Unabashedly In Defense Of Screens For Kids

Use that now infamous term "screen time", and you may just picture a morbidly obese child sitting in front of a ginormous TV while chugging down Coca-Cola and eating chips. Six hours a day. Watching rather unintelligent things, perhaps involving killing people. Perhaps even reality TV following 600-lbs people as they undergo bariatric surgery.

Indeed, as Pete Etchells from Bath Spa University in Britain, whose area of expertise is precisely the one we're discussing, pointed out, the very term "screen time" is not all that meaningful:

"Screen time is a really enticing measure because it’s simple – it’s usually described as the number of hours a day using screen-based technology. But it’s completely meaningless. It doesn’t say anything about what you’re using that time for."

Studies may not, in other words, differentiate between different kinds of activities that have nothing more in common than that they're all accessed using some type of "screen". When research does make distinctions, a more interesting picture emerges, a picture that may show that watching TV is associated with a (slightly!) heightened risk of poor behavior, while the same does not hold true for computer games. Just as spending time outside isn't all that beneficial if all you're doing is sitting down eating hamburger after hamburger, screen time shouldn't be condemned out of hand because some people become addicted to first-person shooting games.

The best sound bite I've heard about the topic of children and technology child development in general comes from Heather Kirkorian from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her area of research is cognitive development, and she said:

"The best research suggests that the content children view is the best predictor of cognitive effects. Children will learn from what they watch, whether that means learning letters and numbers, slapstick humor or aggressive behavior."

Let's hear that again: children learn from what they watch. They learn from what they watch, what they see, what they do, what they experience.

READ Don't Ruin Your Sleep - Stop Staring At A Screen Before Bedtime

Remember Dr Sugata Mitra's "hole in the wall" experiment, in which he placed computers in random locations in rural India and watched on in awe as village kids taught themselves how to use the computer and do all manner of things, including learning English on their own? Not only does his research show that computers can be amazing learning tools, it also shows that the human brain is an amazing thing — not something so inflexible and unintelligent that it would be damaged by looking at a "screen".

Let's be clear, here: I don't care whether your kids are using beeswax crayons as you're reading this, while mine are playing Minecraft or emailing friends half-way across the world. I do hope you won't see me as a neglectful parent because I admit that my kids use technology for learning, communication, and fun. Those devices many are now demonizing have given my children a window into a world they'd never have discovered without them, just like they did for you and me before that.