It feels like very few months we get some viral social media post or article about screen time, it is always presented so simply
Simply, don’t give your kids a phone.
Simply, don’t have kids on Chromebooks at school.
Simply, don’t let your kids have screen time.
But what’s missing there is the parenthetical- don’t let your kids have a phone (which means you, the parent, have no rational basis for wanting them to have one). Don’t let them on screens (which means you, the parent, need to give more of yourself at all times).
In short- it’s very easy to blame screens because we are, in essence, blaming parents. Concluding that screens are the problem means that the question being asked is “What’s the problem”
But that’s the wrong question to be asking
If fear and blame were enough, we wouldn’t be having this conversation again. Parents aren’t allowing phones and screens out of gleeful ignorance. And asking “Why are kids on screens?” is just asking “who do we get to blame?”
The correct question to be asking is “what BARRIER is preventing a family or school from having less technology in a child’s life”
So why don’t we hear this question being asked? Because it’s far more complicated. The barriers include a lack of paid parental leave, affordable childcare, parental support, adequate school funding, and on and on and on.
But there’s another reason we don’t hear big voices in media asking “what’s the barrier causing this tech over reliance?” And it’s this: if you can find something to blame, then that means you don’t have any responsibility.
If a politician or an author or a professor can say “the problem is parents/schools” then they’ve done their job. But if they identify a barrier, then they’d have to…well, DO something about it.
They’d have to advocate for parental support, for walkable neighborhoods, for childcare, for increased school funding.
In short, they’d have to admit that it requires collectivism to care for a community if we want children to be safe to thrive within that community.
And that would then require them to advocate for the lawmakers and political parties that advocate for those practices. But it is so much easier, simpler, and frankly marketable to say “I’ve found the problem”.
