Screen Time in A Pandemic

Jul 8

Rules Reviewed

We have been parenting in a pandemic for multiple months now. This has involved navigating new phenomena of “crisis schooling” and “crisis parenting.” Many children have lived several hours of their days on screens for the sake of learning, and then filled the rest of their hours on screens for the sake of us getting our work done. And now it’s a pandemic summer, many of us working while our children are not in summer camp or otherwise cared for by someone besides us.

I have been the first to support crisis parenting with the idea of lowering screen time rules way far down on the list of battles to wage. But as the pandemic wears on, and the prospect of “back to normal” feels further and further away, if not an obsolete fantasy, we may have to reel in our loosening up.

Limits and Child Development

In the gestalt experience of parenting, limits are pretty much always a good thing for child development. Limits help children feel safe, even as they may rebel against them. Staying up as late as they want? Nope. Eating the whole package of cookies because they just taste so good? Of course not. Playing sword fight with real knives instead of plastic toys? We have no problem drawing the line for safety. We need to place limits around our children’s unfettered pursuit of pleasure, for their own good. It’s common-sense parenting.

It’s no different for the issue of screen time, but there’s something especially alluring and alarming about screen time compared to other ways we naturally and instinctively use limits with our children. Maybe it’s because we had a grand total of one screen when we were growing up, so we do not have our own technology blueprint from when we were kids. Maybe it’s because we struggle ourselves with how we use our phones and devices – feeling our own addictive impulses creeping in — and we want to protect our children.

I think we can all agree with the stance that having screen time limits is good. The confusing part comes in the details – what are those limits? How much screen time is too much? How do we enforce limits in a pandemic involving an unprecedented level of being homebound?

How Much Is Too MUch and What Do We Do?

My children (kindergarten, 2nd, and 4th graders) were on learning apps for hours a day to participate in their distance learning. Their reward for a morning’s work? Video game time. Our pre-dinner tradition that allowed me to work and my husband to make dinner? The kids watching shows together. What are they used to doing weekend mornings? Turning on the TV and iPads while my husband and I sleep. What is our family’s years-long routine on Friday and Saturday nights? Movie nights.

“What might shift it around on the priority list, however, is if we notice the behavior and emotions that correlate with more screen time end up taking more energy to parent than setting and enforcing screen time limits.”

My 4th grader is officially more tech savvy than I am, as she zips around iMovie on her school iPad. Both girls have discovered the joys of online shopping since we aren’t going to stores right now and their allowance money is burning holes in their pockets. I love that my kids have recently ignited a passion for arts and crafts, inspired by pandemic boredom, but this has involved endless feeds of YouTube how-to videos.

I don’t even want to add up the hours that have surreptitiously crept upward as the days and weeks and months at home have blurred into one stretch of unmarked time.

Pre-pandemic, I had done my due diligence in staying up to date on the true risks of screen time for children and teens. I dug deep into the research with my social scientist lens, understanding the limitations of single studies, when to make sound conclusions, and common-sense approaches to applying the data to real life. And then, like many other desperate and overwhelmed parents, I couldn’t see how screen time limits fit in our new shelter-in-place reality.

Then the true motivation hit: my children’s mood swings and behavior. Of course, this takes time, attention, and energy to sort out – is it the emotional shrapnel from the Coronavirus bomb that exploded our sense of normal, or is it the screen time? Since my husband and I can’t do much about the global pandemic, we decided to do something about screen time.

We placed the iPads out of desperate arms’ reach (Step 1: Restrict access). We started saying no to deceptively innocent pleas to “just look at one thing” online (Step 2: Avoid the slippery slope). Thankfully, COVID hasn’t changed weather patterns, so the late spring/early summer weather has made outdoor play the new household mandate (Step 3: Reminders of the plethora of screen-free activities). We are paying attention once again to counting the hours each day of any screens (Step 4: Track behavior), just so we feel like we have more control. When a virus is clearly in charge of the rest of our lives, seizing this modicum of control has been better than continuing to give it up.

Lessons Learned

What has this weaving in and out of screen time limits taught me? Two primary lessons: It’s really, really hard work to enforce, and more necessary for certain children.

Let’s take the hard work part first. As parents, we have a limited amount of physical, emotional, and mental energy, because we are human, contrary to our children’s beliefs that we have infinite resources. Living, working, and parenting in a pandemic raises the degree of difficulty for simple, daily living by at least double. Choosing to set screen time limits requires channeling a substantial amount of this limited energy reserve, so it needs to be a priority for this choice to be worth it. For families with essential workers, zero childcare, and/or a single parent situation, screen time may fall differently on the priority list.

What might shift it around on the priority list, however, is if we notice the behavior and emotions that correlate with more screen time end up taking more energy to parent than setting and enforcing screen time limits. So, the need to set screen time limits depends. It depends on your family situation, your internal reserves, and your child.

Now to the second lesson: your child. The whole screen time debate and how it plays out at home should remind us of the simplest parenting truth often missed in research: each child is different; brain development and temperament matter, a lot.

The Science of Screen Time

Applying screen time limits reveals again how little we actually know about the science of screen time. I discovered the often cited 2-hour limit recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for children 5 and older is not grounded in data showing what exactly happens after 2 hours. I looked and looked for this justification, reading individual studies cited in the recommendations, and I couldn’t find it.

What the AAP does provide, however, is a guidepost. Even though I know the supporting evidence is lacking, I use the 2-hour marker in my own home. Usually a marker we surpass when I add it all up, but as long as we get closer, it seems better. I say “seems better” because that’s how we gauge it in our house: how our children are behaving and the volume and tenor of their meltdowns after disengaging from the screen.

Watch your kids. What do you notice?

I notice my youngest does better with about a 30-minute video game limit; when he goes longer, he has more difficulty transitioning away, and is more emotionally volatile in the minutes afterwards. Two of my children appear more susceptible to the addictive behaviors; the third turns the device off easily and doesn’t exhibit the pattern of emotional blowups afterwards that the other two do. I also notice that iPad time does not appear equivalent to television or movie time. My children seem more stable and calmer after a longer period of the TV screen compared to the iPad screen. My semi-educated guess is that the shows and movies engage their brains in a different way than video games.

Fortunately, help is on the way. A massive National Institutes of Health study on screen time following 11,000 kids for a decade has begun. Early results suggest brain changes after 7 hours of screen time a day, but they are not sure what those brain changes really mean. Unfortunately, many of our kids will be long gone from the confines of our household rules by the time the study is done. In the meantime, we do our best with what we know – both from science and common-sense.

Limits Renewed

Maybe it’s the ecstatic relief of no more e-learning. Maybe it’s the freedom of summer with no camp. Maybe it’s the opening up of allowing outdoor play with a pod of friends. We set more screen time limits, and our children have cooperated (well, more than expected).

I heard a mother of teenagers once share how when they were not allowed to have cell phones at a summer camp, they all described relief. Our children may not think they want us to set limits, but our job is to give them what they need. And sometimes they figure out that what they need is actually what they want. 

Despite what most parenting books promise, there’s not one answer, nor an easy answer in the world of parenting. Not for screen time. Not for parenting in a pandemic. And especially not for screen time in a pandemic.

Pay attention to what happens for your kids, flex your rules around the reality of your priority list, and feel free to revise as needed — based on your family, your child, your rules.