Thanks to website blockers and various ‘child-friendly’ settings on TVs, movies, and games, the typical parent doesn’t have to worry about extreme danger from kids being on screens. These tools have given us a sense of security and make it easy to fall back on screen time whenever we need a break. Whether it’s giving your phone to entertain your 3-year-old so you can grocery shop in peace or, allowing an afternoon movie to appease your 10-year-old for the party you can’t drive them to, using screen time to help us catch our breaths is now more of the rule than the exception.
Using Screen Time to Take a Break from Our Kids
Many exhausted, busy parents will agree that this is a great new rule – but with a caveat. The problem isn’t that we use screen time much more generously, but that most of that screen time isn’t productive. And by productive screen time, we don’t mean videos of classes – we mean games, videos, websites, and apps that keep kids engaged, intrigued, questioning, and having fun all while they’re learning.
A lot of content for kids is not particularly useful. So how bad is it to let your kids have free reign? No one can say for sure but for our part, we followed the most famous parenting hack of all time to get some answers: We asked other parents!
Whether by choice or necessity, they left their kids’ screen time in the hands of blockers and ‘child-safe’ settings. Here are some learnings they had to share.
Content Intended for Kids Can Teach Them Behaviors You Don’t Want
The formula for most children’s entertainment is a villain or a crisis that is resolved. Have you noticed the amount of “Oh Nos!” and unnecessary anxiety created in all these children’s programs? The surprise for parents is that kids can’t only adopt the behaviors of the hero but also of the villains. One mother learned this when her 3-year-old son had a tantrum that followed Calliou’s to the letter. Another mother realized that her daughter’s newfound sass came from imitating the star of a show specifically designed for kids!
Kids Can Get Something Totally Different than You from The Same Content
Sometimes we forget that we too could believe that noses could be captured from our faces and that there is gold at the end of every rainbow. Kids often can’t appreciate sarcasm or read between the lines. One mother told the story of how her son thought Gaston was a beloved character because everyone sang about him. She shuddered to imagine that his ambition was to be Gaston-like!
Leaving Kids to Their Own Devices (no Pun Intended) Often Results in Unhealthy Extremes
Either kids end up doing the same thing over and over again or they dart from one thing to another and don’t give anything a chance to stick. One mom tells us how her little one became obsessed with the same playlist of dancing dinosaurs for days on end.
These parents’ experiences led them to be more attentive to directing and guiding the quality of screen time even within the ‘child safe’ content settings.
The truth is that getting their children’s screen time to be productive has not been the easiest path and, truth be told, it’s not the path most of us follow. Before a tool like Aneta, you had to not only curate the content, but the kicker was you had to be physically on hand to prompt the kids when time for one activity is up and then navigate them to the next activity and enter the credentials as needed. We love our kids, but we are not machines! No wonder there has been mass resignation to the appeal of – As long as it’s not truly malicious, how bad can it be?
