Screen Time – Finding Balance for Kids

TRANSCRIPTION

I want to talk about screen time, and I’m very aware that this could be divisive in some way, and I want to be somewhat controversial in this, and I want to be realistic, and I want to take the side of the child and the child’s future rather than take the side of the parent.

If I take the side of the parent for a moment, the argument would be life is crazy, I’m doing work at home as well as at work, I have too many things on my plate, and screen time is a great babysitter, and I agree. Even 60 years ago, years ago, we we, I mean if you’re my age you remember test patterns and and DSTVs open time or MNet’s open time and and in open time everybody was glued to the screen and watch what they needed to watch and then it went away and then we didn’t have it so we needed to go get busy somewhere else.

The Reality and Appeal of Screens
So the lure of screen time is there, it’s not going away, it’s a beautiful part of our society. If we look at AI, that’s a conversation that needs to be had as well. But if I take that away and I focus more on we have a child, they are struggling, what are we going to be doing about this? I often speak about the parent being the adult in the situation, and this comes into this conversation as well.

What Do I Really Want for My Child?
And the big question that I live with, I hold as the base of all my thinking as a parent and as an educator, is what do I really want for my child, what do I really want for this child? And the answer is never six hours of screen time. It could be a career in IT or social media, it could be that, sure.

A Zero Technology Approach at School
I decided for my school, for Omatas Learning Centre, I’ve made the decision to be, I say zero tech. Doesn’t mean to say the teachers aren’t researching on Google, and we don’t use this screen now and again. But I would say we’re a zero technology school because I’m working on children’s basic abilities of literacy and mathematics, socialising and emotional development and physical skill, physical ability, body’s ability to do all these things, and screens don’t come into that at all.

Typing, Writing, and Brain Development
There is an absolute place for a child who would do way better with typing than with writing. I don’t know that it should be introduced at the age of eight. I think if we understand that the brain is plastic, we’ve got more developing to do before we put in a system that takes away that development. We’re talking about plasticity and how use it or lose it.

If I take an eight-year-old that’s struggling, or even say a 10 or 11 year old that’s struggling to write, we’re not getting it right through therapies, we’re not getting it right through practice, and we want to give them more access to education and typing would be that route, I would argue let’s leave it until they are 14. The brain is hugely plastic up until that age. I would almost see it as giving up if we lean into that too soon.

Finding the Balance
But there’s a balance because we don’t want to frustrate children to the point where they give up anyway, so we want to balance that. There’s an absolute place for technology. My hard no is unmonitored, unparented, unregulated nonsense. I want to say nonsense specifically because doom scrolling is nonsense. There’s nonsense for all of us, and if an adult can’t get off social media, they think they’ve been on for five minutes, but they’ve been on for two hours. If an adult can’t get off, what hope does a child have?

Containing and Regulating Screen Time
So we don’t want to introduce it in an unregulated way. We want to find space in our lives for it and have it contained in the way that makes the most sense for us. We want to contain its time-wise, we want to contain its restriction-wise, and we want to contain its vicinity as well. So you can be on your tablets here and nowhere else, password-protected, and I, as a parent, have to unlock the password so that I know when you’re logging in.

The timer has to be set. After you’ve been on this for 20 minutes, you’ve got two minutes to tell me what you watched, and not as a regulatory thing, I mean that that will be a thing that you’re thinking of as well as a parent, but more importantly, it can’t be mindless. When you finish watching something for 20 minutes, you need to be able to look up and say hey I just watched this, and this was interesting. That would be important.

Advertising, Algorithms, and Hidden Risks
You need to be careful of adverts. The whole system is designed to hook you in and keep you down a rabbit hole. And parents will often say to me, but my child was just watching this really age-appropriate kiddies program, and I’m going no, but they clicked on three adverts, and the adverts were not appropriate. And children are not seeing the difference between content and advertising. It’s very similar these days, and intentionally so, I think.

You Can’t Unsee What You’ve Seen
I always said to my own daughters, and I was privileged enough to raise them in an age when social media wasn’t a big deal, or at least I had more control over it. I have said to them, you can’t unsee something you’ve seen, it’s always there, so just be careful what you see. Be more deliberate and mindful of what you see.

And it was a message I gave them right from early on, and they understood it more as they got older, and they fed it back to me in their late teenage years. They would say I don’t want to watch that because I don’t want to have that in my brain. I’ll watch it another time.
Inclusion and Social Belonging

There’s definitely an inclusion thing. We have a, there’s a place for children to be exposed to things that other children are exposed to, so the conversation on the playground doesn’t isolate your child, but in a contained way.

The Physical Impact of Blue Screens
We just need to think about the detrimental side of blue screens. When your eyes are focused at close range, that’s a stress position for your eyes, and we’re stressing our eyes. So far as I’m aware, there’s no research yet that says we’re damaging children’s eyes, but optometrists will tell you up to a 30 per cent increase in children needing glasses since 2020 because screen time has increased, and because there was more permission given.

What Became Normal After Lockdown
I know when we went into lockdown as a school I needed children to have access, and at least one family who didn’t want their children to have access to screens at all had to suddenly give their children access to screens, and that didn’t, wasn’t taken away after 2020. It was, it just became the norm. So that’s the thing we need to be careful of, what becomes normal.

When “Normal” Slowly Shifts
And it’s like, talk about eating a bar of chocolate. When I grew up in a home where maybe on a Friday, my mom would buy my brother and me this little caramel bear, or she would buy one bar of chocolate, and we were allowed two blocks. Now you go, and each child gets a bar of chocolate, and it’s become the new normal. How do we walk that back?

And I think as a parent we need to look at all the things that we see as normal, and then we need to see if we are happy with this, what is the outcome of that, what’s going on for my child if I make this normal. Then again, starting with you as the adult, what do I need to walk back?

Setting Hard Boundaries at Home
My kids were at primary school. TV only went on on a Friday at 7:30. It was off over the weekend. I kept them off the TV by doing things with them, by taking them out. And when my husband and I watched TV, it was only after 7:30, after my kids were asleep, um.

The Impact on Social Skills
Had to be a hard and fast rule for us. There had to be, this is the line I won’t cross. And the detrimental impact of it at school, uh, in my special needs space, is that children are struggling with social skills because when they game, they can control the characters, then they come to school, and they want to control their friends.

Even so much as we’ve got little kids that want to pause people, and when they won’t pause, he gets very upset. And that’s a, that’s quite a big case of that.

Gaming, Reality, and Escape
I know we talk about violence in gaming and that it could translate into violence in real life, and I think there’s a component to it. I’m not seeing it. I mean, everybody grew up playing cops and robbers types of games. I think it’s a necessary part of life. I don’t think it translates into real violence unless there’s something underlying that.

But it definitely translates into what is real and what is not. For children who are struggling, escape is what they look for, and reality is what they avoid. And when they avoid the real, they avoid the development of skills. And we’re not talking about high-level skills, we’re talking about basic socialisation and emotional development.

Redefining Screen Time
I think the definition of screen time is important, and what we see as free fun time, what we see as work time and what we see as productive versus unproductive. And I think that’s subjective to some extent, and depending on the child’s age and what homework they have and what you do as an adult as well.

If you’re, if you’re a graphic designer, then you might be inclined to get your kid into graphic design more, and that would be more screen time. So let’s portion this out.

What We Mean by “Screens”
The first thing to understand is that we deliberately call it screens because we mean all screens. I had a parent once saying, but I’ve taken my kid’s phone away, and he was still on his tablet and his TV, because the parent’s understanding of screen was, was phone.
So I think first we need to understand that screen time is anything that involves the screen and a visual screen. Okay, great.

Productive vs Unproductive and Mindless vs Meaningful
Then we need to understand productive versus unproductive. Then we need to understand useful fun versus mindless fun. Because watching a really funny movie with a friend for an hour and a half is very different to YouTube shorts, and just pumping through them over and over on your own.

And what’s being developed there? What skill is being developed? And remembering children are growing human beings, they, they needing to develop. You put them in front of YouTube shorts for six hours; we need to look at what the value is.

Skills, Foundations, and the Learning
I don’t think that if you don’t teach your child coding in primary school, they won’t be able to go into coding as adults. I don’t think that translates. I think your child can become anything they want to be as an adult if they’ve got strong literacy skills and strong mathematical skills, thinking skills and the ability to organise and plan. Those are your key skills.

Not coding. That coding is an outcome.

The Learning Tree: How Skills Really Develop
Again, if you go back to occupational therapy and how they view the system and speech therapists, if you use a learning tree concept from Dr Green Span, the Green Span Floor Time approach used in his work, you’ve got to understand the body as, think of the tree. It would be the roots, the environment, the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves.

The apples are the skills: handwriting, mathematics, reading, and coding. Those, those come at the top. Those are an outcome of all the other things.

Screen time doesn’t feed the roots, the branches and the trunk of the tree. And in OT, they talk about the OT wall. Screen time doesn’t feed, doesn’t build the foundation. The foundation has to be there first, and then we can add the other skills.

When Screens Are Used Well
So the argument for skill based, bad argument. The argument for my child should have access to screens for research, good argument. Again, contained, intentional.

I’ve got an intention to go on the screen. This is what I’m trying to do. What are the skills I need to be able to research? What research engine am I going to use? How do I pull the research? How do I put it together? How do I use a document to put the project together? Are there other apps and tools I can use?

That’s amazing development because that’s not mindless screen time. That’s using resources, using the screen as a resource and a tool to develop a skill.

When Screen Use Becomes Dysfunctional
So there are differences; however, six to ten hours of that where I’m saying no to playing and I’m forgetting that I’m hungry and I’m not joining the family for dinner, now it becomes dysfunctional again.