One of the feature pieces on the CBS Evening News they do is called ‘Eye on America.’ The one the other day had major dad and me both waxing fondly in memories and lauding the parents they profiled who’d experienced that awakening. The ‘Hey. Maybe shoving the phone into my kid’s hand isn’t the best thing‘ awakening.
It was so refreshing.
And still way too rare.
What, to their credit, jolted the Sidders out of handing their daughter the phone anytime she got fussy was, as her dad Geno said, when he tried to catch her attention afterward. His ‘Hey Scarlett, look over here,’ was ignored because she was just zoned out, focused on the phone screen in her little paws.
He said it ‘just didn’t feel right.’
Their description of going screen-free and then attempting a Disneyland trip with a toddler rang true, too. All the kids in line on some sort of electronic pacifier while the parents are happily chatting away, and there they were wrangling a boisterous toddler.
Nicolette Sidders really pinged memories when she talked about having Scarlett in the kitchen with her now, watching her cook, instead of being in a chair attached to an electronic device.
Oh, my gosh – struck such a chord. The picture that heads this post is of an ever-so-young Ebola* on the kitchen floor, armed with a spoon, and hubby’s heel at the counter in the background. That’s where he spent so much of his time, right there on the floor, and the ancient, beaten-to-a-pulp Revere Ware lid is proof.
He’d be happily doing his deafening Doc Severinson impression in a corner with six different spoons and five different-sized lids while I made whatever meal it was. I was talking to him constantly, poor kid.
We cherish every dented survivor of those times to this day, and, in his early 40s, he still laughs when he pulls them out on a visit home.
You can’t get that in front of a TV or glued to a tablet.
You also don’t get to listen to that lovely baby gibberish or excited little chirps and screams that are so incomprehensible but incredibly joyous. And you don’t get to chirp back if there’s nothing to chirp to, which is so incredibly sad for both parents and the wee one.
Now, we had a well-worn VCR, one of those JVCs which had the pop-up feed for the cassette and bright, colorful big play, etc. buttons right in the front, so Ebola watched movies (I know every line in “Dumbo’ and hate the song ‘Baby, Mine’ with a passion). Also, PBS was a terrific children’s resource at that time. The Count actually counted, and, as Ebola got older, Reading Rainbow had wonderful suggestions for kids’ books that I’d regularly look for to augment all the childhood favorites I’d bought or rescued from my folks.
We always read to him.
But I’ve never been a TV person, so it was sparingly applied.
And, hell no, I’m not preaching our perfection here. We weren’t paragons of child rearing at all. Like, two active-duty Marines with opposing schedules in Southern California made for a hectic life and snappy tempers, but the little guy was the priority, and we made an honest effort to get it more right than wrong. I remember my aunt telling major dad he was creating a monster because he never put Ebola down. ‘That child,’ she said, ‘Needs to learn not to be held all the time.’
But we always had to scoop him up. He never demanded to be held. He just was.
When we ate dinner, he was in his little chair on the table, or, as he got older, at the table. To this day, he insists on eating at the table when he comes home, whereas we’ve descended into couchdom dining habits in our dotages.
Wait a minute – he IS a monster.
And we’d talk, talk, talk. Still do.
I look around at tables full of young kids wherever we might be, and no one’s talking. They’re all glued to a phone.
It’s no wonder some of these poor kids have no coping mechanisms – they’ve never had a conversation, a real conversation. They’ve never learned the skills it takes to have a comfortable chat with another person. Or an amiable disagreement, more importantly. They have no clue what communicating is.
Screens don’t talk back. Texts have no human nuances.
The average child spends 4 to 6 hours a day looking at a phone.
The avg teen spends 9 hours a day looking at a phone.
& a new study found that the avg parent spends only 5 hours a week face-to-face w/ their kids.
Shut the screens. It’s the best thing you can do for your kids. pic.twitter.com/hpUpYwSP5X
— Brett Pike (@ClassicLearner) July 23, 2025
My other concern is imagination – where does that come from when the story is already told, acted, and drawn out for you? What challenges a child’s mind to grow, flourish, and soar if there’s nothing to imagine? No make-believe?
That’s such a frightening thought, as I’ve always had a wild imagination and encouraged flights of whatever fancy in our son, as has his dad. So many kids are being denied the fantasy world of growing up, being a little person, the wonder of it.
Being an overcharged and annoying ‘WHY?’ machine is part of being a little person. Being a sensory dulled drone is not.
Kids are getting exposed to screens too early and too often
Turns out this is not a good thing
Here are some recent findings about the impact this is having on kids:
– Any screen time before the age of 3yrs has been shown to cause developmental delays
– Babies & toddlers… pic.twitter.com/FgoJtDOpoA
— Raising Healthy Families (@thriving__kids) February 13, 2024
…- Babies & toddlers exposed to screens are more likely to display atypical sensory behaviours associated with autism and ADHD
– A study of 1471 kids showed that 1yr old give screen time had a 105% higher likelihood of sensory processing issues. They had:
Anxiety
Slower response times
A lack of interest in non-screen activities
– Children aged 3-5 who had more than 1hr of screen time per day had higher likelihood of sensory issues later in childhood
-Children under 3 who were given ANY regular screen time were more likely to suffer from obesity, anxiety and/or depression
-Kids aged 2-3 that were exposed to screens were more likely to struggle socially and display behavioural problems
-Kids & young teens who average more than 2 hours per day (the average for this age group is over 5 hrs a day) are significantly more likely to be obese and/or severely depressed
-Parents of teens that average more than 5 hrs/day on screens (the average for this age group is over 7hrs/day) report not feeling a strong connection to their kids, and that their connection is worse since they became teens.
All you have to do is look at the monsters who’ve been in the news lately. I don’t think it’s so much the games themselves influencing the unhinged violence, but the isolation these kids live in. Most of them live in a cocoon to begin with, and within those walls, it’s a sterile, violent fantasy world. There’s zero emotional attachment to a living, breathing life.
I hope it’s not too late for a generation or more of kiddos who have had screens thrust into their tiny fingers from the moment they could clutch and be trusted not to drop a thousand-dollar cell phone. It’s also not all parents’ fault, either, with so much of the industry pressure being geared toward children’s content and pseudo-educational claims about learning advancements for some of these products, even for the youngest of brains.
I’m not an educator or even a failed psych major in college – I don’t even play one here at HotAir. What I am is a blessed mother whose kid turned out pretty damn well in spite of our failings, but who can put a finger on what did work. The minimal things – the constant human touch, the baby talk, the encouragement, the reading, the sitting in the corner of the kitchen with mom and the dog instead of in a chair with a screen.
The love. So much of that.
I sure hope more parents start to have that moment like the couple in the CBS piece. Forty years from now, they’ll be so glad they did, and so will their kids.
Maybe even wind up fighting over who gets to keep dented pot lids.
Wouldn’t that be something?
*Our son was one of the very first computer and gaming savants in the early 90s, winning tournaments and designing “skins” for games not long after Al Gore invented the innerwebs. Unfortunately, he also had a knack for catching the first viruses. One was so virulent that it wiped his computer and all of my work and required one of his father’s computer geeks to come from base with a DoD program to finally exterminate it. His uncle Bingley nicknamed him “Ebola,” and it has been his nom-de-innerwebs ever since.
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