THERE ARE HEALTH AND PRACTICAL
REASONS NOT TO BE TOO WORRIEDIt’s always fascinating to read of the ‘moral
panics’ that arise from time to time with regard
to how much of our finite time we should
spend looking at screens. Unless you’ve printed
off this article, you’re presumably staring at
a screen right now, and you may well work
in a job that requires you to spend a large
proportion of the day doing so. However, that
doesn’t stop many of us being anxious about
the subject of screen time – not least when it
comes to our children.
THE ARGUMENT OVER HOW
MUCH SCREEN TIME OUR
CHILDREN ‘SHOULD’ HAVEFirst of all, let’s not deny one thing: that children
do routinely invest a considerable proportion
of their free time into looking at a screen. Just
consider this ABC News story, for instance,
which documented one California family’s
participation in an experiment that saw no
restrictions at all placed on their young ones’
screen time for 48 hours.
The findings for the Harding family’s four
children, aged between six and 11 years at the
time of the study, might make for staggering
reading for those of you who aren’t parents, but
probably not so much if you do have children
of your own. While it should be noted that the
participating kids sometimes used two screens
simultaneously – thereby inflating the final
numbers – it’s still incredible in some ways that
one child racked up 46 hours of screen time in
total over just 48 hours.