The other day, my three-year-old ran up to me and tried to insert a gummy-worm into my nostril. “What are you doing?” I asked him, after a pause. “Mummy, you are a phone,” my son informed me. “You’re out of battery, so I am charging you.”
I remember playing a similar pretend game with my mother when I was small; I’d pick up the landline and have very polite conversations (in what I called my mother’s “telephone voice”); or do my make-up like her in the mirror; or any number of things I saw her do habitually. And my son sees me habitually use my smartphone.
I feel the education minister Damin Hinds would disapprove of this; recently he urged parents to curb their screen habits when their kids are around.
“The pressures of work and the modern world mean putting phones away is far from easy,” he said. “But it’s an important area to talk about, particularly as we consider ways to support parents with children’s learning at home.”
Twenty-eight per cent of children, it transpires, don’t finish their reception year with the expected levels of literacy or communication skills. And researchers in the USA have found that kids tend to learn smartphone habits from their parents.
Are these two things related? When my older son goes to school next September, is he going to suffer because his house is a screen-friendly zone? I don’t believe he is. Of course, I believe it’s important to spend quality time with your family without one or more of you gawping at the delights of an LED-lit rectangle -- but on the other hand, screens are and will be omnipresent in our kids’ lives, and I think it’s equally as vital to teach them how to use them appropriately.
Here is a confession: in our house, the TV is on a lot. My children are horrendously early risers, so the TV goes on as soon as we wake up. It keeps them occupied while I feed them, caffeinate myself, and generally get everyone ready for the day ahead. It then goes off during activities, when we’re reading, or outside, or eating at the table. But my husband and I have been known to use it as a babysitter while we make dinner or put the laundry on.
The thing is, we rarely just let him devolve in front of the TV. We chat about what’s happening on the screen, and sometimes play make-believe games -- in person -- afterwards.
Plus I think my older son’s literacy and numeracy skills are developing thanks to his screen-time. We only ever watch content that’s appropriate for kids, and quite by accident, he can now read the time and count to 100, because nubmers feature heavily in kids’ shows. He’s also beginning to be able to spell, for the same reason.
It’s just how he learns. It’s how I learned -- although I was (and am) a voracious bookworm, books were for stories, but if I wanted to understand how something worked, I’d need to look and listen to someone telling me about it, and then have a go myself.
“Z-O-O is for ‘zoo’ and ‘zebra’!” My son will shout, spinning around the kitchen after a bit of telly. “Zoos are for eight zebras, 23 lions, and FIFTY-ONE-HUNDRED HIPPOS!” I mean, he’s not perfect, but you get the idea.
In fact, he’s so good at all this I’m considering starting him on a literacy programme for toddlers that teaches through games, books, and -- yes -- screens. My younger son is one year old, so it’s hard to predict how he will learn, but he’s already a bit more concentrated than his brother, and I suspect books may be the way forward with him.
Phone use is slightly different, however. After the gummy-worm incident, I did worry that my phone use was impacting on my family-time, so I attempted a week-long phone detox. And this is what I learned:
- So much life admin is conducted online. Banking, groceries, and even checking the time or weather. To this end I have purchased two key items to bring down my screen time one notch at least: a watch, and a barometer.
- When I’m on my phone, all my kids see of this is my face disappearing into a rectangle. So what I’ve started doing is telling my children what I’m doing when I’m doing it, and sometimes involving them. “Mummy is buying our food for the week!” I say. “Would you like to choose how many apples you’d like?” Occasionally this means we have 13 truckloads of apples in a week, but otherwise it seems quite wholesome.
- As someone with ADHD, I use my phone to outsource my executive function. To have a thought is to put it in a calendar, Google it, or sacrifice it to the unhelpful wildernesses that are my myriad to-do list apps. Instead, now I just jot everything down (by hand! With a pen!) in a notebook I keep to hand, then look at it later when the kids aren’t around.
- And it turns out I’m lonely. I work for myself, have moved to a different part of the country from many of my friends, and don’t have a lot of time to socialise. Quite a lot of the time I socialise on my phone -- in texts, by email, and on social media.
- I don’t think I’m alone in using my phone to provide various practical and emotional scaffolds to my life. And, just as it’s important to block out family time without my phone, blocking out time for my phone is essential to my wellbeing.
One major thing my detox taught me was that I use my phone to let my work bleed into my family life: I’m a self-employed journalist and, while I try to keep my work on my desk, sometimes I do end up editing, emailing or invoicing on the fly while my kids are in soft play. So I’m trying to keep that -- and my endless scrolling over gardeners’ Instagram feeds (apparently I think I can learn gardening by osmosis) to ‘vewing time’.
What’s viewing time? Oh, it’s a new family activity I’ve introduced. It is 15 minutes where we each actively commune with a book, an iPad, or a phone. That way I have 15 minutes to do any of the above, while my older son drives a cat around a city on his (note: formerly, my) iPad, and the one-year-old slowly tears up the pages of his pop-up book.
As with so many parts of parenting, I think the key to dealing with screen-time is moderation and mindfulness. And my hope is that I’m teaching my kids that screen use is as valid a form of information and entertainment as anything else but that, just like anything else, there is a time and place for it.