Member-only story
Children Being Hurt By Screen Time
The problem has been growing for years
How much time do we spend staring at screens? Talking or texting or messaging?
Go to any restaurant today (if you are not still quarantining yourself) and look around. See that family? There’s Mom staring at her smart phone while her partner stares at his, and the children are playing with their mobile devices. Are any of them talking to each other?
Does it get better at home? Maybe one parent does some housework while the other plays video games. Family time consists of watching Netflix.
How many hours a day do children spend indoors? How much of that is spent staring at screens? And does it matter? Are there side effects and consequences to so much screen time?
It’s been getting worse
When the TV was first introduced, many people didn’t have one, so friends and family might gather at one person’s house to watch shows together, which maintained social ties. Later, there were few choices and families still generally watched shows together, the way they used to gather by the radio during broadcast shows. It was seldom more than a few hours a week.
This had changed by the time I was in school.
