Parents Can Police Screen Time — but Good Luck Telling Your Children That
Stories about its effects spook parents with children glued to YouTube. But do we even understand what we’re fighting?
By Zoe Williams
This morning, I was in bed, listening to the Today programme’s headlines, including a new Ofcom study that finds children are watching less TV, and more YouTube, although since YouTube is a content delivery platform, a better headline would be, “children watch less telly, in preference for more telly”. My 11-year-old was downstairs, also in bed, watching YouTube. I knew this not because I have any kind of parental surveillance system, but because if he wasn’t, that would mean the internet had broken, and I’d have heard about it.
The world of nostalgia can be divided in two: the people who just preferred life when they were young, because it was more enjoyable; and those who think the internet is inherently evil, and everything spinning out of it — including the personalities of coming up for two generations — is therefore, also, evil. For those who want to spread terror about screen time — that it can slow development, that it promotes, or at least enables, bullying, that it obliterates boredom and all the constructive thoughts that proceed from it, that it…
