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.
