![]() Bravo for Kamenetz for saying so.Īlso welcome for me was her chapter on parents and screens. Engaging in this sort of tasty media diet is good for kids’ learning and great for family togetherness. But what is the media equivalent of the family dinner prepared with farmer’s market veggies? What about the backyard barbeque with watermelon and s’mores?”Īs I have written in these pages, there’s a lot of great educational content available for families today via television, apps, streaming services, and more. “To return to the healthy-diet metaphor, we have some idea what excessive consumption looks like, what kinds of ingredients are toxic, and the symptoms of dangerous allergies. Mostly with others.” The focus on joy is refreshing given the anxiety that dominated most of the debate. Riffing off Michael Pollan’s famous adage, she advises: “Enjoy screens. Kamenetz is clear that, if you’ve got an orchid-child, you have to parent accordingly.Īnother helpful analogy she offers is to food. And while violent content per se doesn’t typically lead to greater aggression, for some kids it’s associated with greater fear and anxiety, as well as diminished sensitivity to the suffering of others. Internet addiction is real and devastating for some children and their families. (Within reason, of course passively watching television for hours on end is associated with more snacking and thus obesity and nobody who wants a good night’s sleep should be on screens right before bedtime.) Harried parents of “dandelions” shouldn’t feel too guilty about giving their kids a little screen time, Kamenetz argues, especially if it helps Mom and Dad stay sane.Ī small group of kids, however, are fragile like orchids and face real dangers from excessive screen time or certain activities like gaming. Still, from Kamenetz’s perspective, most studies point to what some in the field call the “dandelions-versus-orchids theory.” In short, most kids are resilient and hardy, like dandelions, and can spend time on screens without suffering ill effects. That research, alas, is more limited than anyone would hope, almost all of it correlational rather than causal, the bulk of it coming from the television era, with very little about the smartphones and tablets that now rule our lives. The book itself is well-written, easy to follow, and exceedingly balanced, taking readers through the research on screens and kids in a lay-friendly yet technically accurate way. Being the mother of two young girls only enhances her credibility. ![]() As NPR’s ed-tech reporter, she’s got the perfect credentials for the project and quite the platform to boot. With The Art of Screen Time, Anya Kamenetz has all the makings of a bestseller. Still, I can’t help but-yes-worry that I’m just deluding myself. As a father of two school-age children, and the more permissive parent when it comes to screen time, I certainly enjoyed the former more than the latter. The first offers a mostly soothing message- don’t worry so much, your kid will probably be fine!-while the other ratchets the alarm up to eleven. Into this arena of angst march two new books, each offering advice to parents (and given the book market, that means mostly upper-middle-class parents) about how to cope with the ubiquitous screens in our children’s lives. We worry that sexting will ruin their reputations and self-esteem, or that a thoughtless post will ruin their college applications. We worry that violent video games will turn them into the next mass shooter. We worry that smartphones are giving our children attention deficit disorder. And in the case of us neurotic upper-middle-class parents, what we worry about the most when it comes to our kids are screens. Most are being raised by two loving parents the incidence of violence and abuse is at record lows teenage pregnancy is rare and getting rarer even drug and alcohol use is down dramatically.īut we humans are hardwired to worry, so worry we do. The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media & Real Lifeīe the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat: Strategies for Solving the Real Parenting Problemsīy virtually every indicator, today’s upper-middle-class American children are enjoying advantages that make them perhaps the luckiest cohort in the history of the world.
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