When my ex-wife and I separated about four years ago, I started playing video games with my kids. I wanted to spend time with them, but I didn’t want to pull them away from the things that gave them a sense of comfort in tumultuous times. So I bought them a Nintendo Wii. Then I snuggled up next to them on the couch and we played hours of New Super Mario Brothers. We cheered each other on, discussed our favorite parts of the game, and just generally had a great time.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, researching, and writing about the impact of screens on children and their families. I’ve discovered that when it comes to parenting, folks have a very strange relationship to the screen itself. There seems to be a unique fear of what screens will do to our kids. Most adults I know seem perfectly content to stare at their own smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but they worry when they see their kids doing exactly the same thing. Why?
Maybe it is because their parents told them not to sit too close to the television. Maybe it is because they remember reading George Orwell in high school and they fear Big Brother’s two-way telescreens. Either way, it is clear that parents have a complicated and somewhat neurotic relationship to screens when it comes to their children.
Earlier this summer, I wrote a post entitled “Parents Don’t Need To Worry About ‘Screen Time’ Anymore,” in which I argued that because screens had become such a ubiquitous part of our lives—the technological norm of the times—it is now absurd to worry about whether or not they are good or bad for your kids. In fact, these days, parents should be worried about the opposite. Are your kids comfortable and equipped to operate and live with screen-based technologies?
Here are three questions you should ask yourself immediately in order to make sure you’re teaching your children to live thoughtfully within a screen-time world.
1. Do your kids distinguish the life-world from the game-world?
Too often, people misunderstand me when I write or speak about the positive benefits of gaming. They think I’m telling them that it is okay that their children barely look up from the iPad. Likewise, whenever I explain that I don’t think it is good idea to restrict screen time, I worry that people will interpret it as an endorsement for letting their kids play un-monitored.
Please don’t imagine that my kids are always plugged in. They’re not!
I require my children to do a whole lot of non-screen activities: reading, exercising, drawing, and playing outside. But I don’t restrict screen time because I don’t want them only to think of other positive activities in relationship to their devices. I don’t want art to be something you make just to get another half-hour of video games. I don’t want reading to be seen as punishment for spending too many hours playing Minecraft.
I want them to understand that there are great things about both life-world activities and game-world activities. If they learn to conflate one with the other, I’m not teaching them how to live thoughtfully and responsibly in a world of ubiquitous screens.
2. Do your kids understand the difference between what’s inside the screen and what’s behind it?
Often, when I’m around kids I’ve never met, I ask them about their favorite games. Like a psychoanalyst, I deeply prod their digital fantasies. I’m very interested in understanding how they think about the games that fill so much of their time. But I’m often disturbed to discover that they have little critical consciousness when it comes to understanding the game-world. They can talk for hours about what goes on inside the screen, but they don’t understand what’s behind it.
They don’t realize that games are designed and produced by people. They don’t understand that companies profit by selling them. They don’t get that the immersive world of their games is not objective or unbiased.
Regrettably, today’s games feature a constant barrage of unethical advertisements for in-app purchases. Your kids are constantly being sold points, power-ups, and status upgrades. Even if you never let them spend a dime, they are still being subjected to a world of game currencies that are linked with basic gambling mechanics. They are learning highly questionable lessons about value, resource management, and worth whether you like it or not.
Parents can’t really control the exposure, but they can equip kids to think critically about the world in which they participate. The trouble is that corporations like Disney, with their once-in-a-lifetime theme park vacations, have conditioned us to confuse blind consumption with pure innocence. But parents should know better. It’s not magic; it’s selling.
Don’t be afraid to disappoint your children by breaking the illusion. This is how we empower them as critical consumers of immersive digital experiences.
3. Are you modeling appropriate screen behaviors and human relationships for your children?
No matter how much kids love video games, they still crave their parents’ attention even more. And it is the way in which they learn to manage that longing, and navigate their relationship with you, that shapes their way of interacting with other people in the long run. Remember that the way in which you relate to them around screens influences a lot more than just their next Clash of Clans dopamine hit.
This is why playing video games together is a great family activity. It not only gives you a chance to bond with your kids in a way that they enjoy, it also gives you a chance to actively model appropriate screen behaviors. Most importantly, you model and encourage a less isolated interaction with the screen. When they share the couch with the people they love most in the world—and those people take on the role of opponents and collaborators—they see first-hand that the game-world is not an alternative to the life-world, but rather a tool through which we enhance our real world experiences.
Likewise, this is the reason it is so important to clearly demarcate the difference between appropriate and inappropriate screen times. Consider, for example, dinner time. When you allow them to eat meals with a smartphone in hand, you give them a false sense of connection. They get to feel like family participants without being required to mindfully engage.
When we’re not playing together, I tell my kids to carry their laptops into another room. After a while, they always try to come and sit next to me. I don’t allow it.
“I’d love to be with you,” I tell them, “but not if you’re just staring at a screen.”
“But Dad,” they whine, “I’m lonely.”
“Yup, being absorbed in a game all by yourself can be lonely.”
I love video games, gadgets, devices, and digital technology. I panic if I leave my smartphone at home. But I also know that you just don’t get the benefits of real connection without taking responsibility for actively engaging. And that’s a key lesson about living with technology that I hope to teach my kids.
