Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you.
Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of the never-ending day with screen time, sometimes quite large chunks since you’re asking. Depending on how you roll, screen time can be on an iPad (yours) in bed while one or both parents are comatose, or on an iPhone while in the car to stop the child from distracting you – – and you don’t crash into other motorists. Of course there’s also the actual television to watch, now practically a wooden rattle in terms of perceived device harm.
Before the explosion of iPhones, small children’s screen time used to be exclusively in front of the television. The Square Nanny, as the television was then known, looked after generations of children while their parents had lunch parties, fulfilled necessary but boring tasks like cooking shepherd’s pie and, in my house, had blazing arguments. The Square Nanny was always there for us and we were often encouraged into her quadrangular embrace. If we had woken at 5 a.m. in the 1980s, we simply watched the multicoloured picture of the girl holding a dolly until Bagpuss came on at 6 a.m. According to my mother, we clocked in for up to four hours a day. I’m not claiming to be fine exactly, but I definitely don’t have ADHD or other screen-induced developmental problems.
Fast forward 30-odd years and screens are considered bad for children. Really bad. The World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two years old and only one hour a day for children aged from two to four. What they would make of the screen time in this house is probably unprintable. Recently, being the adult screen addict that I am in the evening hours, I have probably have read almost every single article on Netflix’s Adolescence, and I am aware that children who have access to screens from a young age are likely to exhibit poor mental health and concentration. These children are liable to fall down social media rabbit holes and commit pathological, heinous acts. I know this. And I try not to make the mental jump between allowing my toddler Peppa Pig so I can stick my face back together, and the possibility that in ten years time I’ll be accompanying said child to a police station. But the thought is there.
If the only way to have a break is to immobilise small children in front of a screen, then so be it
Hello, guilt; the modern mother’s perpetual companion. But with all my might, I resist this guilt. I remain resolutely pro-screen for small children for the simple reason that I choose to introduce my sanity into the screen-time risk/reward equation. If the only way to have a break is to immobilise small children in front of a screen, then so be it. I gamble with their development in an attempt not to crack up – a bittersweet roll of the dice if ever there was one. It feels rather hackneyed to point this out, again, but modern mothers are in dire straits: childcare is grossly inadequate and underfunded, and there is less social support from grandparents and maternal communities than ever before. Add to this the culture of presenteeism, whereby it is estimated that parents (largely mothers) spend twice as much time with their children than they did 50 years ago, and you have the perfect conditions for a screen-time bonanza. Research published by Elsevier in 2021 describes increases in screen time ‘as a function of childcare pressure’ but also notes that ‘warning parents about screen time may not produce much more than parental guilt’. The Square Nanny lives on, but sadly my generation of parents berate themselves for it.
Arguments in favour of children and screens usually go along the rather optimistic lines of educational programming such as ‘don’t they learn language skills from Peppa Pig?’ or ‘isn’t Derek Jacobi’s voice on In the Night Garden poetic?’ I’m not sure this is the case, or if my toddler learns much from watching coloured shapes move across the screen, but there is much that I learn about myself in those dark, early hours before 6 a.m. – namely, that I need a bloody coffee before I can drive the car. But fellow mothers, I implore you, don’t feel bad – press play and enjoy.
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