When it comes to children’s development, parents should worry less about kids’ screen time—and more about their own.
Smartphones have by now been implicated in
so many crummy outcomes-car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle-that it almost seems easier to list the things they
don't mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.
Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids' development, but it's probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be
concerned about tuned-out parents.Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the
engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children's lives physically, but they are less
emotionally attuned. To be clear, I'm not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn't have survived infancy if I'd had a smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue that parents' use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn't to discount the direct risks screens pose to children:
Substantial evidence suggests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today's preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of "regular" screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Comment: If anything, the facts should make conservatives MORE concerned: if pedophilia is akin to an orientation - in the sense that pedophiles are biologically attracted to pre-pubescent children, in a similar manner to which heterosexuals are attracted to the opposite sex and homosexuals to the same sex - that implies it is persistent and difficult to change. Ironically, that might support conservative approaches to dealing with the problem: i.e., keeping track of pedophiles, making sure they don't have access to children, etc.