People Without Kids Really, Really, Really Hate Screen Time

Why? lmao

It’ll be obvious if someone comments on this article without reading it, because they will yell at me for being a lazy, screen-assisted “modern parent” whose kids will eventually develop a video game/porn addiction or join ISIS.

But alas, this is not an article about defending screens. I just want to explore a phenomenon I see all the time: avid anti-screen posters actually being people without kids (such as Parenting Twitter’s main character this week- who I won’t post here because everyone’s main character day deserves to be forgotten, but basically, someone who didn’t actually have kids confidently declared that “if you let your baby or toddler watch screens, you are a bad parent.”)

I created this comic right after having my first baby- and I hate it! I genuinely thought I was so much better than other moms and I had only been a parent for like, a month. Shame on me!!

Before I had kids, I saw two things that solidified a very strong anti-screen bias. One was at the OB-GYN. I was pregnant, and I saw another pregnant woman in the waiting room with her toddler and husband. The husband had to step out to take a work call, and her toddler absolutely lost his mind, screaming some fuzzy variation of “Daddyyyyyy.” I was a little irritated by the screams (I have a sensory processing disorder and loud high pitched screams seem to upset me more than anything else) but I knew I couldn’t judge, the kid was two at the most. But then I realized, he wasn’t just saying “Daddy.” He was saying “Daddy phone.” He was completely despondent that he no longer had access to his father’s iPhone, which he had been playing on before he took the call.

I turned to my husband and said “Remind me to never let our baby play with our phone.”

Now that I’m a mom, the “Daddy phone” thing would have made me laugh, and I’d probably feel bad for the mom who was pregnant, with a toddler, and just trying to survive through an OB-GYN appointment. But in that moment as a childless person (and one who was pregnant after severe infertility- which I’ll write about some other time) I looked down on her. How dare she take the “easy way out.” I wanted a baby so desperately and she just passed hers off onto her husband’s phone?! She clearly didn’t even like her kid, and now his tantrum was everyone’s problem!

The other experience that made me feel strongly about iPad kids was when my husband and I went to Buffalo Wild Wings and saw a family of four—a mom, a dad, and two kids who were about seven and twelve. Every damn person in that family was on a device. The kids had earphones on. Everyone was dissociating in their own version of Ready Player One. I mean, I get that it was Buffalo Wild Wings and not a Michelin star restaurant, but come on. And by the way, this is still something that I remember as “screentime gone bad.” I can’t really defend this one.

Without getting too detailed about my current stance on screens for kids (anti-phone, anti-iPad, pro occasional TV and family movie night) I do have to wonder why the people most incensed about screens tend not to be parents themselves. Surely, a kid watching Daniel Tiger on an iPad while you’re having dinner is preferable to that same kid throwing a tantrum? What’s it to you?

I posed this question on Twitter and got some concern-trolling in the form of “we’re worried for the future generation.” But these tend to be the same people who insist humans will be extinct in the next fifty years, so I don’t really buy it, quite frankly. If you’re saying “crotch goblins” and “fuck them kids” I don’t believe for a second that you’re concerned about any future generations unless your primary concern is the attention span of the people taking care of you in the retirement home (and let’s be real, it’ll be DALLE-78 wiping your ass, not my kids). Also, I feel that any adult who is addicted to screens (aka, every adult on Twitter) has a lot of gall to act like there’s something deeply wrong with kids who more or less behave the way they do.

Not the declining birth rate and rise of AI combining to create this retirement home teddy bear robot

But let’s suspend disbelief and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say they really are concerned about the kids. Why, then, are they not this concerned about car safety? Surely, they should post more about something that actually kills kids compared to something that maybe makes them stupider and less apt to pay attention. Why aren’t they concerned about the quality of public (or private) schools? Why aren’t they making posts about the dangers of drugs? Perhaps I’m wrong, but my hypothesis is that they dislike parents- especially mothers- and “iPad kids” encompass everything they dislike about moms.

r/childfree is full of posts purporting to be anti-child, which are really anti-mom. A complaint about an annoying kid ruining their 2 PM showing of Trolls: World Tour quickly devolves into a roast of the kid’s lazy, stupid, slovenly mother who even thought it was acceptable to leave the house. I still remember a post lambasting working mothers, saying that they are “outsourcing motherhood”, they don’t really like their kids, and that if they really cared about their kids, they’d stay home and devote every waking hour to them. For a moment, I thought I had stumbled onto Beef Tallow Roman Statue Twitter. Also—and I suspect this was the key point—OP believed it was unfair to their childfree coworkers to go on maternity leave, requiring coverage of their work. One quick search shows they have similar vitriol toward stay-at-home moms.

This is one of the most annoying topics because while I generally do think screens are bad for kids, especially little ones, I hate to align with people who clearly have hateful ulterior motives. Plus, every kid is different. My kid has been able to navigate public spaces without screens (we initially allowed occasional phone videos but revoked it.) But some kids aren’t able to, due to temperament, neurodivergence, etc. The common rebuttal is “Those kids did just fine before iPads were invented” but it’s not true. Before iPads were invented, parents of kids who couldn’t stay quiet in public (aka, one of my siblings in the 90s!) either had to repeatedly take them out of the restaurant (which is unpleasant for the child and the parent), let them scream (which is unpleasant for everyone) or simply never go anywhere (and that, I suspect, is the endgame for a lot of the critics.)

It sounds like extrapolation, and perhaps it is, but my tentative hypothesis is this: the rabid hatred of screens, even if technically somewhat correct, from childfree people, is actually a rabid hatred of mothers, and a desire to see them exit public life.

Many of these people hate their own mothers, or their mother friends who went from fun-loving young women down to grab a beer at the local brewery with. a couple hours’ notice, to exhausted and uninteresting drones, covered in sores from hand foot and mouth disease, who have to book coffee dates three months out and then show up and complain the entire time about piano lessons and the latest variant of norovirus. They hate that they open dating apps and each year are forced to choose from a pool that includes increasingly more single parents, and fewer attractive childfree singles with six totes-adorbs pitbulls.

And another thing—they hate that the world is built for parents. As a mom, there are times that feel the world is built for anyone but me—just try traveling by plane with a child who needs to be in a stroller or car seat and you’ll feel like the first person who ever attempted this feat. Try being a working mom on a team of childless men who insist that there be frequent offsites that all involve travel, drinking, staying out late, or all of the above. But the reality is that the world is by and large designed for parents, even if it frequently fails to accommodate them. And I know this because my husband and I spent a long time wanting kids and not having them. Everywhere we looked, we were reminded that the prized members of society were children and parents. And we couldn’t very well resent children for it, but we could resent the parents.

So, back to screens. Why screens specifically? Because they’re visible. Because they’re easy. Childless people can’t exactly get visibility into children’s education, sleep or nutritional environments, but they can see screens, and if the only places they see children are airplanes and restaurants, they’re going to see a lot of screens. In fact, it might be quite easy to take a sample of children in public places (where their parents very much want them to be quiet and polite) and extrapolate that to “these kids must be plopped in front of iPads 24/7.” In reality, they’re likely seeing the most screen-dense minutes of these kids’ lives.

Of course, if a child actually is in front of a screen all day, that’s bad. But most of us have no way of knowing if this is actually true just by observing a child in public. And really, no matter who you are—parent or not—we should avoid staring too much at other people’s kids in public, making assumptions about their private life, or really focusing on anyone other than ourselves.

Now, if you excuse me, I need to exit this computer screen, open my phone screen, and post this article on Twitter, where I will scroll mindlessly to talk about why screens are bad.