Coronavirus-induced isolation has presented a particularly tricky challenge for parents: How, if at all, are they supposed to limit screen time for children with too much time and too few ways to spend it?
Tucker Dansie, a father of five, said he now gives his children four hours of screen time as opposed to the usual one hour a day. “I never thought they’d hit that, and now they are — and they want more,” Dansie told the Wall Street Journal.
Parents across the country are facing the same problem. A survey by ParentsTogether found that the average time children have spent on their smart devices, video games, or television has doubled during the coronavirus shutdown, reaching nearly six hours a day. Most of that time is spent on YouTube, Netflix, or TikTok, the survey said.
This has created a new kind of parental guilt since many of these online hours provide parents with ample time to work from home and focus on other things that need to be done without distraction.
“No judgment,” Jenny Chung Seeger wrote in a mothers’ group on Facebook the other week, asking how others were coping with the home-life changes this pandemic has required. “Just curious, as I’m currently feeling like a complete failure,” she added. Within two days, Seeger’s post received 120 comments, many of which confirmed parents’ struggle with the need to change.
There’s also the problem of weaning children off of the increased screen time they’ve enjoyed during quarantine when school opens back up and social distancing restrictions are lifted. There are practical ways to do this, according to clinical psychologist David Anderson. He told the Wall Street Journal that setting and enforcing a schedule are the keys to helping children stay on task, and providing alternative activities and incentives to participate in these activities will help them return to normal.
But that’s a lot easier than it sounds, and parents shouldn’t feel bad if their master plan to cut down on screen time doesn’t work out exactly as planned. Everyone needs to be the bad parent sometimes.
