Let Kids Be Bored

If you want to stop the iPad Kids, you need to embrace the Bored Kids

I have this reflex where I don’t want to judge any parent who could conceivably be “trying their best.” I’m the first to say, “maybe she’s a single mom with no help” or “maybe that kid has a rare type of neurodivergence where they can only eat blue raspberry sour straws” or “maybe Hermione is a family name.”

But I think I’ve reached this point where I can no longer make excuses for frequent, algorithmic mobile screen use. I’m using those words carefully because I don’t think “screen time” as it relates to TV or movies is really that bad. But I think young children having their own phones and iPads with frequent, unfettered use, or consuming algorithmic content (such as YouTube videos) is unambiguously bad. That doesn’t mean every parent who pulls up the “Cocomelon brushing teeth song” on their phone in a moment of desperation is a bad parent, or that there’s no possible scenario in which a child benefits from an iPad. In fact, we have a cracked-screen iPad that magically “only works on planes,” on which we’ve downloaded a few movies. But edge cases and occasional slip-ups aside, let’s just be honest. It’s bad! We all know it’s bad! I’m not going to bore you by pulling up all the examples of why it’s bad.

Unfortunately, most of the people talking about why screens are bad are people who don’t have kids and seem to have a bone to pick with parents. Screens are just the vehicle for their resentment. You get the sense that if it wasn’t screens, they’d be mad at parents for something else (and for simplicity’s sake, I’m using “screens” to refer to the mobile algorithmic screens I outlined earlier, not movies and TV.) They’re like the doomers who were convinced covid would collapse society, and once they realized that wasn’t going to happen, quickly pivoted to climate change and then AI. These people have issues with basically everything parents do. Parents who discipline their children with time outs are “emotionally abusive,” while gentle parents are “not really parenting.” At the end of the day, any parent who isn’t lazy is abusive, and any parent who isn’t abusive is lazy. Many parents manage to be both in their eyes! It feels difficult to engage with the discussion when it’s in such bad faith.

But here’s my humble proposition: for the most part, we should do away with the screens. I used to let my older child look at kid videos on my phone in restaurants until one day I realized how bad it was and abruptly stopped. But the people who hate “iPad kids” (and the parents who enable iPad kids) need to understand that a non-iPad kid is a kid who will occasionally (if not frequently) get bored, whiny, and frankly, kind of annoying, even with their parents’ best efforts.