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Child Development
Let's Stop Trying to Make Pandemic Childhood "Normal"
Parents and kids are surviving—isn't that enough?
Posted February 19, 2021
Last month The New York Times published an article titled “Children’s Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers.” It’s pretty scary stuff. The piece contains alarming phrases like “epic withdrawal” and “addiction” and “losing” children to technology. It compares getting kids off screens to “preaching abstinence in a bar.”
What?!
We are in a pandemic.
Everything is different.
Parenting is already draining the life out of parents, as highlighted in another article in The New York Times titled “Three Mothers on the Brink.”
My advice to the media and the experts they consult? Stop scaring parents.
Yes, screen time among children and teens has been far greater in 2020 and 2021 than before. But this is a necessity in the current environment, not a tragedy. Screens are the nexus of learning, socially connecting, and having fun for our kids right now. Our current guidance around kids and screens is based on pre-pandemic assumptions and systems. Trying to apply this guidance now is fundamentally flawed because we are in a completely different world than we were a year ago. It would be like complaining about airplanes because we can’t roll down the windows to get some fresh air during a cross-country ride in our cars.
Consider the Bigger Picture
Let’s consider the bigger picture. Every part of kids’ lives has been affected by this pandemic to some degree—the limitations on in-person connections, learning, and play have not been optional. Pandemic survival has been the priority. Staying connected digitally has allowed kids to continue some parts of their lives, although in very different ways. But that’s the point. It’s a completely different baseline. The old “normal” is irrelevant right now—it doesn’t exist.
And some of the “big bad” parts of the NY Times article were, in my view, just silly. A little boy found relief in his games when his family dog died. So what? Of course he did. We all look for a little peace and comfort in grief. That is not pathological. Grief comes in waves and surviving big waves is hard. Who hasn’t found solace in a chat with a friend or even sometimes a work task, to make things feel normal again when mourning a death? And right now this child can’t go to a friend’s house to hang out, to decompress, so the game is an adaptive solution.
Another anecdote in the article is about a father who feels he has lost his child and failed as a parent because his 14-year-old son thinks of his phone as his “whole life.” Kids’ lives were migrating to their phones well before the pandemic. And before cell phones, as 14-year-olds, we migrated to a hall closet, with the phone wire hanging out, while we sat in the dark and talked to friends, and our parents chided us for not wanting to spend time with them anymore. Kids at that age have to push out to connect with peers—they are building their independent selves. We are supposed to lose them a little bit at this age. And right now those peer connections and lives are mostly in the digital space because those are the only viable options. Thank goodness they can engage in this important developmental activity. Migrating these behaviors to digital venues is adaptive, not scary.
We All Need a Release
The loss, grief, and fear in the time of the pandemic are real. Our brains are appropriately in heightened alert states. This is exhausting—physically, cognitively, and emotionally. And the longer it goes on, the harder it is to recoup—to get back to anything like our baseline. We need time to decompress, to do nothing, to give ourselves permission to re-fuel. We always need some of this in our lives; true downtime is essential for our mental well-being. And we need it now more than ever.
This need to “brain drain” is no less true for kids than it is for adults. In fact, in many ways, kids are even more exhausted. They are managing all of the usual stressors of growing up such as building a brain and a body, developing emotional and behavioral regulation skills, and navigating the treacherous social waters of childhood and adolescence. And now they are doing it in a pandemic. Sometimes kids just need to be alone and not thinking too hard about anything. And maybe, just maybe, they need it even more now.
Citing Research Out of Context
The article’s scare tactics also include citing research articles that imply very bad things about kids and screens. One article they link to is about brain matter changes seen in adults with Internet Gaming Disorder, published long before the pandemic. Also mentioned is a study published in July 2020 about tracking the time that small children are spending on screens. The researchers also captured patterns of use in which the children were accessing adult-focused material, apparently without their parents’ knowledge. This research data was also collected before the pandemic, since the article was accepted for publication in March 2020.
Accessing age-inappropriate content and potential for problem/addiction level screen use are issues that pre-date the pandemic and are not specific to pandemic levels of use. The problem with the presentation of this material in the New York Times article is that it assumes that higher levels of screen use during COVID-19 will automatically cause higher levels of the problems described in the research. We can’t make that assumption. We have no way to know what the impact will be, if any. In fact, we could even imagine ways that these problems might be lessened. Maybe parents and kids being home more and using screens with such frequency will allow for more understanding and fluency in the digital space that will either reduce these problems and/or present solutions to mitigate them.
Rapidly exploding information access and screen time have presented challenges to parents, educators, and pediatric health professionals over the last quarter-century, since our Gen Z kids were the first digital natives. Risks of excessive screen time, especially if it is replacing other important developmental activities such as socializing, getting physical activity, and doing schoolwork, are noted and important to study. However, the availability of all those activities is profoundly changed in the current state of our world. That doesn’t mean that we ignore the need for the other activities; it just means that applying the old standard of “normal” isn’t going to work right now. That doesn’t mean it’s bad or worse—it’s just what needs to happen now for survival.
We are in a place of collective trauma and mourning. We are in survival mode. Changes and differences in our function are taxing all our resources, internal and external, for kids and adults alike. We make changes, such as using more screens, in the name of survival. We aren't in the “Before Times,” and we can’t hold ourselves to expectations established in those times. We are adapting because we have to, and so are our kids.
What’s the Harm in Trying?
Why would it be dangerous to try to create a “normal” childhood for our kids right now? What’s the harm in trying? A lot. Most prominent is the guilt and despair parents feel if we define ourselves as “failing” our children when we can’t make things “normal.” These powerfully negative feelings drain our already over-extended internal resources, leaving us less juice to regulate our own emotions and to problem solve the ever-changing landscape of the world today.
Another serious risk is escalating unnecessary conflict with our kids. If our goal is for our kids (and us) to think, feel, and behave “normally” (as defined pre-pandemic), this will end in extraordinary frustration for everyone—after a whole lot of screaming and crying on both sides, something we certainly don't need more of these days. There will be plenty of those times without making it worse with unrealistic expectations.
Finally, if we focus primarily on keeping things the way they used to be, we run the risk of limiting our kids’ ability to adapt to the new and unknown. Creativity, growth, and adaptation are essential skills in a period of extreme change and tremendous stress. Trying to keep things the same—setting up the old “normal” as the goal—can get us off track from building these skills and using them.
So, What Should Parents Be Doing?
Cut yourself and your kids a break. Don’t be scared by alarmist headlines and rhetoric about kids in the pandemic. They are surviving. Their stories, by definition, will be part of this epoch and its historic disruption from the previous timelines and stories. Acknowledging this fact doesn’t change the losses and the fears we all feel during this era. It just gives us some emotional and thought space to stop trying to make life like it used to be. Compassion and grace for the incredible job everyone is doing to just keep going is important fuel for all of us. Curiosity about our kids’ experiences can be an energizer for this journey, whereas trying to control the narrative shuts us down and results in unnecessary frustration, conflict, and guilt.
