Screen-Free Parenting is Risky

Or, in defense of everyone's least favorite parent: the helicopter mom

Let’s get one thing out of the way. On the Lorenz/Haidt spectrum of “phones/screens good/bad” I am squarely on Team Haidt, aka “phones bad.” Funny enough, I’m actually reading his famous book, The Anxious Generation, in a hardcover paper format to honor his thesis. If I’m going to read about how bad screens are, I’m not gonna do it on my fucking phone!

Me, reading about how phones are bad

Recently, Dorota Talalay went viral for a really great anti-screen essay. She is so anti-screen that she doesn’t even own a TV, which is far more than I can say for myself. Another favorite Substacker of mine, Drunk Wisconsin, who I would nickname the “chill dad of Substack” wrote a humorous rebuttal in defense of TV.

But Talalay’s essay also brought up a really good question: if screens are bad for kids (and duh, we all know they are) what should they be doing instead?

For one, she mentions “getting up to nonsense” and even helping with chores, so she has several suggestions, none of which require much of the parent, or at least don’t seem to. Indeed, Talalay doesn’t take the neurotic intensive parenting standpoint of “parents must create bespoke sensory bins and educational games for their kids during every waking moment of the day.” I think as a society, we’ve also gotten to the point where we can admit this is unrealistic, not only for working parents but for stay-at-home parents too (chief among these reasons is the fact that if I created some “activity” for my toddler, she would walk away from it within….twenty seconds.)

Talalay also highlights the unfortunate tendency of modern parenting content to default to “you’re doing great, mama,” because any criticism of any parenting choice is “mom shaming.” We both reject the premise that modern-day kids “need” screens to be entertained because naturally, kids didn’t have screens for most of human history. They played with toys. They played outside. They played with sticks. Ergo: our kids today should simply do those things. In Talalay’s case, she made that easier by simply not having a TV at all, but I refuse to do that because the only thing more important than my children’s development is my ability to watch Tim Robinson clips with my husband on a big ass screen. I’d also by lying if I said our family viewings of Spongebob weren’t a little bit for my own enjoyment.

omw to interact with screen-free children

But anyway, for our kids to play like children of yore, a few things must happen. Tradeoffs must be made. This is the “you can work hard, smart or long—pick two,” of parenting. Kids of yesteryear generally had:

• Stricter, more fear-inducing parents. Nearly all children were spanked in the first half of the twentieth century, and spanking in schools didn’t become illegal until the 1980s. That’s to say nothing of yelling, threatening, isolation and non-corporal harsh punishments, which many of my millennial counterparts experienced even with relatively modern parents. The “gentle parenting” of the ‘90s was locking your child in his room for ten minutes and yelling at him instead of hitting him.

• Less parental involvement (even though I enjoy it, parents “playing with their kids” is a relatively new thing, per Elena Bridgers.)

• Less supervision in general. While kids in the olden days had a “village,” that village wasn’t made up of free nannies and devoted grandparents who watched over them 24/7, abiding by all the parents’ rules and boundaries. Most of the time, they were just running around unsupervised with other children. My mom still recalls being allowed to ride her tricycle around the neighborhood, completely unsupervised, at the age of three.

• More accidents, including fatal or serious accidents. Any person older than 65 probably either has a young family member who died in a horrible but preventable accident.

In order to raise kids without screens and avoid the headache of 24/7 anxious supervision, some of these tradeoffs will need to happen. Either you have to become much more tolerant of various accidents, property damage and ER visits (or worse!) or your kids have to be too scared of you to do anything risky. I’m sure some parent will come in to inform me that they’ve never had to punish their eight perfect screen-free kids, who spend all day peacefully and silently playing with corn husk dolls, but for the other 99.9% of people living in reality, screens exist to keep children safe and in one location during times when parents can’t be directly supervising them (while cooking dinner or breastfeeding a baby, for example.)

This is, of course, also the problem with screens. They keep kids stationary. A sedentary lifestyle is bad, and basically every screen-free advocate will mention the fact that screens ushered in the end of “risky” physical play, made the obesity epidemic worse, and that physical play—especially physical play that carries the risk of injuries—is important for childhood development. Haidt has an entire chapter all about the value of risky play, even going so far as to criticize modern-day playgrounds for being “too safe.” This is an obvious tradeoff that parents have made. We acknowledge that even a dedicated SAHM cannot be 100% engaged with multiple children all day long, and during those moments where she can’t be assured her kids are completely safe, screens step in to keep them in one place, even just for an hour.

But I think we’ve forgotten one thing—to believe in the value of risky play means we have to live in a society where risk isn’t criminalized—where taking risks as children did in 1965 doesn’t carry the life-ruining risk of your family being destroyed or potential criminal charges for parents. But we don’t live in that world anymore.