When I was young, my mom would shut off my light at bed time so I’d have to stop reading. I’d maybe plead to read to the end of my chapter, but that was about it. I didn’t fling The Little Vampire across the room in anger. I’d just have to fall asleep. There wasn’t a lot of negotiation after that point. Times have changed.
Now that my five-year-old son is connected to the iPad, I am terrified it’s doing some sort of insidious long-term mental damage, swapping out his synapses with Minecraft blocks and replacing genuine emotions with snarky emoji. Whenever it’s time to put the iPad away at night, look the fuck out. He turns into a wide-eyed rage monster. And according to a New York Post feature, I’m not alone. Far from it. Compared to some parents, my experience is fleeting and mercifully short. In fact, many parents have taken to calling screens “digital heroin”—a moniker that’s equally disturbing and darkly perfect.
“His Eyes Were Not His”
The feature focuses on Barbara McVeigh: an active, outdoorsy mother whose life is painted as something of a Northern California idyll, filled with “boating, camping and adventuring in the great outdoors.” And yet, natural splendor was no competition for Temple Run, Talking Tom and Candy Crush: “None of this stopped her 9-year-old son from falling down the digital rabbit hole,” the story said. She claims the trouble began when her son was “encouraged to play edu-games after class,” which snowballed into violent video games played at friends’ houses. Without warning, “Her sweet boy, who had a ‘big spirit’ and loved animals, now only wanted to play inside on a device.”
“He would refuse to do anything unless I would let him play his game,” McVeigh told the Post. She’d only begun using the game as “a bargaining tool,” which is when things went from bad to worse. “Her son became increasingly explosive if she didn’t acquiesce. And then he got physical,” the Post continued. “It started with a push here, then a punch there. When she tried to take his computer away, he attacked her ‘with a dazed look on his face—his eyes were not his.’ She called the police. Shocked, they asked if the 9-year-old was on drugs.” The answer to that was yes, the story said, “only his drugs weren’t pharmaceutical, they were digital.”
Stop Hating on Screen Time
Not everyone’s buying the threat of screen time, though. Some critics argue that stories like McVeigh’s do nothing more than incite unnecessary fear among already-terrified parents, slamming the “digital heroin” term as nothing short of “scaremongering.” A reaction piece from Verge claims that “screens and computers aren’t actually all that new [and]there’s already a whole generation—millennials—who grew up with computers. They appear, mostly, to be fine, selfies aside. If computers were ‘digital drugs,’ wouldn’t we have already seen warning signs?” Many research studies agree that while iPads and smartphones aren’t ideal for young brains, they’re not exactly the destructive drug the media so desperately wants them to be.
“Screen time is an inescapable reality of modern childhood,” a Psychology Today feature observes, “[but]that’s not always a bad thing. Educational apps and TV shows are great ways for children to sharpen their developing brains and hone their communication skills—not to mention the break these gadgets provide harried parents.” That’s not to say leaving a child alone with LEGO Jurassic World for hours at a time is going to turn your kid into a future paleontologist. That said, loading kids’ iPads with learning apps might not do much good, either, according to the story: “Parents who jump to screen time in a bid to give their kids an educational edge may actually be doing significantly more harm than good—and they need to dole out future screen time in an age-appropriate matter.” Devices pose an inherent psychological risk to children, especially between birth and age three when their “brains develop quickly and are particularly sensitive to the environment around us,” but there’s clearly a huge difference between parents needing a moment of quiet time and parents who simply can’t see the risks in the first place.
Disconnecting from Reality
The Post story insists that even if smartphones aren’t turning children violent, they’re turning them into zombies addicted to digital dopamine. “Over 200 peer-reviewed studies correlate excessive screen usage with a whole host of clinical disorders, including addiction,” the story said. “Recent brain-imaging research confirms that glowing screens affect the brain’s frontal cortex—which controls executive functioning, including impulse control—in exactly the same way that drugs like cocaine and heroin do.” If that’s true, screens become less windows into other worlds than they do gateways to worse addictions later in life.
Surprisingly, the Post puts the blame on schools. “If screens are indeed digital drugs, then schools have become drug dealers,” the story said. “Under misguided notions that they are ‘educational,’ the entire classroom landscape has been transformed over the past 10 years into a digital playground that includes Chromebooks, iPads, Smart Boards, tablets, smartphones, learning apps and a never-ending variety of ‘edu-games.’” And it’s these games that the story calls “Trojan horses,” which contribute directly to overstimulation and skyrocketing ADHD rates. (The story claims that ADHD rates have jumped “50 percent [over]the past 10 years” due to screens.) Whether screen time is as vicious as the Post argues, it seems to have the same vicious circle of any drug: over time, the user needs more and more of the drug to achieve the same effect. Therein lies the biggest responsibility parents actually have when it comes to devices: it’s not about controlling how much screen time their child gets—it’s about teaching their children that real life isn’t something that they can unplug from.
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