Beyond alarmism about kids and screens

If there’s one thing I learned in my history of communication class, it’s that the introduction of new technologies is usually met with a strange cultural cocktail of utopianism and alarmism.

It’s at once hilarious and disturbing to hear people responding to the social disruption ushered in by the telephone* or even the chalkboard. Reading accounts like these has made me as suspicious of moral panic as of moral triumphalism or moral indifference.

It was with that formation and a whole lot of eye-rolling that I read (some of) the recent package of “kids and screens” stories from the New York Times claiming, as Pamela Paul put it, “the people who know the most about tech are the ones who want the least tech for their kids.”

(Incidentally, the preview text for the article in question is “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones,” from a former administrator at Facebook. If quotes like that aren’t a warning sign of lazy thinking all around, I don’t know what is.)

In a tightly argued piece in Columbia Journalism Review, education reporter Anya Kamenetz called the stories “howling missed opportunities,” which seems generous given her subsequent characterization: “They were lacking relevant research, they drew misleading conclusions, and some of the anecdotal evidence they cited contradicted the central hooks of the stories.”

If you know about Kamenetz’s recent book, The Art of Screentime*, you’d be right to want to interrogate her possible biases and blind spots. Doesn’t she have a vested interest in devices’ possible redemption?

Sure, but there are good reasons to be frustrated with writer Nellie Bowles’ reporting of these pieces and to trust Kamenetz’s rejoinder. For my part, I’m convinced by Kamenetz’s conclusions in large part because I’m familiar with a lot of the rigorous research she cites. She reached out to one of my scholarly heroes in this core statement of her argument:

[S]trict approaches aimed only at limiting screen time aren’t the most effective. You have to be a role model and engage alongside your kids, a notion that the Times stories largely skirted. As Mimi Ito, a foundational scholar of teens’ online lives, tells me, “With anxiety stoked by fear-inducing media stories, and shamed by their peers, parents grasp for simple authoritarian solutions often against their kids’ interests. But when parents take the time to appreciate and connect with their kids’ digital interests, it can be a site of connection and shared joy”—and a way to mentor kids to discover their own creativity.

If piling up researcher pull quotes or citations isn’t your preferred approach to convincing others or yourself, consider more closely the complex path of critical engagement rather than faux-critical prohibition.

The former—advocated by Ito (see HOMAGO online or in print*), boyd (see It’s Complicated online or in print*), Kamenetz and others—passes a kind of smell test that my college calculus professor called “conservation of effort”:

If an approach to solving a problem seems to too easy, it probably is.

It’s just as easy to let nannies be the phone police (if you can afford them, of course) as it is to over-rely on techno-wizardry for keeping kids entertained. (Though let’s cut it out with the shaming that happens on the kids and screens front. Actually, let’s cut it out with shaming.)

We shouldn’t be surprised that the most effective approaches to teaching and learning, to forming strong values and good habits, to growing relationships and community, are the ones that take the most time and effort to practice.

That’s true in the fraught world of kids and screens, and just about everywhere else.

Photo by Simon Migaj on Unsplash

*Disclosure: Affiliate links.