I never give my 1 year old my phone. I’m determined to raise a child who doesn’t spend all his free time on a device. So imagine my surprise when she recently got a hold of mine and started scrolling and swiping with the muscle memory of a bored teenager on TikTok. How did she learn to do that? I wondered. Can I blame childcare for this? My husband?
Then I realized: she was learning by watching me. I was afraid my daughter would become an iPad kid, but I might be the biggest of them all. I’m addicted to my phone – perhaps more than ever, thanks to my maternity leave – and my baby has noticed. I started to worry: Will my excessive phone use make my daughter long for the sweet, lobotomizing glow of a high-tech rectangle, despite the screen restrictions I impose on her?
Keeping my baby away from phones is the easy part. She can’t buy one. She has no money. I know parents of older children will be waiting for this. But I will stand by my position as long as the World Health Organization and similar bodies agree that there is no benefit to babies from looking at digital screens before the age of two.
But what about, for example, people in their thirties who are recovering from a caesarean section, learning to breastfeed and can’t leave the house for at least two weeks, just like me? There’s no rule of thumb for screen time for that specific demographic – and friends in similar situations tell me that many of us panic about our screen time.
I was like a rat. I crept along the subway lines of my phone, desperately searching waste.
Much attention has been paid to the pitfalls of phone use among children and teenagers. For babies, screen exposure correlates with lower academic performance later in life, according to a 2023 study published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science. It is also linked to social development problems, obesity, sleep disorders, depression, anxiety, reduced emotional understanding, aggressive behavior and reduced social and emotional competence. That’s enough for me to try to limit it for my daughter.
Even for older kids, screen time is associated with feelings of loneliness and a skyrocketing suicide rate, perhaps because teens spend less face time with their friends than any previous generation. Of course, correlation is not causation, and at least one study found that the impact of screens on teens’ well-being is minimal. But even if my fears turn out to be exaggerated, I’d rather have my daughter chatting over dinner than staring at an iPad.
Yet no one seems to be able to rein in adults, who spend an average of more than six hours a day on screens. Learning how to monitor my own daily screen time made me want to sign up for an exorcism. Why did I spend so many hours on the phone when I “never had time” to write my screenplay, clean my house, or do my taxes?
I managed to push the number down. But after I had my baby, it crept back up. Did you know that breastfeeding puts you in the perfect physical position to stare at your phone? It also takes a lot more hours to feed a baby than I thought. I’ve looked at them all Downton Abbey in less than a month. I think I read a book. But my postpartum brain preferred the phone.
Then there was the isolation. Maternity leave is like a COVID lockdown on steroids: you’re stuck inside, but this time everyone is free. Even your husband, who should be half-hearted about this, can talk about it all day long with his coworkers. Traitor! The male loneliness epidemic is getting all the press. But it’s nothing new for moms.
This makes your phone a glowing panacea against boredom and isolation. Sometimes I was grateful that it existed. But when my daughter started noticing screens, I wanted to cut back. I’ve tried setting timers on social media. No dice: too easy to snooze.
I’ve deleted a few apps, especially Twitter and Reddit, the apps that make me feel the worst. But it never stuck. As soon as a viral news moment occurred, I had to download them again ‘for journalism’.
Next up was the Freedom app. This is a kind of VPN that logs everything fun on your phone at regular intervals. Of course I learned to avoid it. I was like a rat. I crept along the subway lines of my phone, desperately searching for trash, until I found a manual VPN switch to disable Freedom. which I voluntarily paid $39.99 per year to use.
I recently installed a Screen Time widget on my home screen. I’ve been ashamed of the ballooning total all day. With all these measures, I have reduced my average daily screen use to about four hours. But it still seems so high. What am I? doing? I must be busy. And how can I expect my daughter not to be just as powerless against a push notification?
According to one study, children whose parents are glued to screens may exhibit lower emotional intelligence. This could be caused by the expressionless face that parents adopt while scrolling. Children pick up emotional intelligence by watching the people around them. If all you offer your child is a slack-jawed stare bathed in the glow of the phone, what are they learning about how to interact with people? Plus, being rejected in favor of a phone can leave kids feeling lonely, isolated and depressed, experts say.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a clinical psychologist who focuses on parenting and child development, helped me out of my shame spiral. I will never be Mary Poppins or Fräulein Maria, she said, so I had to give up perfectionism. “It’s not sustainable. We love our children with all our hearts, but part of parenting is boring and lonely,” Kennedy-Moore explains. “So if you want to come over to your friend’s house to help you get through the day, I’m not going to argue about that.”
But what if checking in with my friend turns into two hours of occasional Reddit research? Real Housewives conspiracy theories? What should I do if my screen use feels dirty? Kennedy-Moore says it’s important to ask ourselves what exactly we think we’re missing or should be doing instead of scrolling on our phones.
If the phone is keeping you away from a child who wants your attention, or making you act harsher on him or her, then it’s time to make a decision. change.
What I think I should do instead is stare at my daughter while she plays with blocks. But as Kennedy-Moore notes, that would be weird for her. “Our kids don’t want us staring at them all the time,” she says. “What we strive for is responsiveness. When our children try to get our attention, do we turn toward them more often than away?”
So catching up on texts while your child plays independently won’t hurt. But if the phone is keeping you away from a child who wants your attention, or making you tougher on him or her, then it’s time to make a change.
Kennedy-Moore told me about a family she helped who had trouble leaving the house in the morning. She discovered that the parent in charge was always multitasking on his phone. “It made more sense to take the kids out completely and then go on his device,” she said. “He wasn’t a jerk, he had work things he had to do.” But focusing on the children first helped solve the problem.
Parents can also try putting their phones away at certain times, such as when they get home from work, school or daycare, she explained. “Mealtimes, bedtimes: these can be times when you set a rule for your family that there are no screens.”
Speaking of other screens, while I never give my daughter a phone, I’m more lax when it comes to television. Sometimes, while playing, she catches a minute or two before I can distract her again. I feel bad about this. But Kennedy-Moore does not see many problems with this.
“Is watching television high-quality interaction for a young child? No,’ she said. “But does every moment have to be high-quality stimulation? If the child gets enough stimulation for the remaining 24 hours, minus seven minutes, I can’t imagine it makes any difference.”
She also says she needs to think about what screen time is replace. I don’t want to replace connecting during meals with… Bluish. The same goes for changing diapers. My baby needs to figure out how to survive two minutes of boredom without a screen, even if the swaying is rough in the short term. But maybe TV during a plane trip is fine.
The fact remains that my own phone use makes devices seem more attractive to my daughter – as if the digital slot machine in my pocket needs any help with that. The greatest minds of my generation got filthy rich making these phones addictive, and here I am to help them sell their technology to a 1-year-old.
Luckily, Kennedy-Moore has tips for cutting back, in addition to the phone precautions I’ve learned to avoid with ease.
The first is to reward yourself, she said. Instead of stealing glances from social media and TV all day long, when I should be focusing on my baby instead, I tell myself that later, after she’s asleep, I can bathe in the glow of screens without guilt. “It’s always easier to replace a behavior than to stop it,” she said. “What are you going to do when you would normally scroll? What would be meaningful and satisfying to you?”
The answer is connecting with my daughter. Now I realize that it is not feasible to do this 100 percent of the time; my daughter doesn’t even want that. But if she wants my attention, I can make sure I stay phone-free. And when she plays independently, I can check my lyrics. The doctor said So.
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