The primary task of all parents is to worry. You are given a thousand things to worry about across the course of the day, ranging all the way from “What’s that in their mouth?” to “How am I going to get this cleaning done?” across to “How will we get through the rest of the year?” and all the way back to “OK, they’ve got something else in their mouth now. What is it?”
Once we are done with the immediate worries, we have the joy of worrying in the abstract, about things entirely out of our control. This again moves on a spectrum all the way from whether they will be a good person to whether they will have a breathable atmosphere. Of all of these, one of the most talked about, stressed about, and judged by other parents about topics is screen time. It’s something that constantly plays on my mind. Every moment my child so much as glances at an electronic billboard I can feel a countdown timer click over in my head. I try to calm myself by remembering how I was raised on television and turned out fine. Then I realise that I currently work in television, believe television to be very important, and have absolutely not “turned out fine”.
