Imagine, if you will, that you have woken up on a tropical island on a pleasant beach rimmed with fruit trees. You cannot tell whether they are cultivated or wild, but each banana and kiwi makes you forget the ones from your hometown grocery store. You never knew that fruit could be so wholesome and nourishing, sweet and subtle. You had not imagined that even in a banana there are complexities that rival the world's greatest wines, beers, cheeses and breads. On the sixth day a wooden crate washes ashore, perhaps thrown off a container ship as it creaked and moaned through the same typhoon weather that you suppose landed you in this strange paradise. With the shard of a pulverized clamshell, you eventually pry the crate open. It is filled with 144 packages of Double Stuf Oreos.
Eventually you get sick of them.
You feel slightly ill and with a strange inertia you sit in the sand as you watch the wind whip the empty packages around on the beach and then deposit them back in the ocean where they came from. Your body is able to metabolize the Oreos, eventually. You pace around. You remember the bananas. To your surprise the fruit you once loved so much is now not as palatable as it was just days before. The bananas which were once sweet and nuanced are now bland. You miss the crunchy texture, the sweetness that overpowered your senses. With the Oreos you experienced the feeling of a craving fulfilled, a scratch itched. Now you joylessly eat the bananas and kiwis when you have to, but when the boat that comes to rescue you reveals its form on the glassy sea, you are a little disappointed. On the horizon it looked an awful lot like a very large crate full of Oreos.
My silly little allegory is about screen time and your child, especially as it pertains to reading and virtue. I recognize that this is a controversial topic. I have not so far in my life been blessed with children of my own, and know that this essay may resemble me giving you unsolicited parenting advice from the cheap seats. I recognize the role screen time has in focusing a child and getting them still so that the adults can get on with their important tasks. I recognize that screen time ranging from movies to video games to phone to tablets are so entrenched in our society that to critique the model would be only slightly more perverse than riding to school on a Victorian penny-farthing with a waxed mustache and a bowler cap. Almost all of us have strong positive memories of consuming film or television with our families. For me it was watching the New York Rangers win the Stanley Cup with my dad in June of 1994. I also remember my mom showing me parts of the series Jesus of Nazareth a few years later, and how it increased my interest in reading the Bible. I also remember in the spring of 2020 being the cameraman for the private Masses at Saint Sebastian Church in Providence during lockdown, when these livecasts were a lifeline in frightening times to dozens of people I knew and loved in my small parish community.
That is all true. I also know the following to be true. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages any screen exposure whatsoever for children younger than two, and for children older than two they recommend a limit of one or two hours a day. The Mayo Clinic notes that children who receive too much screen time are at increased risk of obesity, irregular sleep, behavior problems, impaired academic scores, violence, and reduced physical activity. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology further notes that a high diet in visual media of this sort can lead to problems in body image and self esteem, as well as engaging in risky behaviors seen online.
I have been teaching in different contexts since 2010 and been teaching in Montessori classrooms since 2014. In that time I have seen the twilight of the era in which grandmothers shouted to children to not sit so close to the television and the dawning of the era in which the sight of a tablet ten inches away from a child's face does not even provoke comment. I have seen a child put their hand to a candle flame because of something they saw on Youtube. I have heard racist things come out of the mouths of sons and daughters of good families from things typed in the chat of an online game.
Those are exceptional cases, ones I hope to never encounter in our community. I would like to emphasize, however, that whether we are discussing a social media network, a Youtube content creator, a video game, or even a cartoon on television, we are dealing with stronger stuff than what we consumed as children. Media for children is not just big business--it is huge business. Just as the fast food scientists have used all the new things we know about human nutrition and human cravings, the programmers and writers in media have used every new insight into human psychology and the mind. It is a matter of public record that many of the notable figures of Silicon Valley ban their children from using any electronics whatsoever. Like a candy bar taking advantage of our primordial desire for fat and sugar, the new attention economy has taken our curiosity about novelty and story and reality and made us addicted to screens. Do you read as much as when you were a child? How would you compare your attention span to the person you were before email and LinkedIn and Instagram?
Even as I type this essay, when I look away my eyes need to adjust, as if I am taken out of an odd state of bodilessness back into reality. Later tonight when I open the novel I am reading, it will not shine back at me. There is nothing I can do to interact with it besides read, think, and ponder. I can tap its pages and nothing will happen. I can interact with it on the level of my mind and soul, but the curiosity of my eyes remains strangely unsatisfied at first until I can truly give myself over to reading and to art. The way we live now gives remarkably few children the same option to set aside their cravings and give themselves over to something larger than themselves. Read that last sentence again. I suspect that this might resonate with the decisive change in your upbringing or development, when you decided to follow a higher calling, and then to figure out what it means to walk this different path not just as an individual, but as a family.
Habitual screen usage in general seems to decrease the ability of adults and children alike to fall in love with the magic of reading. Video is simply a more immersive medium than music or poetry or drama or painting. The consumer of the art has less and less to do. They have fully outsourced their imagination to the maker of the video. It is usually perfectly clear what is going on. It is usually perfectly clear what the meaning is. There is little need for symbolism and even less for metaphor. Those of us who have delved deeply into Christianity have often discovered how the logic of the Faith is the logic of poetry, of type, and of analogy. The very literalness of the medium of video has made not only the Bible itself, but its very mode of expression a strange and forbidding territory for many children. One who is used to taking everything merely literally will fail to understand much in Christianity.
Media also changes the way we relate to one another. Sample any program meant for kids coming from the Cartoon Network or other similar networks. Things are getting faster and louder. There are no heroes. Note who the funny characters are supposed to be. What are their personalities? Their laugh lines are usually to them overreacting to events. The humor is not based on wit but on non sequiturs, usually shouted. Stories lack beginnings, middles, and ends. Beauty is absent. Heroism and virtue are defamed as illusions in the minds of dreamers. There are layers upon layers of irony, and when one has stripped them away one finds simply nothing at all. This type of media has changed what storytelling means for children. Until they are coached out of it, students will often put catch phrases and empty trash-talk into the dialogue of their stories when we engage in creative writing. This same dynamic invades reality as well. Children do not naturally encourage each other--they must be taught. From their exposure to media, students are often surprised to discover from their teachers that "roasting" someone who has fallen down or has failed in throwing a ball is unacceptable. Some even think it normal to verbalize the sort of non-sequiturs they hear on Youtube or television.
As Montessori families who chose a school animated by faithfulness to Christian faith, we have all already begun to question some of the received wisdom of the surrounding culture. I encourage you to examine your own family's screen diet, and to do so in concert with the ideas from last week's update. While I am stepping a bit outside my day job in this essay, I will end with a brief summary of what I have found in my time teaching young people. I hope you will take it in the spirit that I write it--with loving concern from someone who wants the best for every student and would love them anyway even if they played video games for three hours every evening.
1. Children allowed independent access to the internet will quickly encounter things you do not want them to see. Their reaction will likely be fear mixed with fascination. They will rarely tell their parents. They might not even tell their friends. The experts think the average American child will encounter pornography before they are out of elementary school. This is almost always from having unsupervised access to the internet or spending time with friends or family with unsupervised access to the internet.
2. Students with learning differences and reading difficulties will generally be more attracted to video games or other interactive media than the average child. Boys, who are generally slower to take to language and reading than girls, are especially interested in the competition and the stakes offered by video games. The best way of fulfilling this need is through team sports. These teach skills like cooperation, interdependence, and responsibility towards a community that would never be learned from a video game.
3. Students with a lot of screen time are more likely to complain of being bored at school or to have difficulty choosing work during a morning work cycle. There seems to be a correlation between being a frequent user of passive entertainment and a lack of strength in exerting one's will.
4. Anecdotally, I usually hear more about how fun the video games were on the plane than I ever hear about a child's vacation. What do you want your child to remember?
5. The most successful elementary students experience film and television with their family, not alone. They tend to experience more movies than television. They tend to think of video games as a social activity--like bowling or cornhole.
6. If you think screen time has gotten a bit out of hand in your family, you are in charge of the rules, and the rules can change. This will bring about conflict, but this is normal when rules and routines change. The bigger negative reaction you get, the more you can be confident that you have made the right decision.
7. Not all media is equal. It can be exhausting to cull through it all to find what is acceptable and what is not, but it is worth it. You control what your child eats. Control this as well. You will see the difference.
8. Allow your child to be bored. It is good for their brain. I mean that in absolute seriousness. We need this sort of unstructured time to spur us into the sort of unstructured play that is great for the mental and social development of a child. Give your child the gift of their own imagination. Just as there are forces out there who would give your child values not your own and a worldview foreign to that of your family, there are those who would shrivel their power of thought and dreaming to be replaced by something else, covered in shrink wrap and with a price tag.