Having a balanced diet of screen exposure is not bad for kids

Hi there! 

This is my first blog on parenting and first one on Blogger.com. I am happy to share my thoughts and perspectives with you as a millennial parent. 

But let us keep in the mind the basics - every child is different and has her/his own ways to adapt to situations they are in.

This is the most debated and discussed issues with all parents of this era - how to cut down on screen time for children. I am sure after having finished all the day's work, you and your partner too, realise and discuss how the little one was left to watch YouTube Kids on a smartphone or the POGO channel on the TV for most parts of the day. And you want to buy them some more books or crayons or craft materials to engage them offline.

The COVID-19 pandemic and this locked down life has made things worse than ever before. The children are unable to go to school, socialise and play outside with their friends like they used to. They are feeling bored already. And in homes where both parents are working (busy with their professional duties too) and doing the household chores all by themselves, I guess the children are going through another level of difficulty which we are unable to comprehend.

Analyse my case - I have a 2 year and 10 months old boy. My mother and sister stays with us. My husband and my sister are working already and I landed a job soon after the national lock down was imposed in India. My boy was going to a play school last year and I am very thankful to the Kidzee Tata Nagar team who not only made him settle down but pamper him a lot and the boy started to like school very much. My mother is of course, the manager of the kitchen. I take the responsibility of cooking the breakfast and dinners on few days but on some days, I am unable to cook any meal for my family. 

But as Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In says, `Its important to get rid of the guilt of time management and guilt management'. I continue to do whatever I can whenever I can for my family and baby in particular. I wake up my boy, brush his teeth and feed him and play with him in between my meetings and work. And all of us, engage with him more during the evenings--play with him, draw and colour with him, sing and dance and pretend to get into an igloo (under the blanket). The guilt is only that we have to let him devour cartoons on screens for more than an hour and sometimes even more than an hour, during the day time. This is when me, my husband and my sister are all engaged in our professional duties (either shutting ourselves in one of the rooms and participating during team meetings).

What has surprised us is how much my toddler has learnt from Peppa and other cartoons. My sonny speaks a lot of English, some sentences in Bengali (his native language) and some Hindi words too. We also ensure that some of the cartoons he watches are censored by us and should have some educative stuff. Yes, he of course, has his own specification about when he wants to see only Peppa or Masha or Blippi. But we don't bother so much. And we all keep singing his rhymes often so that he keeps hearing these all the time.

Not just that, I don't shy away from admitting that my little one operates the Amazon Echo all by himself. He orders Alexa to play his rhymes or sing alphabet song or play the Shadow Game. He knows that which phone in the house uses which search engine. Like he approaches my phone and asks Google to show him photos of animals or approaches my sister's phone and calls `Hey Siri show me photos of dolphins from the internet'.

There may be flip sides of over exposure to screen also. Doctors have already establishes those facts and I will neither deny any of those scientifically proven ill-effects on the overall health of a child nor go deep into those. Rather, I will share an anecdote.

My son loves stories to be told to him all the time and he already has 23 books! Anytime and randomly, even while taking a bath and as he runs to bowl. But sometimes, all of us would mix up stories and say whatever comes to our minds. But he stares blank and now-a-days even denies to listen to such mixed up stories. He wants to listen to the same story what he reads in his books or sees on screen. That is because he relates to the audio-visual memory bites in his brain.

I would not say this raises alert. This is just as normal. But an overdose of screen exposure gives them a lot of images and words to remember and they might later deny to accept anything diversion from what they have seen and heard over and over again. It also affects imagination and creativity. In our childhood, when we were told stories of Krishna or Hare and the Tortoise, we would not have always had to read in our books but could imagine. Imagination boosts creativity.

I don't see my boy having any issues with creativity--he sees things and re-creates his own rhymes, stories, and toys made of blocks. And he even tells stories by making up one of his own but the characters are all from his books or cartoons. 

But not every child is same and not every stage in every child is same. And when he gets bored from viewing his cartoons on YouTube Kids or the TV, he of course, asks us to engage with him through a physical game.  

Although many parents object to online classes in the COVID era, as I call it, I feel they haven't been able to see the things that their kids are learning otherwise from the cartoons they see on phones or TV. They also seem to be overwhelmed with the idea that online classes for all age groups will be same and for an hour or more. Let us accept the reality, see things from various angles and see the possibilities around it. Do we know that when we are watching our favourite shows on TV, the children are also exposed to screens in some way. I keep hearing a lot of parents who admit that their tiny ones definitely like watching TV or playing with mobile phones. There is no way children of this millennium can be totally away from screens, until there is no screen in the household. Rather, if we ensure that they view something meaningful to them - say rhymes or short stories, they will surely benefit. And I am not advocating for screen times beyond 30 minutes either. 

Thus, I feel a balanced controlled diet of screen time routine is educative. Schools, playgrounds and even screens - make up our children. It is my perspective and you may not buy it.