Managing screen time: it’s less about the time and more about the content
When school’s out, your kid has discovered that she’s got gobs of time to play. And that could mean significant amounts of iPad time. Quite a few of my friends limit the amount of time their child spends in front of a screen. While the idea is certainly universal, however, in practice, it could encourage the very thing you hope to deter. After all, scarcity creates demand. If you place your focus on time elapsed, then kids will use up the last seconds of that time consuming any content. Kind of like using a gift certificate to buy stuff you wouldn’t have bought in the first place. But, if you place your focus on content, they will actually get far better use out of their screen time.
Back when I was growing up, I must have seen hundreds of hours of violent Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner and Elmer Fudd/Bugs Bunny cartoons. I was often told by my mom to turn off the TV and go outside. There were only two choices back then. Today, parents have been arrested for sending their kids outside (several hundred feet) unsupervised. And if for whatever reasons, they can’t go outside and they can’t have screen time, you will have to help them come up with alternatives. Kids today don’t have to be broadcast to like we were; they can select the content they wish to see. Take a step further, some of the apps and content can truly be interactive. And this is the true distinction here: manage the content that comes on the screen, not passage of time with the screen. Telling my daughter to limit her screen time when I have a computer with four screens (yes!) attached to it, seems a bit hypocritical and arbitrarily because I feel she’s had ‘enough’ time. Oh, and it also helps when your face isn’t always planted in front of a screen, either.
I also noticed that my daughter enjoys watching videos made by other people as they narrate their Littlest Pet Shop play, so I gave my daughter my old cell phone and taught her how to shoot videos. After disabling the geo-tagging function, she started filming her own play. She was no longer just watching videos; she was creating them!
As soon as my daughter was able, she walked up to the large flat screen TV and tried to swipe it like an iPad. As with many of the kids at her age, they have little problems navigating UIs to pull down their YouTube video on the Littlest Pet Shop. I also noticed that my daughter enjoys watching videos made by other people as they narrate their Littlest Pet Shop play, so I gave my daughter my old cell phone and taught her how to shoot videos. After disabling the geo-tagging function and telling her not to capture her own image on pictures and videos, she started filming her own play. She was no longer just watching videos; she was creating them! She showed me a few and many of them are well shot, well narrated and they go on for 15 minutes in length! This isn’t the kind of screen time you’d want to limit – quite the opposite.
Growing up, we’d gather in front of the TV and say, “Let’s see what’s on” and get broadcast to. Now, my daughter voice commands programs and YouTube channels by name. And all of it is selected on-demand. (I’m sure this Netflix generation is trading convenience for developing patience, but that’s another story.) Because she knows that everything can be accessed later and on-demand, her protests aren’t too dramatic when I ask her to put down the device. So next time your daughter has planted her face in front of the tablet, check to see if you can offer a better activity , especially if friends are nearby, and then check to see if she’d be inclined to create or interact with content rather than just sit in front of it being broadcast to. Worrying about time is only one dimension; ten minutes of bad content is way worse than 30 minutes of good content.