How to win the screen time battle with kids
THERE’S been all out war in my household over devices, and our parental tactics had varying success until we pulled off a battlefield masterstroke, writes Matthew Condon.
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WE are at war in our household.
There is war every weekday morning and every weekday evening, and then there is more war right across the weekend. Then it starts all over again.
The battle is over the amount of “device time” our children are permitted.
And like any war there is subterfuge, resistance, big confrontations, smaller skirmishes, spying, temporary compromise and brief moments of surrender.
Millions of words have been written about the pros and cons of time spent by children and teens on smartphones, iPads and personal computers.
I thought we had it bad in at our place. But then I read a paper in Psychology of Popular Media Culture, titled Trends in U.S. Adolescents’ Media Use, 1976-2016, by academics from the San Diego State University and published last month.
If, as a culture, Australia invariably follows any trend, fad, craze or behavioural anomaly that comes out of America, then we’re in for a hell of a ride.
“In a society awash in information, media and communication, attention has become a scarce resource,” the paper begins. “With only so many hours in a day, and only so much cognitive capacity for information processing, an attention economy results in which each activity competes with other activities. Time elasticity is limited.”
The research findings on the behavioural patterns of “iGen adolescents” was jaw-dropping.
It found that in 2008, 52 per cent of 12th graders said they visited online social media sites “almost every day”. By 2016, that had increased to 82 per cent. Furthermore, U.S. teenagers spent an average of four to six hours a day surfing the internet, texting and social media.
All this device time appeared to be at the expense of the traditional “legacy media”, such as print, TV and going to the movies.
The report stated that in the early 1990s, a third of 10th graders read newspapers every day. By 2016, that had dropped to two per cent. In the late 1970s, 60 per cent of 12th graders said they read a book or a magazine every day. By 2016, that had crashed to 16 per cent.
During the same period, the number of teenagers who said they did not read any books for pleasure had tripled. By 2016, one in three did not read books for pleasure.
The impact of this dramatic change had “still unknown implications for education and the workplace,” the report said.
“The pronounced shift away from legacy media and towards digital media among adolescent populations has implications across several areas,” it continued. “Education will increasingly have to adapt as students experience the intake of information in fundamentally different ways.”
The study concluded that the results “provide a vivid example of the interplay between culture and individuals.”
Our war continues apace. As parents we have done the daily allotted “screen time” equation, with varying success. We have hidden devices in bookshelves and cupboards. We have investigated actually buying a small safe to lock devices away.
Recently, my wife initiated a system so rudely obvious that we wondered why we hadn’t thought of it before. She turned off the wi-fi in a glorious battlefield masterstroke.
We may have won that skirmish. But we are a long, long way from winning the war.
Matthew Condon is a columnist for The Courier-Mail.