It’s time to get real ladies. How much screen time do your kids get? I’m not asking how much you WISH they get, but how much they ACTUALLY get. I’ll be honest with you: way too damn much in my house!
Look, my kids are up at 0530 (if not earlier) Monday through Friday. They used to watch a movie in the car on the way to daycare and on the way home from daycare. They’ll play outside a little in the evenings, but c’mon, it’s central Texas. The summers are stupid-hot, and by the time it cools down enough to play it too late to play…It really was easier to let them watch tv or play on tablets while I tried to get things done, but it was getting to be too much. Now, I let them play with toys when the weather is bad or it's too hot, but we still focus more on outside play for now. Before we made some changes in our home, our boys were watching about 3 hours of screen time per week day. Let's not even talk about the weekends...
This is the official guidance on screen time as determined by the American Academy of Pediatrics:
•For children younger than 18 months, avoid use of screen media other than video-chatting. Parents of children 18 to 24 months of age who want to introduce digital media should choose high-quality programming, and watch it with their children to help them understand what they're seeing.
•For children ages 2 to 5 years, limit screen use to 1 hour per day of high-quality programs. Parents should co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to the world around them.
•For children ages 6 and older, place consistent limits on the time spent using media, and the types of media, and make sure media does not take the place of adequate sleep, physical activity and other behaviors essential to health.
•Designate media-free times together, such as dinner or driving, as well as media-free locations at home, such as bedrooms.
•Have ongoing communication about online citizenship and safety, including treating others with respect online and offline.
Y’all…1 hour of screen time isn’t even enough time to watch a full-length movie!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m a 90s baby. I was born in the early 1990s where TV became even more accessible than in years prior. If my mom needed to cook or clean, on came the purple dinosaur. It wasn’t always that way, just until I was old enough to go play unattended. 20-25 years ago, that meant at about 5 or 6 years old you could go play with the other neighborhood kids, and can you imagine, UNSUPERVISED! Today, parents will sh*t a brick if their child is even in the front yard unattended, not to mention down the street and around the corner.
It’s really no wonder we’ve come to rely on technology as much as we have. If we can’t trust our kids to go and do anything without us, we need to keep them amused WITH us so we can get stuff done.
So what is the answer to our technology problem? Try to limit screen time the best you can, but don’t beat yourself up over it. If you have things that need to get done and letting the kids zone out to some terrible sing-song program gives you a few minutes, then do it. My best advice is that for every hour of screen time, you try to counter it with a family-friendly activity. Go play catch in the backyard, ride bikes down the street, play a board game, ANYTHING. Do some kind of activity to show the kids that there is enjoyment outside of a TV, tablet, or video game.
The lesson: Screen time can be a life saver, but don’t make it your whole life.
Source: https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/American-Academy-of-Pediatrics-Announces-New-Recommendations-for-Childrens-Media-Use.aspx, 2018.
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