Peter Gray has a nicely contrarian article at Psychology Today weighing in on the debate over how much “screen time” children should have each week. I’ve talked to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists about this over the past few years when it comes to my own kids and it is interesting how diverse the opinions were, from one person who didn’t allow his children any screen time, to another who was more “anything goes.”
Gray comes down closer to the latter view,
I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.
In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.
We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.
Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).




