The paradox of screens: Parents and grandparents wrestle with how much screen time to give kids

Parents and screen time

Parenthood is brutal — it has always been brutal. But in an era of unstoppable tech growth, raising children becomes more difficult by the day.

If you have kids or grandkids under the age of 13, you know the paradox of screens. The chaos of parenthood is relentless, and there’s a special brand for those of us with little kids. Exhaustion of every sort.

Peace is hard to come by for parents and many grandparents, especially those of us with little ones.

I have toddlers. Screen time is one of the constant subjects of examination between my wife and me. We're always assessing our screen time, our personal relationships with our phones, and the behavior we model for our kids.

Handing your kid a phone or tablet is a quick way to buy a moment of silence. We are desperate for the chance to think, to breathe, and sit still.

But this is no ordinary quiet. Screen time offers immediate relief in exchange for destruction that comes later. Parents make this deal constantly regarding screen time. Handing your kid a phone or tablet is the quickest way to neutralize a chaotic environment.

But this pause is deceptive. It doesn’t seem to remedy the situation, and it may even worsen the chaos.

Then there’s the addict-like response kids exhibit immediately after being handed a phone, a slot-machine glaze. They grip it like a starving ape grips bananas, as a tool for survival.

The Mayo Clinic warns that excessive screen time has been noted to lead to all sorts of health issues, including obesity, violent behavior, attention deficit, sleep disruptions, and erratic behavior.

It can even lead to “sensory differences” in toddlers.

There are plenty of detractors who frame the rejection of screen time as part of a moral panic, contending that it’s harmless or even beneficial.

This is one of the bizarre confrontations that have arisen with any new technology over the course of human history: People feel that these recent advancements are causing an incredible amount of harm. The other group claims that “every generation panics about technology, but most of the time their anxiety is actually ignorance and fear."

Reality lies in between the two: The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck.

Big little feelings

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Fad parenting has always been a problem. And like fads in general, it risks being swept aside at a moment’s notice, leaving a generation of disenchanted parents in its wake.

Each generation winds up with its own parenting philosophy. It’s corrective, a way to address the failures of the previous system. It’s also expressive, allowing each parent to rule the kingdom creatively. It is full of predictions about what matters and what doesn’t, what should worry parents and what shouldn’t — with plenty of outrage and hysteria along the way.

This philosophy is also a response to the folkways, constraints, disasters, luxuries, and technologies of that exact moment in history.

The current era of parenting seems largely focused on gentleness. Gentle parenting is the coin of the realm. I’ll give you a rushed, cursory, and probably haphazard explanation.

Gentle parenting, known formally as “attachment parenting,” is guided by empathy, the willingness to sit with a kid who, by most accounts, is being a real piece of work. Gentle parenting is focused on language that often sounds politically correct, like how it emphasizes bad behavior is “action,” not identity. It’s wrong, for instance, to say that a kid is mean. Say instead that the kid is acting mean. Parents are advised to “comment on the action, not the person.”

Every new parent I know has taken a parenting course from “Big Little Feelings.” It may be the most obvious example of Millennial parenting philosophy available. I have to admit, the course has benefitted my parenting tremendously.

The course has an entry on handling outbursts related to screen time, and as a true Millennial philosophy, the solution to screen time tantrums involves an acronym, PREP:

• P: Plan in advance.
• R: Reveal the plan.
• E: Explain the details.
• P: Put your toddler in charge.

The method remains unproven, but my point here is that it serves as a perfect representation of the parental angst unique to this era of total networking, total communication, total information.

The New Yorker captured this weird disharmony, where, in all of its planning, “gentle parenting represents a turn away from a still dominant progressive approach known as ‘authoritative parenting.’” It feels inherently feminine, yet it’s not. Because we have also seen an unprecedented shift in the father’s role and presence in family life.

At its worst, gentle parenting resembles the performance of a cartoonish NPR host, whispering passive-aggressive slogans that don’t correspond to reality. At its best, it offers a key to peace in the household. It can be annoying and stilted. But it can also be calming.

Screen activism

If you have young daughters or granddaughters, you should read “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigail Shrier.

She charts the spread of radical gender ideology as the cause of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” in which prepubescent girls who have never expressed any sort of gender confusion suddenly develop an identity centered on gender and body dysphoria.

Transgender activists hate Shrier largely because she exposes the dark side of screen time, which political radicals use for recruitment.

She argues that this fad is unnatural — it has never occurred at any other moment in recorded medical history. She makes a compelling case, and one of the phenomena she cites as proof is the influence that social media has on these girls.

She refers to Jonathan Haidt’s observation that we’re living through a “mental health crisis,” the worst in decades, specifically affecting adolescent girls. Depression and anxiety rates are spiking, along with self-harm.

And Shrier correlates it to the rise of the iPhone and social media. This has left kids today not just depressed and anxious but also socially underdeveloped. She argues that kids today feel like they should be able to live the carefree lives of their parents, but they don’t know how. So they seek the guidance of online personas who appear to have things figured out.

This leads to peer contagion, the cultural spread of a mental pathology. Increasingly, we have seen how this process occurs throughout the education system.

The “trans influencers” behind this fad are devoted to evangelization. Their biggest argument is that early intervention is necessary, the earlier the better. As Shrier puts it, “Trans influencers typically take a by-any-means necessary approach to procuring cross-sex hormones. Whatever you have to do, whatever you have to say — do it. Your life is on the line.”

Shrier’s response to this tactic is one of her most compelling points: Intervention is not a pause button. No studies show that puberty blockers are safe or reversible. They stop sexual maturation and development of bone density from occurring.

Studies have shown that from there, nearly 100% of kids put on puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones. This guarantees that the child will be infertile and have permanent sex dysfunction. In other words, early intervention almost guarantees infertility. We should hammer this in. It’s maybe the most shocking and unacknowledged part of the transgender craze.

In other words, screen time has led to an unprecedented crisis of psychosis-driven mutilation.

Shipwrecked

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Jonathan Haidt is quite possibly the most reasonable man in America. He is somehow unaffected by the political vertigo of our time, able to connect with every sort of person. He has approached the dangers of social media from many angles: as a tool for activism, as a corruptor of colleges, as a harm to teenage girls, even as a modern version of the story of the Tower of Babel.

In an article for the Atlantic titled “After Babel: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor “for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit.”

The story of Babel comprises one short chapter of the Bible, Genesis 11. Yet it’s a story everyone knows. He describes “people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.”

Like the people in the story of Babel, America is in trouble: “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

Social media platforms have damaged our trust, degraded our belief in institutions, and eradicated our shared stories. Haidt has been sounding the alarm about social media for years now, including in his most recent book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness."

Children born after 1995 are disproportionately anxious. This is largely the result of screen time. Screen time is alienating. It leads to isolation. Hence the alarming rates of depression and anxiety, both rooted in aloneness.

Haidt argues that over the past 30 years, it has led to a rapid decline in “play-based childhood,” which has been replaced in the past decade by “phone-based childhood.”

The Mayo Clinic confirms his assertions.

He notes that the smartphone-driven "great rewiring of childhood" is causing an “epidemic of mental illness.” He suggests four ways to combat this: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and prioritizing real-world play and independence.

He describes “smartphones as ‘experience blockers' because once you give the phone to a child, it’s going to take up every moment that is not nailed down to something else,” adding that “it’s basically the loss of childhood in the real world.”

He concludes with a similar refrain: “The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.”

Like so much else as a parent, this process winds up being tough but redemptive.