A recent study suggests that “hyper parenting may increase the risk of inactivity in children.” Apparently, parenting styles like the so-called “tiger moms who push for exceptional achievement” and “little-emperor parents who shower children with material goods” are “associated with lower physical activity in 7- to 12-year-olds.” I find this study puzzling. In my own experience, it usually takes a push from Dad to get my kids outside and engaged in physical activities.
What’s more, I find the study’s categorization of parenting styles troublesome. We should all be hyper parenting, but that doesn’t mean we should be pushing too hard, protecting too much, or spoiling them with material goods. Instead, we should practice “intentional hyper parenting.” By which I mean, we should be constantly thoughtful about all the decisions we make. We should understand that we are always teaching our kids habitual ways of being in the world. Both by example and by prescription, we are demonstrating to the next generation of adults our own best practices for being good people, for living fulfilled lives, for interacting with the world around us. It seems important, therefore, that we make sure we’ve thought through our actions, that we’re intentional about our decisions. Parenting, after all, is the most direct way we make an impact on humanity and the world’s future.
It takes active parenting to create intellectually, physically, and emotionally active kids. I have learned that if I did nothing, my kids would be glued to their devices—laptops, iPods, tablets—all day long. I imagine most parents these days have discovered the same thing. Digital media is super stimulating; it moves fast, and it is designed to be easy and seductive. This is why it is common to hear people complain about video game addiction; they worry that the evil temptations of screen time will draw their children into an underworld of lonely, geeky, solitude. This is, frankly, absurd. Most children would also eat ice cream and candy all day long if their parents let them. Still, we don’t blame bad nutrition on the temptations of junk food. Instead, we expect parents to get involved. They should structure their kids’ diets. We create healthy, fulfilled, and happy kids, we don’t just leave them alone and we don’t surrender responsibility to the environment.
Of course, most advertising for kids’ products implies just the opposite. In fact, most digital products implicitly suggest that the user has very little agency, and kids’ products aim to create this impression at a very early age. I’m particularly irritated by Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a kids’ tablet. I believe that learning through digital play is essential. But Amazon, since the very inception of this tablet, has pushed its “Freetime” parental controls as the big selling point.
In theory, the idea of parental controls sounds great. And Amazon’s Freetime offers the most robust controls on the market. It not only allows parents to customize what kind of content their children are exposed to, it also offers the ability to set time limits. How many total hours of screen time are allowed? How much of that can be games? How much can be videos? How much can be ebooks? During what hours of the day is screentime acceptable? And how much reading or learning-app time is necessary before unlocking ordinary entertainment features?
Ironically, there’s very little freedom in the “Freetime” software. Instead, these kinds of controls surrender authority to the device itself. This is problematic because when parents yield their responsibilities to the tablet, the children internalize the wrong message. They learn to play until the device stops them—to consume unwittingly until the time runs out. The machine becomes a kind of Freudian metaphorical breast, nourishing them sometimes and withholding at others. The Kindle Fire becomes the parent. The kids don’t learn to take responsibility for their own time management, they learn to let software do it for them. They’re denied precisely the kind of agency that digital learning should be cultivating.
The Freetime parental controls, therefore, represent an entirely wrong way of thinking about both screen time and parenting. In fact, the very notion of ‘screen time’ is completely outdated. Parents don’t need to worry about screen time anymore.
Instead, concerned adults all need to face facts. Screens are now a ubiquitous part of our lives. It is a technology that has been completely integrated into the human experience. At this point, worrying about exposure to screens is like worrying about exposure to agriculture, indoor plumbing, the written word, or automobiles. For better or worse, the transition to screen based digital information technologies has already happened and now resistance is futile. The screen time rhetoric that accompanied the television—when this technology was still in its formative age—is no longer relevant. But that doesn’t mean parents are off the hook.
Actually, parents may have more responsibility now than they used to. Now, in addition to all our other responsibilities, we also need to teach our children responsible ways to operate the technologies. To do so, parents need to be actively involved. Perhaps they even need to be hyper parents.
Parents need to help their kids learn to mediate between the screen world and the earth world. Do your kids get enough physical activity? Do they spend enough time outside? If not, make them. When parents nag their children, they are not only impacting today’s behaviors, they are also cultivating their children’s lifelong relationship to each particular nag. Don’t worry about creating anxious kids. Neurotic conflict drives the human animal. Intentionally create irritating guilt-trip voices in your children’s heads that ask, “is it time to move away from the screen yet? What would my dad think? Would mom approve? Am I getting enough exercise?” Telling your kids to stop playing video games is less about actually making them stop than it is about creating these voices. We all have little authority figures in our heads and they are useful (Freud called this the Super-Ego). But when we capitulate the nag to the digital monitors like Amazon’s Freetime software, children never learn to internalize the voices into their own individual psyches.
Parents also need to help their kids learn how to engage with the digital world. We teach our kids how to talk to others—the proper restaurant etiquette, how to treat other people’s property, how to behave when walking down a busy city street. We need to do the same in digital world. Play video games with your kids. Chat with them online from a very early age. And use Skype or Google Hangouts to video conference when you’re away from home. By interacting with you online, they learn how to interact with others.
Parents no longer need to worry about screen time, but they do need to worry about teaching their children how to live with screens.
