ADVICE&REAL LIFE Activities
From video games and apps to YouTube and Netflix, screen time has been a pandemic saviour for many parents. Still, you may be concerned about the number of hours your kids have been clocking on their devices—and how you’ll ever get back to your pre-pandemic rules. We assembled a group of experts to get some real answers about the emotions (your kids’ and your own) and the science (are kids hard-wired to love screens?) of screens.
WHY ARE KIDS SO ENTRANCED BY SCREENS? Kids get so zoned in on screens because the people who create apps and television shows for children are specifically designing them in a way that grabs their attention. “They change constantly and they provide what they call variable rewards to keep us hooked,” explains Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, president of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, a nonprofit organization that studies the impact of tech on children. “For little kids, screens are full of stimuli—they’re noisy, they’re colourful, they’re constantly changing and they involve multiple senses at the same time.” Kids have always loved TV, but with so many more content options and devices to watch or play on, they are less likely to get bored and walk away on their own. Sukhpreet Tamana, a clinical child psychologist and researcher in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University who has studied screen time in preschoolers, says three-, four- and five-year-olds are especially susceptible to the
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todaysparent.com Summer 2021
ILLUSTRATION: MARI FOUZ
The psychology of screens
THROUGHOUT MY 13 YEARS as a parent, the amount of time my three kids have spent on screens has ebbed and flowed with the chaos and stress going on at home. There were the months when, after her baby brother was born, our threeyear-old would wake up at 5:30 a.m., climb into our bed and start her morning with a healthy dose of The Big Comfy Couch and whatever else was on at that ungodly hour. Then there was the time after our third child was born and we’d just moved into a new house. The two-year-old sat, surrounded by boxes, sucking his milk bottle, tiny hand tucked into his diaper, watching Monsters Inc. for days. I look back on these chapters as our “seasons of screens,” where there was just too much going on in our lives to be fully imaginative and engaged when it came to parenting. When we really just needed to park them somewhere and know they were happy and safe. When there really wasn’t another choice. Enter the COVID-19 pandemic and parents everywhere have been in a universal, seemingly never-ending “season of screens.” More than a year after the initial shock of school and daycare closures, cancelled extracurriculars and a ban on family visits, our kids are still exposed to way more screens than they were pre-pandemic because, well, we’re still living through it. I haven’t been feeling great about my kids’ pandemic screen time, yet I know it’s unrealistic for me to uphold the pre-pandemic rules I used to have in place. So I assembled a team of experts to find out exactly what we parents need to worry about and what we can let go. Here’s what I learned.
