Screen Time Does Not Exist (A Word from Pandemic Dad)
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
New York Times article, Jan. 16, 2021. Author: Matt Richtel.
There are three groups of people in that big old headline that the New York Times ran this weekend: children, parents, and researchers. I only count myself among one of these groups: I’m a parent. I’m not a child psychologist or an addiction specialist or Obama’s former drug czar, who was also in the article for some reason. Importantly, I’m not a child, either, so I’m not going to claim to speak on any child’s behalf—not even my six-year-old son’s. But as a pandemic parent, I am pretty much on the verge of losing my mind every damn day, and the moral panic that the Times (and other outlets) are stirring up about something called “screen time” is going to finally bring me to tear out what is left of my graying hair.
The article in question, at its best, tells the stories of some parents who are bravely willing to admit to a national audience that they don’t know what to do about their kids’ frequent recourse to screen-based entertainment in a time when it’s really hard to find other stuff to do. But this compelling narrative is peppered with the dire warnings of “experts” of various stripes about the catastrophic consequences so much “screen time” is going to have on children’s development. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t fault a person who professionally studies addiction for discussing their expertise when a major publication comes calling. The better question is: forty-one years after Tom Hanks’ performance in the ludicrous panic-flick Mazes and Monsters, why are we still seeking out people who are experts in drugs and cigarettes to explain games to us?
I’m not making an argument for or against the concept of video game addiction. It is unquestionable that people can use video games in ways that prove detrimental to their well-being, producing behavioral patterns that are nearly impossible to break from without professional intervention (the WHO calls this “gaming disorder”: in which a person “lacks control over their gaming habits, prioritizes gaming over other interests and activities, and continues gaming despite its negative consequences.”) These patterns can be associated with drugs, but then again, they can also be associated with exercise.
My real bugbear in all of this is the lazy and casual use of the phrase “screen time,” as if the unfathomable array of electronic means of engaging with the world is one homogeneous thing, a time bomb with an invisible counter waiting to implode a child’s cognitive development. There are so many different devices, and so many different ways to engage with them, that it borders on absurdity to lump them all together under the only attribute they universally share and then apply a single label to cover every possibility afforded by their use. And, since video games are apparently supposed to be the primary culprit here, the same thing could be said about them as a medium. In the relatively short period of time games have been major players in the cultural sphere, they’ve demonstrated an inexhaustible variety of genres, mechanics, and ways of making worlds come alive.
Since the Times article relies mostly on anecdotal evidence, I have a few anecdotes of my own. It started with Mario Kart: Double Dash. When I played that game growing up, I always found its coop mechanic to be extraneous and boring: who on earth would want to just ride on the back of the car and throw stuff? But, early on during the pandemic, casting around for things to fill the summer days, it dawned on me that riding in the back and throwing stuff at people was the perfect job for a newly-minted six-year-old who lacked the manual dexterity to steer his own kart. It didn’t just give him something to do—it gave us something to do, together. Especially once school started up again, after a full day of exasperation with each other over his incomplete online assignments and my many failures as an ersatz elementary educator, Double Dash put us back on the same team, giving us time to strengthen any bonds between us that had been stretched too thin by the day’s ill humors.
In August, I replaced my laptop and gifted the old one to my son for school. I took pretty much everything off of it and helped him pick out a totally radical Digimon desktop background, but I left a little folder on there called “Games,” which had some ROMs and rips from childhood I had apparently been carrying around with me for years whenever I changed computers. And that little folder changed our lives, because, once again, it gave us things to celebrate together. “Dad, I don’t know what to do,” became, “Dad, come watch me beat this crazy boss in Mega Man.” Especially as cold weather moved in and outside play became less and less of a possibility, “Dad, come play this SUPER HARD track I made in Hot Wheels” became music to my ears. For once, inverting our usual online-school power hierarchy, he had challenge for me that I needed to overcome. Just like Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s experiences of childhood exploration inspired that great game, electronic play became our site of shared curiosity and adventure once we couldn’t go to the playground anymore: “Come look at this! Come see this! Can you believe how hard that was?”
Look, obviously, this is imperfect. This whole situation is the definition of imperfect. And these games are old, and might not hold a candle to Roblox (though my son would probably disagree—fun is fun, you know). My sweet little guy is also still at an age where he is excited to welcome me in to the things that he is doing, which clearly works to my advantage here. I will insist, nevertheless, that we have to let the myth of screen time go. That there is value and richness in the multiform ways that games, in whatever medium we find them most accessible, can forge togetherness, if we choose to use them together in ways that combat isolation.
Using games to make kids entertain themselves without showing any interest in the worlds they are exploring does not combat isolation, nor does monitoring their play, prison-warden style, motivated by hyped-up narratives that use scary buzzwords. Furthermore, endless doomscrolling isn’t good for anyone, of any age, ever. But we have got to stop accepting narratives that, like the Times did, put doomscrolling and Roblox in the same category, as if they were equivalent experiences simply because you can use the same device to do both.
The myth of screen time only exists as long as we allow ourselves to be sloppy and haphazard in thinking about our world’s most complex media. And if, for the moment, a kid seems to be enjoying a game more than what we are used to calling reality, maybe that’s because the game is awesome and reality sucks right now. Maybe it’s an opportunity for us to grow past the outmoded assumption that virtual worlds are less significant than others in the first place. At the very least, we parents could sit down next to our kids and say, “Wow, you sure do play that a lot! What do you like so much about it?” If we’re really lucky, maybe our kids will invite us to join in their adventure.
