Screen Test

Ryan Weber teaches technical writing at UAH. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, SlackJaw, RobotButt, and a bunch of nerdy academic journals. 

My kids participate in two activities: 

1) Screen time.

2) Begging for more screen time.

You might argue that they also sleep, but I’ve heard them begging for screen time in their sleep. And they’re probably dreaming about Roblox (if you don’t know what Roblox is, consider yourself lucky). It doesn’t matter what else we’re doing. Playing Go Fish? They’re begging for screen time. Hiking the Land Trust? They’re begging for screen time. Telling them screen time is over? They’re begging for screen time. If a meteor crash landed in our backyard and a spaceship piloted by giant lizards playing electric guitars flew out, my kids would glance at it for a moment and then ask, “When can we have screen time?”

When our kids were younger, my wife and I tried to enforce the screen time guidelines established by those killjoy nerds at the American Academy of Pediatrics, who apparently hate both fun and parental sanity. But our vigilance waned. An allotted hour of daily screen time could become two, or occasionally a whole afternoon where a toddler gets lost in the blue glow of Toca Kitchen Monsters while dad naps on the couch in a pile of unfolded laundry. Sick days and snow days are like the “Purge” movies but for screen time rules. On the airplane, we superglue iPads to our children’s faces. And without screen time, you wouldn’t be reading this essay, because I would have been interrupted in the middle of writing this sentence to mediate a fight about which child makes the more annoying chewing noise, and then interrupted again to listen to the chewing noises so I can provide a definitive verdict. 

Maybe kids have always been obsessed with media. Maybe Cro-Magnon kids begged for just ten more minutes of looking at cave paintings before dinner. Maybe Renaissance kids did nothing all day but stare at the Mona Lisa. But somehow, my kids’ obsession with screens feels new and more intense. The New York Post once called screens “digital heroin,” and some days the analogy feels apt, though after recently buying my daughter an iPad, I suspect heroin might be the cheaper addiction. 

I admit, everything is more enticing on a screen. My daughter recently showed me a video game that lets you vacuum your house. So she begs for screen time to do virtual vacuuming but complains about the incredibly realistic vacuuming simulation her parents offer right in her own living room. It reminds me of a friend years ago who would clean her house and then unwind by making her Sims characters scrub the toilet. This gives me high hopes for my forthcoming app, a game that lets you do your character’s taxes and then listen to a presentation about a multi-level marketing opportunity. 

Another challenge of limiting screen time is that phones and tablets consolidate an entire childhood into one device. Back when I was a kid (and just writing that phrase makes me feel old), you needed a cordless phone to call your crush and hang up in a panic when she answered, a giant boombox for listening to Color Me Badd CDs, a disposable camera for taking artistic photos of yourself taking a photo in a mirror, a chess board for throwing a tantrum when you lost to your dad, an Encyclopedia Britannica set to research what kind of underwear people wore in the Middle Ages, and a video camera for making extremely clever parodies of “SpaceBalls”, even though that movie was already a parody. But Apple has brilliantly consolidated all of those activities into one device that requires our ever-increasing attention. Now I don’t even own a boombox, so if I want to serenade my wife with a powerful rendition of Color Me Badd’s “All 4 Love,” I’m reliant on my phone and her immense patience. 

With streaming services, I at least consoled myself that my kids wouldn’t consume roughly 100,000 hours of commercials like I did as a kid. Too much of my brain is devoted to jingles like “Chocolate is scrumptious when it crunches, that’s why I loooooove, Nestle Crunch. Scrumptious!” I could use those neurons to store information about, I don’t know, the periodic table of elements or where I parked my car at Publix. But when the kids discovered YouTube, commercials snuck back into our lives. The next thing you know, my six-year-old is begging my wife to buy Febreze Touch because, as he parroted directly from the TV, “You get a burst of freshness with every touch!” Then the kids started constantly using a catchphrase from a gum commercial, and I got the urge to call my parents and apologize for the six months I went around the house quoting “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”  

Of course, my own screen time overuse doesn’t help. I routinely interrupt play time with my children to read listicles with titles like “The 12 Zaniest Outfits Worn by Balki Bartokomous from 'Perfect Strangers' (You Won’t Believe #9)!” The kids notice the hypocrisy. My six-year-old son recently wandered into my office and asked, “Can I have some screen time?” 

“It’s not screen time,” I replied.

“But you’re looking at your screen right now,” he retorted, gesturing to my computer. 

There are few parenting moments more frustrating but simultaneously satisfying as when your children turn your own logic against you. And he didn’t stop there. Days later, my son presented me with this sign (pictured in center). 

Honestly, it’s a pretty good platform for building a grassroots movement. He’s probably organizing a protest at Big Spring Park. 

This problem won’t get easier, because we haven’t even hit peak screen conflict yet. The first time another kid from school bullies my kid online, I will respond by having a level-headed discussion with their parents and then burning an effigy of that kid in the school parking lot. If our kids ask to get on social media, we’re moving to an Amish village, where I assume my utter lack of useful skills will lead the community to take pity on me, and eventually they’ll appreciate that I cannot raise a barn, but I can write a mildly funny essay about raising a barn. But in the meantime, I guess I can do more research about effective ways to limit kids’ screen time. That research will take awhile, so I’ll let the kids have the whole afternoon on their iPads while I figure it out.