In this episode I'm talking about what I call the screentime dilemma - basically the overwhelm and frustration you feel around figuring out screens. I’m helping you understand why it feels so hard and why it actually falls outside of your wheelhouse as a parent.
You’ll Learn:
- Why figuring out screentime is so confusing
- How screentime is following in the footsteps of driving, smoking and dietary recommendations
- Current best practices for kids and screens
- What I’d do about screens if I ran the government
With tech and screens, we’re all making it up as we go along. And - news flash! - it’s not working out very well. Listen to learn how to handle this confusing topic in your family.
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There are a lot of areas of parenting where you know what’s best. Adults need about 8 hours of sleep every night. You shouldn’t eat a bunch of sugar at every meal. Your kid can’t drive until they have a license. For these things, there are laws or guidelines that give you a mental map for how things should go.
The Screentime Dilemma
In my opinion, screentime limits are a little above our pay grade as moms. It’s kinda the Wild West of parenting, because there aren’t a lot of guidelines or oversight. So, you have to be the sheriff in a house full of robbers that want it all the time.
You don’t really know what the rules are supposed to be or how to enforce them. There’s no Surgeon General’s warning or food pyramid of screens. And you’re (probably) not an expert on childhood development and the human brain.
So we, as regular people, are left trying to figure out what’s normal and what’s best for our kids. No wonder you’re overwhelmed!
Guidelines in Our Society
In this little history lesson of rules and guidelines in our American society, you’ll see that when something new comes around, it takes almost an entire generation to set clear rules around it. And until the government realizes that something is causing a problem or that our kids need to be protected, we’re pretty much on our own.
Here are a few examples…
Cars. The first car was invented by Carl Benz in 1886. It was 20 years before states slowly started to require a driver's license, and it was even longer before age restrictions came into play. It was 30 years before the first stop sign was installed and 66 years until the seat belt was created. 70 years after the first car, driver’s licenses were required nationwide in the United States.
In the beginning, there were no rules or restrictions, and now there are a lot. As a society, we agree that an 8-year-old shouldn’t drive a car. We’ve decided that somewhere around 16 or 17, people are mature enough to handle a vehicle, but we don’t yet know how old someone should be to handle the internet.
Food. Prior to the 1960s, most food was prepared at home with basic ingredients. After World War II ended, manufacturing shifted from creating machinery and supplies for the war to machinery for the home and agriculture. The way we processed, stored and distributed food changed. More cheap, processed foods solved the problem of there not being enough food to go around, but we also created poorer quality food in order to get it to more people.
20 to 30 years later, the Surgeon General started to notice that nutrition and health were decreasing in our society, and chronic diseases were on the rise. Mandatory nutrition labeling on all packaged food went into effect in the 1990s, but a lot of consumers didn’t really know much about carbs, fiber, sugar or calories, so they created food guides.
When I was a kid, we had the 4 basic food groups as our guideline. Then came the pyramid, which was just confusing, and now we have the simplified “My Plate” model. The purpose
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