I Had a Simple Rule for My Kid. I Now Realize What a Hypocrite I Am.
Reading Time: 6 minutesI was worried about my daughter becoming a device addict—but I might have been the biggest one of all., IPad kids: Banning screen time for my toddler is easy—but not so much for me.
I never give my 1-year-old my phone. I’m determined to raise a kid who doesn’t spend all their downtime on a device. So imagine my surprise when she recently got ahold of mine and started scrolling and swiping with the muscle memory of a bored teen on TikTok. How did she learn to do that? I wondered. Can I blame it on day care? My husband?
That’s when I realized: She learned by watching me. I had been worried about my daughter becoming an iPad child, but I might be the biggest one of all. I’m addicted to my phone—perhaps more than ever, thanks to maternity leave—and my baby’s taken notice. I began to worry: Will my excessive phone use make my daughter long for the sweet, lobotomizing glow of a high-tech rectangle, despite any screen limits I place on her?
Keeping my baby away from phones is the easy part. She can’t buy one. She doesn’t have any money. I know that parents of older kids will ‘Just you wait’ me on this. But I’m sticking to my guns as long as the World Health Organization and similar bodies agree that there’s no benefit for babies to watch digital screens before age 2.
But what about, say, people in their 30s who are recuperating from a C-section, learning to breastfeed, and unable to leave home for at least two weeks, just as I had been? There is no screen-time rule of thumb for that specific demographic—and friends in similar situations tell me that many of us are freaking out about our screen time.
Much has been made of the pitfalls of phone use among kids and teens. For babies, screen exposure correlates with lower academic performance later on, according to a 2023 study published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science. It’s also linked to social development problems, obesity, sleep disruption, depression, anxiety, impaired emotional comprehension, aggressive behavior, and lowered social and emotional competence. That’s enough for me to try to limit it for my daughter.
Even for older kids, screen time is associated with feelings of loneliness and a skyrocketing suicide rate, perhaps because teens are spending less face time with their friends than any previous generation has. Of course, correlation is not causation, and at least one study implied that screens’ impact on the well-being of teens is minimal. But even if it turns out my fears are overblown, I’d rather my daughter socialize at dinner than stare at an iPad.
Still, no one seems to be reining in the adults, who spend upward of six hours a day, on average, on screens. When I learned how to check my own daily screen time, it made me want to sign up for an exorcism. Why was I spending so many hours on the phone when I ‘never have time’ to write my screenplay, clean my house, or do my taxes?
I managed to push the number down. But after I had my baby, it crept back up. Did you know breastfeeding places you in the perfect physical position to stare at your phone? It also takes many more hours to nurse a baby than I was led to believe. I watched all of Downton Abbey in less than a month. I think I read a book. But my postpartum brain much preferred the phone.
Then there was the isolation. Maternity leave is like COVID lockdown on steroids: You’re stuck inside, but this time everyone else is free. Even your husband, who was supposed to be going halfsies on this, gets to yuk it up with his co-workers all day. Traitor! The male loneliness epidemic gets all the press. But it’s nothing new for moms.
So your phone becomes a glowing panacea for boredom and isolation. Sometimes I was thankful it existed. But when my daughter started noticing screens, I wanted to cut down. I tried setting timers on social media. No dice: Too easy to snooze.
I deleted some apps, especially Twitter and Reddit—the ones that make me feel the worst. But it never stuck. The minute a viral news moment occurred, I had to redownload them ‘for journalism.’
Next was the Freedom app. This is a kind of VPN that logjams everything fun on your phone at designated times. Of course, I learned to circumvent it. I was like a rat. I sneaked around the subway lines of my phone, desperate for garbage, until I found a manual VPN switch to disable Freedom, which I had voluntarily paid $39.99 a year to use.
Most recently, I installed a screen-time widget on my home screen. It shames me all day with the ballooning total. With all of these measures in place, I did reduce my average daily screen use to about four hours. But it still seems so high. What am I doing? I’m supposed to be busy. And how can I expect my daughter not to be similarly powerless in the face of a push notification?
Children whose parents are glued to a screen can show lower emotional intelligence, according to one study. This may be caused by the expressionless face parents adopt while scrolling. Children pick up emotional intelligence from watching those around them. If all you’re offering your kid is a slack-jawed look bathed in phone glow, what are they learning about how to interact with humans? Plus, being snubbed in favor of a phone can make kids feel lonely, isolated, and depressed, experts say.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a clinical psychologist focusing on parenting and child development, talked me out of my shame spiral. I’m never gonna be Mary Poppins or Fräulein Maria, she pointed out, so I needed to quit the perfectionism. ‘It’s not sustainable. We love our children with all our hearts, but some of parenting is boring and lonely,’ Kennedy-Moore explained. ‘So if you want to check in with your friend to get you through the day, I’m not going to argue with that.’
But what if checking in with my friend turns into two hours of off-and-on Reddit research into Real Housewives conspiracy theories? What if my screen use feels gross? Kennedy-Moore says that it’s important to ask ourselves what exactly we think we’re missing or should be doing instead of scrolling on our phones.
What I think I should be doing instead is gazing at my daughter while she plays with blocks. But as Kennedy-Moore points out, that would be weird for her. ‘Our children do not want us to spend all our time staring at them,’ she said. ‘What we want to aim for is responsiveness. When our kids are trying to get our attention, do we turn toward them more often than away?’
So if you’re catching up on texts while your child plays independently, then no harm, no foul. But if the phone is keeping you from a kid who wants your attention, or causing you to be harsher with them, that’s when it’s time to make a change.
Kennedy-Moore told me about one family she helped who were struggling to leave the house in the morning. She learned that the parent in charge was always multitasking on his phone. ‘It made more sense to get the kids fully out and then go on his device,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t being a jerk—he had work stuff that he had to do.’ But focusing on the kids first helped solve the problem.
Parents can also try putting phones away at designated times, like when they come home from work, school, or day care, she explained. ‘Mealtimes, bedtimes: Those might be times when you make a rule for your family about no screens.’
Speaking of other screens, although I don’t ever give my daughter a phone, I’m more lax about television. Sometimes while playing, she’ll catch a minute or two before I can distract her again. I feel bad about this. But Kennedy-Moore doesn’t see much of an issue with this.
‘Is watching television for a young child high-quality interaction? No,’ she said. ‘But does every single moment have to be high-quality stimulation? If the kid is getting plenty of stimulation for the other 24 hours, minus seven minutes, I can’t imagine that makes any difference at all.’
She also says to think about what screen time is replacing. I don’t want to replace connecting at mealtimes with Bluey. Same goes for diaper changes. My baby needs to figure out how to endure two minutes of boredom without a screen, even if her flailing is rough in the short term. But maybe TV on an airplane ride is fine.
The fact remains that with my own phone use, I’m making devices seem more tantalizing to my daughter—as if the digital slot machine in my pocket needs help with that. The greatest minds of my generation got filthy rich making these phones addictive, and here I am, helping them sell their tech to a 1-year-old.
Luckily, Kennedy-Moore has tips for cutting down, beyond the in-phone safeguards I’ve learned to get around with ease.
The first is to self-reward, she said. Instead of stealing glances at social media and TV throughout the day when I should instead be focusing on my baby, I tell myself that later on, after she’s asleep, I can bathe in the glow of screens with zero guilt. ‘It’s always easier to replace a behavior than to stop it,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do during those times when you would normally be scrolling? What would be meaningful and satisfying to you?’
The answer is connecting with my daughter. Now, I realize doing this 100 percent of the time is not an attainable goal—my daughter doesn’t even want that. But when she does want my attention, I can make sure to stay phone-free. And when she’s playing independently, then I can check my texts. The doctor said so.
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