Last July I let my children, 7 and 9, stay in the air-conditioned car on a sweltering day so they could play games on their iPads. When I returned from my errand 20 minutes later, I found the air conditioning off and my kids showing signs of heat stroke. They hadn’t even noticed, let alone unbuckled their seatbelts and opened the doors.
The key lesson is clearly don’t leave your kids in the car, no matter what. But I took away another one, too: My children would rather die than disconnect from their screens.
The hold electronic devices have on my children makes me think the surgeon general hasn’t gone far enough in calling for a warning label on social media, just as we have on tobacco. Screens themselves are more like zombies, sucking out children’s brains.
Like other parents, my husband and I have tried to set limits. We’ve used timers and alarms; we haven’t allowed devices at dinner or bed; we’ve fumbled our way through parental controls.
But none of it has really worked.
The iPads we bought for our kids during COVID remained their constant companions. They carried them around on those jaunty plastic handles the way Christopher Robin gripped Pooh by the paw. In between the appointed hours when they could use their apps, they waited on the couch like travelers at a train station, passing the minutes until Screen Time. If they overran their alarms, as they almost always did, they offered no defense. They just lowered their faces in shame, and I watched the fragile tower of their self-esteem crumble.
I also hate how screens have transformed my parenting. Screens require me to police my children—to surveil content, monitor for compliance, constantly renegotiate the rules. I once read that to engage an audience in a flashback, whatever happened in the past must be significantly more compelling than what is happening in the present narrative. Likewise, screens force me to Olympic heights of creativity in order to offer my kids something more interesting than a Mr. Beast video. Even if I succeed, my victory is brief.
And so, last summer, we left the devices behind. At the last minute, I stashed the iPads in a closet and we boarded a plane for Mexico untethered.
Reader, let me tell you—it was glorious.
Without technology to rescue them, our kids were forced to scale what my son calls “the wall of boredom.” They turned their bedroom into a fortune teller’s shop and charged my husband and me a penny to divine our futures. They invented a nonsense language and prattled away on a pretend telephone. On a rainy day, they made a comic book dedicated to poop jokes and danced around with underwear on their heads.
It got a little rowdy sometimes, yes. But on the whole, not having screens made parenting easier, an outcome I never could have predicted. Some of the grasping, dissatisfied energy I’d become accustomed to dissipated. Our kids’ attention spans stretched and their patience grew. They learned solitaire; they read chapter books. One day I realized I hadn’t laid eyes on my son in over an hour and found him outside, picking up lemons and throwing them in the air. He seemed perfectly happy.
I’m convinced that our success lay in our scorched earth approach. We weren’t merely taking a break from screens; we’d left them in another country. And because we didn’t know anyone else in the remote Mexican village, other kids’ screens weren’t around either.
To be fair, some parents find success in moderation rather than abstinence. Danny Mercer, vice president of the National At-Home Dad Network, broadcasts a playlist on Alexa to guide his kids through their morning routines. He refers them to their devices to answer questions, and he encourages them to download apps that foster both independence and curiosity. He also unplugs them at the first sign of grumpiness.
I salute Mercer’s approach, and I suspect it can work for other tech-loving parents who enjoy finding ways to use screens for creativity and connection. But I am not that parent. To be honest, my husband and I mostly use screens to allow both our kids and ourselves to zone out.
So what did we do after our near-death experience in the hot car, as well as our spectacular, screen-free month? We welcomed the iPads back into our lives.
They returned in the hour before school, slowing our kids getting dressed and thwarting their breakfasts. They came back in the afternoons to help the kids recover from all that learning. Although screens were in the classrooms, too. Our daughter’s fourth grade teacher had to keep the devices in a locked cupboard, and on the day she forgot to give the substitute a key the children clawed at the door and wailed.
In our house, screens resumed their status as both carrot and stick, a reward for good behavior and a pleasure to withhold for leverage.
Until a few weeks ago, that is, when someone broke into our car and stole the iPads. It wasn’t me, I swear. But once the tears and hand-wringing abated, I found the conversation in our house had shifted. Now, it’s not how many hours of screens our kids are allowed during summer vacation. The question is: Given the significant drawbacks and modest rewards, why should children have them at all?
Kelly J. Kelly is a fellowship coach at The OpEd Project.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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