Mum’s the Word: Children and Electronics
Friday, August 28, 2015
Relatedly, I have often heard people critiquing parents on the amount of screen time a child is given.
When I was growing up the main critique was related to watching TV, and I remember being told even by other children that I “watched too much television” simply because I referred to watching movies sometimes.
Despite my love of movies, I was also often seen sitting in a corner with my nose stuck between the pages of an Agatha Christie book or the Anne of Green Gables series. In fact, I read probably more often then I watched TV or played video games.
Additionally, as far as I know, my critics were not watching me through my family’s window at night, breathing heavily, as I placed one VHS into the player after another. However, because they heard me mention the “evil box” a couple times, they made an assumption and ran with it. People critiqued my family simply because they could.
Similarly today, a person will see you hand your phone to your four-year-old one time and respond with a sad shake of their head.
Obviously, your child will eventually end up becoming a garbage-eating mute, living in a cardboard box on Guerrero Street, with an Iphone 20 as their one possession.
However, the people critiquing you never seem to take into account any external circumstances.
They’ll see you hand over your phone to your child, but they won’t really think about the fact that you’re in the DMV or at the airport with a long wait time or trip ahead.
Of course, I’m not denying that there are parents who use electronics as their primary babysitters. I’m also not denying that there are some negative side effects that come with an overuse of entertainment-related screen time.
However, more than likely, the average parent does not use electronics as a fulltime babysitter.
I would also go so far as to argue that the average parent lets their child use electronics on a monitored, but fairly frequent basis, simply because that’s the time period that we are living in.
Remember, at a certain time in history, even novels were looked down upon as being lowbrow entertainment.
Our forms of entertainment change, but the human tendency to judge one another never does.
Consequently, the average parent might feel conflicted each time they let their child watch TV or play with a smartphone.
More than likely, you are the best judge of whether or not you overuse electronics with your children. Still, if you really are trying to either cut back on your kid’s screen time or monitor it better, then here are four things to consider.
See Slideshow Below.
Related Slideshow: Mum’s the Word: Children and Electronics
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