Kids and screens

Wherein I find my old homeschooling reflexes were right, yippee!

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

More and more jurisdictions are considering or implementing school cellphone bans, and some places also have strict rules preventing kids from having social media accounts although in fairness that probably only applies to kids who are too clueless to find ways around the system but I digress. The point is, everyone sees that kids who spend inordinate amounts of time sucking their screens aren’t actually that healthy and something should be done to help save their brains and capacity for attention.

I don’t disagree, mostly, but I do think banning phones is totally the wrong idea. Banning things never works. Instead, we need to train kids (and ourselves, too) to depend on something other than a bunch of likes for our dopamine hits.

Yes, I know. Easier said than done. But as someone who has mostly succeeded in bringing up children who have a pretty healthy relationship with their screens (by which I mean, it’s no worse than mine), I have things to say.

As I rule I find people who freak out about new things tedious. I also find blind faith in anything new to be potentially dangerous. The trick is to be somewhere in the middle; to find ways to use tools intelligently without becoming the product.

It’s one reason I’m not on TikTok. I may have an account somewhere but I don’t use it. I don’t hate short-form videos, but the utter randomness — and endlessness — of things you find on platforms like TikTok bug me. It’s also not relaxing at all — it’s like the point isn’t to tell stories but to get you all stressed out.

Phones, the internet, social media and AI — these are all useful tools. Provided you remain the master in that relationship, not the hopelessly enslaved.

My trick for achieving that with my own kids is remarkably close to what Jonathan Haidt (if you know who he is, I don’t need to introduce you; if you don’t know, go google, he’s worth it) said on a recent podcast with Ezra Klein.

The part I’m referring to starts at around the 43:10 mark.

My kids were born in the later part of the century’s first decade. I homeschooled them for 12 years. By age three or four they each had a laptop and part of their schooling was to research things that interested them (I made them teach me stuff; kids fucking love teaching their parents). They were also allowed to watch as many documentaries as they wanted. On anything. I had a basic filter for porn and graphic violence. I don’t remember if I tried to block swearing. Probably not.

We did homeschooling in the morning then I’d kick them outside to play. After lunch they were researching things on their own and they could finish their afternoon watching a movie. Any movie they liked. Often the same movie; I’m pretty sure my kids hold the world record for how many times in a row you can watch Wizard of Oz without bursting.

What they were not allowed to watch? Kids’ shows. Dora was famously banned in my house. They could watch this shit when they were at their friends’ house. Not mine.

Why? Because those stupid (but loud) shows have no point. They have no story arc, no character development, no moral universe, nothing. Characters are predictably themselves and they run through pointless, unconnected scenarios and scenes that always end well without the slightest hint of internal struggle.

These shows are inhuman, in the sense that they don’t represent anything that’s remotely close to what children (or adults) experience. All my homeschooling was story-based. Every chance I got I threw the kids at things that helped them develop their creativity and imagination. I wanted them to learn to think for themselves and to solve puzzles. I didn’t need them to obey me (or anyone else). I wanted them to understand why the rules existed and follow them because they make sense.

I didn’t put up with churlishness but they were welcome to argue with me and believe me when I say they did. Children aren’t stupid. They’re small, under-developed and inexperienced, yes. But they’re at least as smart as you are. It’s generally a wise idea to talk with them instead of barking at them.

Today my teens all have their phones and iPads and who knows what-all. They’re on some social networks. I don’t monitor them one bit. They know they can come to me with anything and they frequently do. But I have no need or desire to police them. And you know what the best part is? They use social networks to talk with their friends and get their news — seriously, my teenagers are remarkably well-informed for people who don’t read newspapers. Yet they much prefer hanging out with people in person. They also hate AI-generated content and they’re often better at spotting fake news than I am, which is saying something.

I don’t think I did anything special. I observed how little children lost every ability to focus and became miserable whenever they watched kids’ shows (including when they were with friends) or anything resembling social media reels. And I just decided to redirect their attention towards something else. I didn’t tell them what to watch — they could pick anything they wanted out of Netflix. If they felt deprived or badly treated, I didn’t hear about it. And trust me, my kids were never shy about sharing their views.

I started them young and maybe that’s the secret. I am not sure what I would do with an Instagram-obsessed 13-year-old who spent the previous 10 years scrolling short-form videos. Haidt and other experts have all kinds of resources, and maybe some of those are useful. I’m just very skeptical of phone bans because they don’t solve the problem; they just put some symptoms on pause during business hours.

The real problem, in my professional non-expert opinion, is a generation of children raised without enough agency and not enough freedom to explore their own creativity, because that’s often messy and it never fits neatly into adults’ precise schedules. Imposing stricter rules on the kids without giving them the space and freedom to explore who they are is not going to lead to a better place.