When I was pregnant – and therefore at the height of my confidence about my parenting skills – I said I’d never be the kind of mother who is dogmatic about screen time. As with breastmilk, refined sugar, sleep and potty-training methodologies, I quickly came to understand that black-and-white thinking around those technicolor pieces of hypnotic technology would only serve to make motherhood even more of a fraught and self-shaming endeavor than it already is.
My parents were relatively strict about TV, and then, when a colorful iMac entered our home, about time on “the family computer”. I appreciate the limits they set, in hindsight. But I also know that the moralizing ways in which my parents spoke about screens made them both more alluring and more danger-flavored to my anxious little brain.
Like junk food, I was taught, screens were an opiate of the masses – anti-intellectual, wasteful and something that, when avoided, allowed one to feel virtuous and morally superior to others. And so, burning with a secret desire, I became a true addict: sneaking into the living room to catch a few minutes of Sesame Street or Saved by the Bell (no wonder the millennial psyche is such a swirling vortex of chaos) before my parents woke up, formulating elaborate justifications for another family movie night, another episode, another game of Tetris or Snood.
Two decades (and one thwarted natural birth plan, replete with emergency C-section) later, things have changed. My son is currently potty-training, and the most effective bribe we have found is what he refers to as “video”.
A “video”, in his world, is usually a two- or three-minute YouTube clip of some cursed British or Australian program, usually about anthropomorphized construction vehicles. His little face goes blank with blissful focus, his eyes take on a thousand-yard stare, and when the clip ends – no matter how we prepare him for that eventuality: he is overcome with grief. In other words, he is addicted, and it’s terrifying.
So, in an effort to wean him from “video”, I have tried the following screen time alternatives. The ones which didn’t seem to grab his two-and-a-half-year-old attention, I offered to friends and neighbors, the kids ranging in age from six months to four years who are in and out of our backyard and our spare car seat as we rush from playdate to dinner party to collective babysitting and errands.
Leapfrog My Own Laptop (2-4 Years)
I was skeptical of this toy when I bought it, having hoped to avoid any computer-like objects for as long as possible in order to feed my delusions of providing an analog childhood that doesn’t really exist in any form any more. But this sweet little faux-laptop, in bright blues and greens, has brought him so much joy and so much confidence in learning and exploring its many functions that I’m a believer.
Watching and hearing him receive his “emails” (and then, hilariously, reply to them), sing along to the songs he can select, and try to match the letters of the alphabet to their corresponding animals (complete with that most alluring treasure, to kids, weird or cool animal facts) has eased most of the guilt I feel for introducing the concept of an “inbox”, perhaps the biggest source of my own angst and despair, to his previously unblemished psyche. 10/10
Yoto Mini Player for Kids (3-12+ Years)
To be fair, my son is not yet in the age range for this. But suffice it to say he began to lose interest immediately upon opening the package, and his excitement waned rapidly as he waited for me to download the accompanying app. (His mother, having not realized there would be an app to download, did not do a stellar job of hiding her abject despair as she read these instructions). We passed it along to a very precocious and podcast-loving four-year-old friend, who is – as I write this – curled up under my dining table and twisting its knobs in delight. 0/10 for us, 8/10 for the big kid next door.
Hand puppets
You know that little TikTok soundbite of Justin Bieber saying: “Immediately no. Immediately no. I’ve seen what I needed to see, and instantly it’s a no,” or whatever it is that he says to James Corden to stop him from singing? That’s my child, to me, as I try to make puppets happen. They’re not going to happen. At least not this year. He did enjoy pulling them off of my hands and yelling “Uh-oh! It’s Mama!!!!” as a bit, though. And a good bit can buy us more time than you’d think. So, 2/10.
Throwing rocks into a body of water
Not an activity I strictly “planned” or “organized”, perhaps, but one that has proven to be incredibly versatile when the siren song of the phone in my pocket gets too loud for my toddler’s short supply of patience and impulse control. He has loved: making different sizes of splash with different sizes of rock, trying to throw multiple rocks at once to see what happens, using both chubby arms to lift what must, to him, be sisyphean boulders and shrieking with delight at his own strength, pouring cups of water with various numbers and sizes of rocks in them out into the puddle/creek/ocean/water table, and lining up and counting the rocks before sending them to their watery doom like some kind of tiny mobster. Not nearly as boring for me as many of his other self-directed screen time alternatives (watching traffic and commenting on the color of each car and truck, for example). 9/10
Melissa and Doug Learn-to-Play Pink Piano
At first, this toy filled my son with rage. Mad that he couldn’t play “real” songs, mad when I would try to help or play a song myself for his enjoyment (“NO MAMA PLAY! NOT MAMA MUSIC!!!”... hurtful). But eventually, he learned that he could make incredibly irritating and discordant sounds by banging the keys repetitively and passionately, for many, many minutes on end, and now it is a surefire tool with which we can dodge his demands for Elmo, Trash Truck, my nemesis (Blippi), or simply, “Video” (or – even more primal – the little vroom vroom sounds he makes whenever he remembers that moving images of vehicles exist and are accessible to him). Now, with the help of Melissa and Doug, whom I assume are a kindly married couple of elves tinkering away together in a woodshop somewhere, we turn his vrooms into (equally primal-sounding) tunes. 4/10
