I Don’t Need Your Opinion on My Kid’s Screen Time

Talking about how you’ll parent someday is one thing. Surviving a kid’s tantrum so bad you question every choice you’ve ever made is another.

I love reading about all the things people think they’re going to do as parents before they actually have any kids. The fantasy of it all. Their precious little angels abstaining from sugar, back talk, or screens — all because of how well, how perfectly, they’ll parent them. But I really love checking in on the people who’ve said such things to me after they have their own kids, their cupboards now overflowing with cookies and candy, their kids screaming for another episode of Cocomelon on their iPads. It’s not so much “Told you so” as it is “Welcome to hell.”

Because, of course, kids don’t care about your vision for who they are. They will be who they are and do what kids do. And eventually, we all realize how much easier parenting them is when we don’t adhere to strict and rigid ideas of how things should be and just embrace how they are. Yes, your kid is gonna get goofy off sugar; will probably get addicted to the worst, most inane TV shows; and will occasionally throw a tantrum in public so bad it has you questioning your entire life and every choice you’ve ever made. Fantasy, meet reality.

It’s probably a necessary part of evolution, deluding ourselves in this way, letting ourselves think we’ll be the ones to nail the formula. Otherwise, we might not be so willing to dive headfirst into such a hilariously losing game. But it used to be that you could keep these silly thoughts confined to your own cohort: other childless parents who are doing a perfect job, if only in their heads. Now social media takes those fantasies and amplifies them and maybe even has the people espousing this fiction convinced that they’re right. The latest comes courtesy of Gen Z, which has littered X and TikTok with rants about how kids should behave in public (if they even belong there in the first place!) and whose fault it is if they’re seen to be misbehaving, especially when it comes to screen time.

As the 20-year-olds swear in one Daily Beast story — “Why Gen Z Won’t Be Raising iPad Kids,” screams the headline — they won’t be raising their own kids with tech, and their kids will never touch a screen or be annoying and loud in a restaurant.

Okay, good luck.

Meanwhile, in the real word, some friends and I went to a diner for a late lunch recently after a major playground session with our young kids. The seven of us snagged a big banquette in the back and allowed ourselves to spread out. At first, the kids were too preoccupied to realize they were sitting still, scribbling with the crayons mercifully supplied by the waitress and chatting among themselves. Then the juice came, and the energy started to shift; I could almost see the sugar ascending to their little brains, ready to kickstart a riot. The shoes and socks were about to come off, the acrobatics dangerously close to beginning. As a group, we had to decide if we were going to let the entire back half of this restaurant descend into madness, or, as one TikToker put it, “shove a screen in their face” since we can’t “make your child behave for more than five seconds.” As if, at six or seven, the TikTokers, too, weren’t running around a Chili’s, screaming their little heads off. The only difference is their parents didn’t have the blissful option to give everyone a few minutes off from the noise.

We chose to sacrifice one of our phones to put on a couple of episodes of Moomins for the children to watch while they ate their grilled cheeses.

It was also the only way us adults would be able to eat our own food and not spend the whole meal juggling a mess of tiny bodies. Sure, I guess we could’ve done what all those Gen-Z commenters suggest and spent the entire time barking at the kids to sit still or begging them to just quietly color — but if you’ve ever been in charge of little kids at a restaurant, then you already know that wouldn’t work.

And by the way, you may think the screen is strictly so the parents can breathe easy for a minute, but in a restaurant, those screens are just as much for the sake of the other diners as they are for us. I’m always so stressed about making sure I’m not ruining the vibe for everybody else trying to enjoy their meal that giving the kids ten or 15 minutes of some Netflix show on my phone is genuinely a no-brainer. I’m doing it for you! All of this stress about how and where my kids take up space is part of a growing sense for a lot of parents that people are unwilling to tolerate either them or their kids in public anymore — that families should just stay home or be relegated to playgrounds and that even those playgrounds should be kept far away.

What does it matter to you, a perfect childless stranger, how any parent manages to create peace for their family in the brief moments that you share the same space? Every family, every kid, has their own needs for feeling comfortable and functioning, and I, for the most part, try not to judge those needs.

I have no problem with my kids watching screens in general; they don’t have strict limits on their TV time, and we take them out to the movies as often as money and time allows. Anyone who knows me is familiar with how many times my kids have watched and rewatched The Grinch or the latest Ninja Turtles movie, and in comparison, their TV time has nothing on the amount I clocked staring at one as a kid. My boomer parents had no problem using the TV as a babysitter, and I fucking loved it. It made me the woman I am today.

But like so many actual parents and experts, I also agree that phones and iPads, and in particular the specific content on those devices, are wreaking havoc on both our kids and us. Endless YouTube playlists set to an algorithm that promotes, if not outright oblivion, then at least mollification, have decimated all of our attention spans and made us less social, more anxious, and more depressed. I don’t even need an expert to tell me that last part — I can feel it every minute I choose to stare at my phone rather than do literally anything else. It’s also why a few of my friends and I, along with our kids, have instituted a blanket YouTube ban and why we don’t have an iPad or any kind of tablet for them at home. We believe they deserve a chance to be bored and to see those attention spans bloom or, at the very least, for those spans not to be prematurely thwarted.

But if you were at that diner that day, watching my kids watch the phone, you’d have no idea how we actually consume content and what screen limits exist for my kids. Maybe the same is true for those other so-called “iPad kids” someone on TikTok encountered for the briefest moment. Either way, it’s none of your or my business. As a friend’s mom used to say, “Who cares — get a real problem.”