To think current concerns over screen time is bordering hysteria

[Tiredboymum22]

I think it’s over the top.

If my kids didnt have screens, nothing would get done. I’m mostly solo parenting. Family can’t babysit, husband works late 6 days a week. Childcare costs are through the roof.

I have a 6-year-old with ASD and a very hyperactive toddler. Eldest is obsessed with numbers and Minecraft, uninterested in his little brother a lot of the time. Up at 4.30 am most mornings too. I give my toddler the tablet when I’m trying to cook or tidy up (once he’s done playing with his toys).

I am criticised by older members of my family and told I should let him “help me” cook. Sorry but no.

Now I’m seeing countless articles and comments about the harm of too much screen time, but I think people are missing a lot of nuance.

aibu?

Screens aren't inherently bad. It's how they are used and for how long plus what are you doing in between?
At 2 and 6 mine (only a few years ago) were only allowed cbeebies. Even then there has been a change from live to on demand since my youngest was 2.
Eldest got a switch at 6 and our rule has always been
All homework and house jobs must be finished first
No games after dinner (we eat together at the table)
When we say turn it off you do it with no argument.

Eldest is now 10 and ADHD ASD. He LOVES screens. Would watch literally anything including history shows, antiques roadshow, golf etc. all things he has no interest in but, screens always win!
For this very reason we will continue to monitor and limit.
He is allowed the laptop for learning games/homework/coding and graphic design.

Absolutely no Roblox, Fortnite , tiktok or YouTube.

When my youngest was 2 he would sit at the table/highchair playing with play dough or drawing while I cooked. Or even just chatting, having a snack, looking at a book.
Eldest would have been happily playing alone in another room with a bit of string and a coat hanger....not sure how we didn't realise he was autistic.

Now if you are saying you allow them screens while you cook but spend hours a day chatting, reading, playing and sharing experiences with your kids. Fair play.
If they go to school and nursery then just watch screens.....

I voted yanbu because as a parent, you do what you have to do. No one else here has your life.
Of course the less time on a tablet is better than all day viewing however, your kids your rules.

I would love to know how many kids is a fuck ton of them 🤣🤣

I think the fact that you use it as a tool and that it is helpful to you is a fact that can be true, but that doesn’t mean that it is not detrimental to kids health and well-being. I tend to be fairly pragmatic about most things but I have to say that I do believe strongly that giving young children devices and screens to play games on is really bad for them. My children are 14 and 12 and have fairly limited device screen time now, but had none at all before they were 11. They were allowed to watch a bit of tv (not YouTube or anything) but had no access at all to phones or gaming consoles until they were 11 and still don’t have a tablet. They have a shared Xbox that they can play a few hours a week but never online, and they both have locked down iPhones - no social media whatsoever, no internet browsers, no YouTube, limited games and parental approval required for pretty much everything, shutdown times between 7:30pm to 7:30am, 1 hour max on phones a day. Their school doesn’t allow phones on campus as well which is great. That’s how strongly we feel about it as parents.

in contrast they have huge amounts of freedom in the rest of their lives - we live on a farm and they drive tractors, are allowed to roam free on our land, they ride their bikes a few miles along country lanes to hang out with friends at their houses, if they want to catch a train to the nearest town to meet friends then we drive them to the train station and let them get on with it.

They are both happy with this arrangement and prefer to spend time doing things in the real world - playing sports, doing sports training (both very competitive and high level with their sports), learning tricks on the trampoline, whittling with their hunting knives, firing flaming arrows in the garden 🙄, or out playing on their bikes. We have agreed with both that there will be no social media until they are 18 but the eldest has already said he would like never to have SM. People like to say that children will be left out if they don’t have everything available to them but it simply isn’t true - over use of phones and SM in particular causes so many problems with my nieces. My boys are both nice kids and so they are popular and have nice friends who include them in everything.

My youngest has lots of ADHD traits and if he were allowed lots of time gaming etc his behaviour would be so so much worse. He would also crave it I think whereas now he can happily come off after 30-60 mins, if he is ever left for longer he finds it harder to come off it and his behaviour is noticeably much poorer afterwards. When they were little I worked full time and my husband worked away for extended periods - I never gave the boys devices or let them watch loads of tv. Yes it’s harder work but also more joyful spending lots of time with your children - doing the fun stuff and the drudge stuff, without relying on devices to parent your kids.

It absolutely is over the top, in my opinion it's a moral panic. Screens have pros and cons like anything else. Literally every new technology gets this reaction, when novels were first invented people thought they would rot women's brains - now reading books is seen as a sign of intelligence! Another example is landlines! There's a couple of good podcasts on this that might help you push back or just feel more validated, I think one if not both of them explains how some of the research people love to quote about screens is not high quality:
Youre Wrong About - Phones are good, actually
Panic world - Are kids brains being rotted by screens?
It doesn't sound like you have the time to read but there's also a book called 'Unlocked: the real science of screen time' by Pete Etchells and he's done a few articles/interviews that might give you the highlights eg this one in the Guardian

I'm told that from the age of 4, my nose was permanently buried in a book. Some was entertainment of course, but we also owned a 10-volume Children's Encyclopaedia which I'd read cover-to-cover. If I'd had access to the vastly extended amount of information online, maybe my career would have been even more.... Well OK. :-) But it didn't ruin me. And limiting the 'screen time' of a similarly inclined youngster today would be as cruel as it would have been to ration my reading.
Now I approach the other end of my lifespan, my 'window on the world' will make limited mobility and resources bearable. We shouldn't demonise 'screens'.

Op, my child is 14 months and has not had any screen time! Phone, iPad or even telly. We didn’t decide - it just happened that way or neither of us have time for telly and we consciously try not to use our phones around her only because we want to give her attention she deserves! I worry she will be behind the curve with all cool things eg I don’t have Instagram..I got Facebook 3 years ago but by then no one was really using it!
i think you do what’s best for your family!!! Unless those people who are judging you are offering to help with the kids then they can do one!!! You do what you need to get through the day…

Yes it is science based, but more often than not it is correlational and there lies the problem - you cannot infer causation.

I was going to say...I had a boyfriend as a mid teen who was constantly playing Tomb Raider with friends when I went to see him. He did skateboard as well but he was gaming a lot - watching him game, a bit of electric guitar playing to show off was almost as boring as watchinh him do skateboarding tricks?

Equally my DH now who is mid 40s recalls how all his friends used to go one friends house because the parents were at work and they could go on the PlayStation. A couple of them still play on the PS and other gaming devices.

They are all really successful if we are basing that on conventional definitions!

Hrft but pretty sure my mom put us in front of the TV. It was a long time ago and I can recall us getting our first computer game. It was the tennis thing, basically 2 lines and a ball that bounced between. I never really moved on from that so I can't comment on gaming.

I'm no genius but I don't blame the TV or the computer games.
I'm sure you can have detrimental effects from most things many of us do. Screens included. My little boy loves Danny Go and they dance to it at parties, really gets involved. I have no problem with that.

So they have screens then? Unless theres been a new way to watch the TV invented?

It is clear what @Pineapplewaves means.

These kind of responses are just not understanding the current issues. Did your DC go out on prams holding a tablet or a phone instead of being engaged in the real world? Did every cafe and restaurant visit involve sitting watching a phone or a tablet? Did they know how to turn a page in a paper book when they commenced school? As toddlers and pre-schoolers did they develop hand-eye coordination and use their imagination in real world play of blocks and role play etc or was it all screen-based play?

Yes it does come down to screen. Watching the kids at break as well as lessons they cannot hold a conversation with teachers or peers.

Agree it is nuts. Some kids really benefit from time online and most are able to self regulate. Computer skills learned are valuable in the workplace. It's crazy to prevent usage.

Yes, 100%!

I don't buy that argument at all.

Everyone my age and older grew up with zero screen time as they didn't exist until we were adults. We are all in positions of seniority, responsibility and use multiple complex forms of tech multiple times a day. The fact that I spent 20+ years including my whole childhood and adolescence without screens has not in any way prevented me from learning and productively working almost exclusively in a digital environment.

Indeed, it is very much the late teens/early 20s crew who have grown up with screens that are struggling in the workplace - particularly with face to face contact, social skills, other soft skills and executive functioning.

So how do you think people managed in the workplace who never encountered a computer or phone in their lives until, I'm thinking of teaching here, about twenty-two years ago for widespread use, i.e. in every classroom? Even then that did not mean a laptop to work from at home, no email, all phones and pigeonholes.

Personally I do do better. I haven't had a TV for 12 years as it was full of mind numbing programmes like can't pay we will take it away and soaps.
I don't have any kids in my household stuck on screens when my own kids were young I only had BBC kids programmes on because other channels were drivel and full of adverts which were forerunners to YouTube now.
All I'm saying is historically everything that is being said has been said about other technology or pastimes. Even billiards was held up as a sign of a misspent youth. And personally I think adults screen time should be blamed for lack of school readiness. We now have a generation of kids whose parents have been way more interested in Facebook than potty training or actually speaking to anyone in their household. No idea what that is like but that's not whataboutery it's piss poor parenting.

Historically there wasn’t empirical evidence that billiards was actually changing people’s thought patterns and destroying their concentration

Obviously it’s completely up to you how much screen time you give your children, but the research is clear and easily accessible. I have been teaching for 30 years and have noticed a huge increase in concentration problems in my Year One classes, especially over the last 10 years. The impact of too
much screen time is so obvious - it hinders communication, language development and social interaction among so many other things, but for some parents, an easy life is more important than these things.

This is a ridiculous argument. Children learn computing skills at school - hours spent
on mind numbing, addictive computer games do not contribute significantly to
learning skills needed in the workplace.

The book The anxiety generation by Jonathan Haidt is worth a read.

It really doesn't matter OP if you don't think you could cope, all the research is really clear that it's a serious problem.

There is also a lot of indirect research correlating the increased use of screens with a lot of very negative social issues.

I suspect in 50 years people will look back on current norms the way we look at people who let small kids smoke or drink alcohol.

People managed their kids before without screens. Part of that being, the kids developed a lot more capacity to entertain themselves earlier because they had to.