What a title, amirite?? I can’t deny it; the title is what sucked me in. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life. That’s pretty inflammatory. Imagine the reactions and debates you’d get from posting this picture on your social media!
It’s actually quite a lot milder than I expected. Downright reasonable. She obviously doesn’t want you to have screen-time, especially before certain ages, but she knows that’s not on the agenda for many people and especially not for parents’ media consumption. She gives great advice for reducing screen-time even if you have no plan to eliminate it.
This updated edition includes some information about modern screens, but no book currently available yet give a full analysis of those new forms of media. The studies need time to make long-term predictions, though there are some studies floating around already. Though, like the author, I think we can extrapolate many common-sense conclusions of what their effects might be based on a couple of generations of TV consumption, a generation of desktop computer usage, and our own reactions to new media (I can sure tell you about my own smartphone addiction).
We’re not a screen-free home, but we’re very close to one. We watch TV on a laptop every day for about a half hour. During dinner, no less! ::gasp!:: But it’s tv for us, not the kids, though they’re present, which is getting to be more complicated as the toddler gets older. We watch the news. One angle to TV consumption I haven’t yet seen addressed in this age of new media is how we watch TV: it’s a 20 minute clip, but we take 30-40 minutes to watch it. Because we constantly stop it to debate the material we just heard, add additional info we know on the subject, or share what the segment just reminded us of. It’s a very interactive, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite times of day. Let’s be honest: it’s usually the only intellectual conversation I get with an adult all day long, and in person no less! With a guy I sorta like! And if I were being even more honest, I like the structuring of our conversation. My day is full of baby, toddler, and information related to babies and toddlers. Some days, I don’t know what else I’d talk about with my husband when he came home. Rather than racking my brain for something “interesting” (and he’s very picky about what interests him), we have topics provided by a third party in a way that interests us both and then gives us equal footing to them discuss and debate. When my brain is fried at the end of a day of tantrums (both mine and the children’s), that is worth its weight in gold. The power of a simple pause button, effectively.
I think this approach to screens deserves study: how can we make new media more interactive and utilize its ability to actually stimulate interaction between real human beings?
But if you’re like me and have a smartphone problem, I highly recommend the free app Moment. (Check out this slightly-out-of-date review on Lifehacker.) I liked it so much I even paid for a premium account (after using the free version for about a year I think) so I could do the harsher bootcamp. I cut an average of 42 minutes a day of phone usage in two weeks. That was about two weeks ago, and I have good and bad days, but I am using my phone less than I was before. I’m sure I’ll write a more comprehensive post about that soon enough because it’s amazing. (They also have a free sister app called Focus that helps you stay off your phone while driving. Unfortunately, they haven’t worked out using the app when you also use your phone as a GPS. I just checked my app, and it says I spent 3.5 hours on my phone while driving in the last month, which was almost entirely GPS time. But the verbal reminders to turn off my phone are why I use it.)
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