely move to scheduled times for screens (e.g. one show in
the morning and some tablet viewing before dinner), which will eliminate
arguments about when she’s allowed to watch. My husband has also tried to foster
her interest in playing number-and-letter-learning games, instead of mostly watching
cartoons. She’s learned a lot from Doc McStuffins and Elmo, but games will
certainly impart more educational value.
