I’m not particularly into banning things in my house, partly out of laziness – enforcement creates conflict, or at least a need for me to get up and do something – and partly out of a dim conviction that the more rule-bound the child, the greater the meltdowns. The kid not allowed snacks between meals goes mad at houses with an open-fridge policy. Inflexible bedtimes create inflexible children. News blackouts designed to preserve the innocence of a child can make the world seem more not less frightening, and so on.
The obvious exception to all this is tech, which takes away all of our abilities to self-regulate. Until recently, I imagined there was no amount of slack-jawed screen time that would exhaust my children’s appetite for it. This has turned out to be wrong: one child, off sick a few weeks ago, actually looked up bleary-eyed from her iPad after two days of constant usage and expressed a desire to go back to school. More generally, however, they will want more time on it than I think healthy, even as I use the time bought by their screen addiction to feed my own.
Until recently, it has seemed as if the messaging around kids and screen use has been broad stroke and premised on assumptions that all forms of engagement are equal. Social media can be harmful to teens because of online bullying, toxicity and skewing their values towards instabullshit but, in general, children need to be on phones and iPads less and that, we are led to believe, is the bottom line. This may well be true; I’m sure it would be better if they were all playing volleyball. But the Eiger-scale task of getting them off screens altogether can seem so overwhelming that it discourages any action at all.
This week, there is some consolation to be had, therefore, in research undertaken by Birmingham University and published in the Lancet’s Regional Health Europe journal, that suggests the ultimate – and ultimately impossible, or so it feels – goal of banning children from screens can support some shades of nuance. While the research confirmed what we already know, that increased screen time in young people affects mental health, behaviour and sleep patterns, the university research team also discovered that banning phones from schools doesn’t actually achieve anything. The study concluded: “There is no evidence to support that restrictive school phone policies, in their current forms, have a beneficial effect on adolescents’ mental health and wellbeing or related outcomes.”
These findings seem like a foregone conclusion when you stop and give them some thought; apart from break and lunchtime, school days simply don’t afford an opportunity for what happens after school and at the weekend, which is the spectacle of kids engaged in unbroken, multihour screen usage that results in the average child spending between four and six hours on screens a day.
Even within that horror statistic there are differentials, however. If I’m bingeing a TV show, I can easily pull down a four-hour shift of back-to-back episodes. There may be better ways to spend time – I’m sure there are – but apart from a vague risk of deep vein thrombosis, I don’t think of the activity itself as particularly damaging. Children are more malleable, need to move around more than adults, and should ideally have a life before they turn into couch potatoes. But it is worth making a distinction between different types of screen engagement so that rule-making around it can become more realistic.
To this end, it’s worth isolating the single most damaging aspect of online culture for kids, which is the dopamine-spiking, attention-nuking, wholly ruinous and entirely nutrition-free feeds on YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels, that have apparently led to gen Z college kids being unable to read a whole novel. Going screen-zero is great if you have the resources to occupy your kids in other ways, but assuming, like most parents, you have neither the time, energy or fine temper to police what happens when you cancel all screen time and tell them to play with each other for four hours after school, there is another way.
This seems so obvious but for some reason struck me only recently: they can be on screens, even for hours at a time, but it has to be nutritional content, which is to say either to involve an element of active play – Roblox or Minecraft, where they message and hang out with friends – or actual programming. This revelation has led to a rare enforcement of rules in our house: I won’t ban screens, but I will ban short videos. (I make an exception for Bluey webisodes, because they’re well made and I am a snob, plus I find the Heeler family soothing.)
It’s early days, but so far the new rule seems to be working, not least because it makes everyone feel as if they’ve won. Now I have one child who just ploughed through three seasons of A Series of Unfortunate Events and another embarking on Young Sheldon, which with any luck will keep her going all year. OK it’s not volleyball or sticking bits of felt to a toilet roll, or, you know, interacting with each other; but considering the alternative, I’ll take it.
