Read just about any pediatric study concerning screen time and you're bound to be told that our children are addicted to screens. Reports also indicate that the majority of children are spending too much time in front of screens and not enough time interacting with real people. If you've found a study that says not to worry about screen time I want to see it. I'd also like to know the amount of hate mail that author receives. Yet parents with children of all ages punch in a password, pass the screen, and revel in the peace and quiet as their own eyes cross in front of a screen held six inches from the tip of the nose.
What does this say about our culture? The older generations who don't "get it" are considered backwards and out of the times. Anyone sixty or younger owns at least one screen, the traditional TV, a tablet, computer, laptop, smartphone, watch... Where does the list end? It's not just children. We're all in our screens physically and mentally. Have mercy on the individual who interrupts Facebook time for some old school peer-to-peer interaction.
We are a species prone to addiction. Anyone who says "I don't have an addictive personality," is full of the nasty stuff. Myself included. Maybe not prone to nicotine addiction, perhaps not prone to alcoholism, but down to every last person I know, except possible my mother, bless her soul, she doesn't "get" Facebook, is addicted to their screens. Prove me wrong. Go a day without your screen. Without your phone. Without your tablet, laptop, desktop. You can't because they're everywhere. At your desk at work, on the wall in the break room, in your living room, family room, bedroom, in your purse, in your pocket. They're in our economy. If all the screens stopped working the world would come to a screeching halt and then jumpstart into a panic not seen in America since the crash of 1929.
Parts of the world would go on as they have for thousands of years, but all of us first-worlders would have no idea what to do without the ability to post meta first-world-problem memes.
Young people have no idea how to date the way their grandparents or parents dated. My son, my precious little angel wakes up, he runs to me clutching for my leg, and the first words out of his precious mouth, every single morning, without failure are, "pad? pad, da!" "Pad" almost sounds like "dad" in the mouth of a two year old learning to speak. It's heartbreaking.
I'm asking my peers: Gen Xers sending their children to college, older Millennials with young children: What are we doing to ourselves and to the succeeding generation? As one man on the street to another. Is this right? Is this healthy? Is this okay? Is this the world we want our children to experience? The world where everything happens within a five-point-one-inch-screen? Will our grandchildren be part of the cyborg revolution with screens surgically tattooed in their wrists, internal heart monitors, blood pressure sensors, RFID tags in the fatty tissue of the hand? These things don't scare me. I'm not preaching the apocalypse or the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. I'm just asking. And saying, our children talk to screens more than they talk to faces.
What role-model are we establishing when we're checking our phones 150 times per day? That's 6.25 times per hour in 24 hours. But you're sleeping a full eight hours a day, right? So that's actually 9.4 times every hour in a 16 hour day. On average, that's every 6 and a half minutes. However, there are times when checking-in turns into screen time. Assuming twenty minutes is spent on the phone every waking-hour, that drives check-in time to every 4.3 minutes. (Do you know how often you check your phone? There's an app for that).
The smartphone is not the only screen time to consider. The average American spends 24 hours per week on the television. That's nearly 3.5 hours a day on the TV. Next time someone asks where did all the tinkerers and self-starters go tell them they're watching television. We are drowning in our screens and this cannot help but to change our culture, and quite possibly our neurodevelopment.
There's a lot of data to sift through regarding this subject. Individuals will be prone to their confirmation bias, but there is no doubt that screen time is higher than it's ever been, and it looks as though that trend will continue to climb. Stay plugged in and watch for the results.