Don’t let screens raise our children: Letter to the editor

"Have the demands of parenthood become so enormous that we’re choosing to ignore our feeling that all this screen time is harmful?"

Re: “Newsom wants smartphones out of all schools” (Page A1, June 19).

The woman drawing my blood doesn’t want a TV in her 4-year-old’s room. “My daughter already has a tablet, but she whines too much!”

It’s exhausting when a child depends on us. But have the demands of parenthood become so enormous that we’re choosing to ignore our feeling that all this screen time is harmful? Don’t we have enough evidence to stop the on-average five hours a day of social media use that is damaging our children’s unformed brains? Let’s stop pretending we’re not allowing our young to be raised by machines. Using addictive dings and weak emojis of mediated friends, our devices and their invisible algorithms seduce and deceive with mere facsimiles of human relationships.

Sure, we suspect something’s missing, but left to our own devices, we’re so distracted by our own ghost-likes, pronouncements and memes we can’t see what’s happening to our children. We’re losing them and losing ourselves.

Kathryn Jordan
Berkeley