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?

They watched TV

What did they do before tv existed?

I believe everything is ok in moderation, including screens.

When DS was born I had serious PFB syndrome and we did not allow screens at all.

He hit his motor milestones but did not hit his speech and language milestones and he did not play with toys either. He was destructive. He liked to pull things apart to see how they worked but did not have the skills to put them back together.

He also did not, and to this day almost 7 years later, sleep through the night.

He got his autism diagnosis aged 3.

When SALT got involved it was all "talk more, red books, narrate what you're doing, narrate what he's doing" and it felt like I'd run out of words to use by the end of the day. I was talking so much I was losing my voice and my mind.

I posted on reddit and some people recommended things like yakka dee, twirlywoos etc that model functional language, and it gave me a much needed break and lo and behold he started picking up language too. He will always have a lifelong speech delay, but screens gave him the language he needed by providing functional phrases that he understood and engaged with, gestalts, echolalia that we could build on for helping him meet his needs.

He also struggled with patience and waiting his turn, made no progress in school with the various therapies and interactions listed in his EHCP, but after introducing video games where he can try and fail and try again on his own timetable when he is ready to engage rather than on an adult led schedule has worked wonders for him and his ability to wait. It's the difference between waiting in a queue with some mild agitation and just not leaving the house at all for us and living a completely isolated life.

I also have a family member with a very young child who has been given screens since the second he entered this world and he has unmoderated access, is behind on his speech milestones, and now this family member is pushing for an autism diagnosis on the basis he isn't talking, when the content he watches is pure brain rot, not educational, and he doesn't get talked to, he gets talked around. I'm not discounting it's a possibility but it feels very neglectful to me that the work has not been put in to see if a change of environmental factors would make a difference for him in terms of his development, and he is categorically an iPad kid. I try not to be judgemental about it, but even talking to this child myself results in tears because it's an interruption of his screen time.

My kids watched a lot of TV when they were small, but I think this is a lot different to spending hours on tablets and phones. One thing that always concerned me about ipads is that kids can get access to other stuff (via YouTube recommendations for example) and you can't control so much what they're watching.

I think it also depends on the child. My DD had not much interest in gaming, my son could've played 24/7. But... they often played together, really imaginative games and I made sure they had time for this every day. When I was cooking though, I had to get dinner on the table, so the TV went on.

I admit that I sometimes used the TV/technology to preserve my sanity, but this is also important. Me going mental was not going to help my kids! I can say that my kids are almost adults now and have turned into really nice well-balanced people, despite all the TV and gaming that I used to worry about and feel bad about. Sometimes we worry when we're in the thick of it, but a lot of time it turns out OK!

Giving a toddler a screen as a pacifier on a regular basis not a great idea

My ds has had screen time since a baby and a tablet since 2. He’s excelling at school and gets glowing reports. I do always make him read his book and do homework before the TV goes on. He also goes to the park daily.

I really don’t see the harm. I remember being glued to the TV as a kid and came out with good grades.

Of course a little bit of screen time is ok. It's also important what they are watching.
But using lots of screen time to do things isn't good for children, it's backed up by research. Personally I notice when my children have had too much and I scale it back. Behaviour changes. So it's limited in our house and they don't get to watch really overstimulating programs. But I'm also in Germany where there is generally less screen time for kids.

Umm, you make it sound like Victorian England. Screens - personal ones anyway, are very recent, last 15 years. Mine had basic tablets with just a few games on and CBBC when they were about 8 or so, and DD2 is 16 so that was 2018. It wasn't a thing before the 2010s. And I never had to limit screen time as they naturally wanted to do physical play as well.

That is disturbing

It's like Wall-e
With those fat people who are contained in the seats with a screen over their head- almost like a prison.

My kids were small 10 years ago, so plenty of screens around but not to the addictive level of now. I wasn't on my phone much back then so I paid more attention to my children, that is becoming harder and harder to do - I often have to physically force myself to put my phone down when the kids get home from school or they're chatting away to me or just want me to play a game with them. I have to force myself to prioritise them. Same with doing essential chores - i used to put cbeebies for 30 mins while cooking, but I'd be checking in on them and it would be kept to a minimum. These days the temptation would be to check my phone, rather than check in with them if I had a few minutes,and maybe spend a bit longer in the kitchen. The addictive algorithms are worse and the impact is increasing. You see kids in cafes and pubs and restaurants staring at phones and tablets instead of learning how to eat meals...they may as well not be there as their parents have pretty much just tuned them out.

You have created a situation in which nothing can get done unless your kids hav screens. Or did mothers in every generation before yours never get anything done because their kids had no screens? No. We kids were told to go and amuse ourselves. I told my kids they could get out of my hair and go play with their toys, or they could help me; those were the options. Sometimes they had no option and were required to help me. It was not a problem. You've made a rod for your own back here.

No wonder kids are in such a mess at school these days.

Explain how single parents were able to cook and tidy up before handing a child an iPad was invented?

Avoid YouTube whatever you can. Unless it's for a specific educational need.

And as they get older it's the social media- tiktok/ snapchat/ instagram/ facebook ( Whatsapp- but difficult to stop access to this)etc that you want to try and shield them from.

They played. It's not so long ago that I was raising my kids in a remote part of the back of beyond where there was no TV and the least reliable internet ever. They got one video a day. Then they played. I do not remember them ever telling me they were bored.

This is very true. Screens are not 'new' - my children had screens including iphones and are now adults - but the way that material is now programmed to totally capture our attention IS new.

The warning sign for me is that you say you can't get anything done unless they are on screens: how are they ever going to learn to self-regulate at school / college / work if you aren't teaching them to do so now?

Well in the very old days, kids had a tot of something in their bottle to keep them quiet, this is the equivalent.

Dad eldest parent TV was around but only just they played in streets - sometimes bombed out ones.

There were pleanty of other kids about doing the same often siblings and cousins- and lots of usually related or known adults and way fewer cars. Wasn't always safe as kid did get injured but more people were just around and known to family than these days. He was born just before end second world war and grew up in 50s.

Dmum slightly younger never liked us playing out. She had to look after her younger brother and she wasn't keen for us to have same experiences she felt it unsafe even in our village where they were no relative uinlike Dad and Mums childhoods. We did a bit usually as part of a larger group but not often with brother getting much more freedom - and she got more against it as her daughters got near teen years.

It's differnet now - playing out happens a bit round here and is more common in early secondary school years - and didn't happen at all in previous location with kids - too many mad drivers not expecting kids to be out playing and often kids with DGP or in childcare as both parents worked rather than out in streets.

There are always going to be outliers. Maybe your child is highly intelligent; studies seem to show that the most intelligent children are the ones least damaged by excessive screen time.

There’s literal science and countless studies showing the damage screen time does to children’s brains, development, attention spans, hormones and attitudes towards their bodies etc.

Parenting is hard, but sometimes you have to do the hard work to make it easy. When my older son was small (now diagnosed ADHD) he was always worse behaved and more hyper after too much screen time - so we made it harder for ourselves in the short term (really really hard at times) by severely limiting screens, because in the long term it gets easier when you have a kid who can manage without screens. He's a delightful teenager so it has worked, but it was exhausting and definitely the hard option at the time. There's definite research around humans being short-term orientated so it's not good for us to be offered too many shortcuts, and that's all excessive screen time is.

Whilst I completely sympathise that your schedule and commitments with the kids sounds very overwhelming, i fell into this trap. I have been juggling a lot and my parenting with my youngest slipped. I relied on the TV/Ipad to pick up his attention when I needed a break or to get on with stuff and not having him under my feet. His screen time was growing more and more. I then noticed his behaviour began to decline, his attention span was appalling, and he began to refuse to play with toys and say they were boring. So I had a wake up call and pulled the lot! It only took 3 days to see a difference in his behaviour. He is back to his lovely polite self, he plays beautifully with his toys and is so imaginative, he's stopped telling me he is bored and just goes an plays. He still asks for the ipad but if he has had his 30 minute allowance then I am saying no.

Sometimes, it is a case of getting him to help me with the cooking, or putting something aside for him to do that I know will occupy him whilst I cook.

It's not the answer you will want but its a cautionary tale! You reap what you sew and it will come back to bite you later in life when you will have to address poor behaviour and reduce the screen time. I'd rather do that when the child is small and easier to distract than when they are older and more determined to get their own way.

It also sounds like his screen time is limited - because he's doing other things and living a full life.

I agree that alongside the time spent, the content of what they're accessing is a huge factor in the level of harm. Educational games, less harm than Fortnite or Kick the Doll etc

I don't think children should be able to interact with friends 24/7 or before they're well into their teens. That need some time away.

I also agree that using screens as babysitters for more than about half an hour is lazy parenting. Call it 'essential' if you must but it isn't. You made the decision to introduce screens the first time and it was for your convenience, not for their benefit.

Dont get me wrong, I get that its difficult but I have a toddler and we made a conscious decision when she was born, to ban all screen time. My child is 3 and has never watched tv. They have seen tv in other people's houses and a previous nursery it turned out was giving screen time (we withdrew from the nursery as a result) and we have tv in our house so my child is aware of a screen and knows what it does i guess - but our tv is never on when she is awake. She never asks for tv because its never on and it doesnt feature in her life. My husband travels a lot with his work so sometimes I need to cook or do things that are not playing with my toddler and she has a pretty good attention span for playing with toys or entertaining herself, she also has a tower she can stand in to take her to kitchen counter height, so depending what im making, she might help out. My daughter has a noticeably better vocabulary than any other child her age who we come into contact with. This is commented on regularly and she is also very content, she can sit well at tables in restaurants and whilst some people offer children an ipad/tablet, we simply dont have reason to, she is able to sit and be bored. She has also always been a very good sleeper. My child is 3 so will these behaviours make any difference in 10 or 20 years - I will never know because this is how iv chosen to parent, i cant redo it another way to compare. Perhaps even my child would always have had these skills even if id let her watch some tv each evening. But i do fundamentally believe that cartoons now are designed to be addictive in a way that they werent when I grew up in the 90's. I accept that at some point my child will start using screens and probably have to use them every day for the rest of her life. At the very least, I hope i have helped her eyes for these few years and iv got to spend quality time engaging with her that I could have easily lost by plonking her infront of the tv.

Well no, but I was thinking by screens we also meant tvs rather than just iPads and YouTube and X boxes so we are talking about 50 years ago…!

If you have adult kids like I do (yours sound a bit older), they were not given access to tablets and phones from toddlerhood and probably saw no social media till teens. It’s a different kind of exposure now I think.