One thing was clear about screen addiction from the debate generated by my piece on the Minecraft Generation awhile back. There’s no point making technology and computer games take the sole rap for unhealthy, screen-obsessed kids.
As the father of three healthy, sporty, balanced and digitally-connected kids, I know first hand that parenting today takes just as much work as it ever did. You get out what you put in.
That said, gamer addiction – or at least over-immersion – is a very real thing. Almost all parents share the dilemma of how to limit screen time without being too heavy-handed. Kids are binary creatures, and haven’t built up the same filters as adults. It’s no surprise they get sucked in by shiny virtual worlds made by some of the world’s top marketing and creative minds – and a blanket ban on screens might be healthy by our standards, but it can isolate children from their peers.
In a day of constant connection, how do we deal with screen addiction?
The real question is, who are we to talk? It’s a problem of our own making. Workaholism might be a more respectable problem than drinking whisky on the way to work, but in some ways it’s no less disruptive: one study of college undergraduates found that children of workaholics scored 72% higher on measures of depression than children of alcoholics. And now this has fragmented into all sorts of contemporary problems, or iDisorders, as the way we relate to modern media and technology affects our behavior, from Facebook addiction to orthorexia.
These days the modern bedroom is more likely to be lit by the cold blue glow of a phone screen than by the flicker of a romantic candle or two; we sit hunched over small devices checking and re-checking for unimportant messages or venal social media updates rather than looking out of windows or – god forbid – at each other; and get twitchy if we don’t check for messages at least twice during dinner (see Eric Pickersgill’s excellent photo project, “Removed”).
Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve got waylaid on the web and disappeared down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia (did you know there’s even a list of lists of lists?) – and the simple reason is that sometimes it’s nice to be seduced. The knowledge and power promised by the other side of the screen, the almost zen-like mindlessness of it; if we occasionally fall pray to its charms, is it any wonder our kids struggle too?
The simple solution is to encourage people to stick their heads over the parapets and look around so they keep a healthy perspective, to remember where they are and what they’re supposed to be doing. Simple but not easy. We’ll be working on the rules and etiquette of our new toys for some time yet.
