Greg Bruce: Screen time - terrible for kids; a godsend for parents

The screens are coming for our kids.

We know the screens are coming for our kids. We have even tried to board up our houses and hoard our weapons against them, but we are powerless to stop them. We know that we have only so much time before we are eventually overrun and the screen army takes our children. It will happen, not just because the makers of screen content are stronger than us, but because they are infinite. If Bluey doesn’t get our kids, then Roblox will, or Minecraft, or YouTube, or TikTok, or Facebook… lol! Just trying to lighten the mood.

I see the screen-based threats lurking all over my home, but far from eliminating them, and in spite of myself, I have welcomed them. I wake up in the morning with a phone in my hand, take it to the toilet, take it to breakfast, walk around the house with it and so on. I try to exercise restraint, so as to be a positive role model, but too often I am forced to engage in post hoc justifications at the point I finally hear them say, “Daddy! Are you listening!?”

Recently, I came across a 2021 study by the University of Auckland, which revealed that seven out of eight Kiwi kids exceed recommended recreational screen time guidelines. The only thing that surprised me was that it wasn’t eight. The problem is that, sometime in the last few years, screens have become overwhelmingly more powerful than academics in shaping children’s behaviours.

To label screen time as a single thing is, of course, ridiculous – television is both David Attenborough talking about plankton and a MAFS husband talking about the size of his wang. So why do we talk about them as if they’re the same? Because it’s easy. Parenting is already hard enough without having to prepare a complicated spreadsheet displaying the respective values in order to calculate the times allowed for various screen-based activities.

Also, it’s not always easy to determine value. Bluey, one of the world’s most popular children’s television shows, with a reputation for wholesomeness, has recently come under fire for episodes featuring racism and fat shaming. Meanwhile, Mr Beast, the world’s most popular YouTuber, whose moral compass has previously seemed to revolve entirely around boosting his numbers, who produces hours and hours of filmed meaninglessness and is beloved by my kids, has recently taken a powerful and inspiring moral stand, in the face of transphobic internet vitriol and threats of audience collapse, by supporting his friend and co-host Chris Tyson, after Tyson revealed he is gender nonconforming and is undergoing hormone replacement therapy.

The temptation at this point is to throw your hands up and say, what’s the point, this is all too hard and we have other priorities, for example, the planet’s burning. But just because an issue is complex doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least think about ways to deal with it, especially when the fate of our children is at stake.

In good news, the University of Auckland researchers have done just that. The recommendation they put forward was for parents to be more involved in monitoring content, choosing interactive rather than passive watching and “balancing screen use with family time”.

It’s important to spend time with your kids. I know this, and I do spend time with them, and I often love that time, but I know I also need to spend time away from them, sometimes quite desperately, and the only foolproof way I know to do that is by giving them a screen and a remote control, and a list of passwords. Then, and only then, can I have the relaxation I need to recharge my parenting batteries: lying down on my bed and scrolling remorselessly through Twitter.