Screens, that great addiction
Screens, that great addiction
Whether we’re kids or adults, with different risks and problems posed, we share the same challenge: how to use screens, and use them well.
It’s tiring to think of something I want to do and then not do it, in general. There’s a sense of relief even in just taking the first step of whatever that thing hanging in the air is. I feel this sensation: that’s it! It’s like being desperate to go to the loo and finally making it.
Yesterday, I was desperate to sit down and write. I’m only doing it today. Procrastination does not come from a lack of ideas; there’s a long list which I write and delete constantly, but I am also uncovering material for this newsletter all of the time.
I realize that this is also just a mirror of that overwhelming feeling which fatherhood can provoke in me sometimes, and life in general: everything I think I have to do, the interminable to-do list, and then the reality of what I can actually get done. In this battle against procrastination (and the demands I put on myself to do it, to be efficient), what helps me the very least is screens.
I spend hours crawling through the internet, without solving other issues. Which school will our two boys go to? Are we doing the right thing raising them in Greece, far from our families and lifelong friends? How long can we keep our kids away from a cell phone for?
Of the risks and challenges which are getting closer, which ones can we tackle and get a step ahead of? What are we doing wrong without even realizing it? I write in the plural form because many are decisions that we need to take with Irene, my partner, not just me alone.
There are some things which can be classified as problems for later, but I know that they’ll creep up on us because this is what other families go through (and people in general, whether they have children or not).
I’ve been reading up on how children use screens. One of the biggest risks is the early exposure of adult content: between the ages of 9 and 11, Spanish children have their first experience of consuming pornography. According to El Periódico, 62.5% of children aged between 13 and 18 had already accessed pornography. The figures across Europe are similar.
I won’t go into the problems of accessing pornography at an early age (not in this newsletter) and so lacking in resources to discern and elaborate — but it must be clear that it becomes a huge, huge problem when porn is the main source of sexual education.
The pornography which is most circulated, and which the majority of children consume, “reproduces gender stereotypes, certain ideas of bodily beauty, certain roles of men and women, shows us sexuality which is very intertwined with violence,” says Laura Milano, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina and with a PhD in Social Sciences, in this interview (in Spanish).
Misuse
Coming back to the time we spend in front of screens, it’s evident that something’s rotting in the tech industry and in online entertainment once we learned that even the children of tech gurus do not use the products which have made their parents millionaires.
How would you feel if I invited you to eat at my house, told you I’d prepared you an incredible dish — in fact, my favourite — and when we sat down at the table, you saw that I was eating something quite different, far simpler, and without telling you why?
“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it's closer to crack cocaine,” Chris Anderson, former editor of technology magazine Wired, told the New York Times in 2018.
The same article lists how Tim Cook, the head of Apple, doesn’t want his nephew to use social media; how Microsoft founder Bill Gates didn’t allow his children to use cell phones until adolescence; and how, in an interview from 2014, Steve Jobs revealed that he didn’t let his children use the very iPad his own company innovated.
There’s been reporting about this for years (see these pieces in El País, The Mirror), but somehow both children and adults are using more screens.
Now, China is proposing that children spend less time on their smartphones. The idea, according to the New York Times, is to prevent internet addiction by limiting the daily screen time spent by children under 8.
In his newsletter Diego Geddes, an Argentinian journalist, writes (in Spanish):
Each week begins with the repeated, worrying ritual: getting a notification on my phone of how much screen time I have spent. It’s almost always four hours a day (to be fair, never more than four hours and 30 minutes). Once, I was online for less than four hours a day. Often, I am online for five hours a day. Like this week: 5 hours, 12 minutes.
The worrying ritual is this: the purchase this very week of an alarm clock so I can stop finding an excuse to bring the phone close to bed. It’s that final hour of absurdly spending time with the phone, its artificial light on my face, the content idiotic, lives far away. For what?
The topic came up during my interview a few weeks ago with Ruben Magnano, the Argentine former basketball coach who brought the Golden Generation gold in the Athens 2004 Olympics. The trainer spoke of his rule that phones were banned during team activities, including during mealtimes.
“Phones completely interfere with social, comic and family events; with meeting people or friends who you haven’t seen in ages. It felt to me like it limited communication. Why not feed affection?” said Magnano in the interview.
What happens to me
I try to not use my phone daily when I am with my kids, with Irene or with friends (I often fail). I don’t bring my phone to the table. And I’ve just got back to the habit of leaving my phone turned off in the other room when I go to sleep.
Lorenzo, who will be five years old soon, only rarely watches videos (chosen by Irene and me); sometimes it’ll be once a month. I know this will be a challenge later on down the line, when he is more autonomous and his peers start using screens more.
The goal is to build a foundation of interests and curiosities so that, when the moment comes, they won’t only compete with the attraction that technology generates, but will also help my children in whatever way they will be using the screens… or at least that is my hope.
Unicef has warned of the risk of internet usage of children and adolescents. In Spain there was a recent debate about the use of cellphones in schools, since some were prohibiting it.
“The problem is that many parents don’t want their children to be frustrated”, wrote Roger Ballescà, a psychologist specializing in children and adolescents, in an article for El Periódico about children and their abusive use of cellphones. “From the point of view of psychology, frustration is unpleasant, but not bad. Nevertheless, it seems that parents only know how to say yes to their children; never no”.
In the same Catalan newspaper I read that a WhatsApp group with violent and pornographic content went viral recently between a group of 12 year olds in Barcelona. They shared “many pornographic images — one with a corpse” and shared racist and homophobic messages such as “he looks like a gay”.
“Screens are a public health problem”, said pediatric neuropsychologist Carina Castro Fumero, who has more than two decades of experience with mental health. She warns new generations are developing addicted brains to screens.
Amongst other things, Castro Fumero signals that screens are associated with: delayed language skills; difficulty regulating emotions and controlling impulses; attention problems and in the development of vision; the emergence of violent behaviour; addiction to pornography, video games and social networks; food-related disorders (anorexia, bulimia, etc); mental illnesses, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation.
This illustration may seem tendentious: you can read a stupid book and another person can watch an interesting documentary. But at the heart of the question is regular use of technology, and what each piece of technology foments or stimulates. How much time do we spend consuming rubbish on our phones?
The earlier a child is exposed to indiscriminate use of screens, the higher the risk they run, because their brains are less developed than that of adults who can handle different situations.
It’s not that adults can save themselves from some of the problems that screens generate. Not at all. I often fall down a wormhole on the infinite internet. It happened to me yesterday, when I was planning to write this newsletter. After two hours of scrolling online, I bid Irene a goodnight — she was abroad for work — saying I was off to bed.
I went on to spend another two hours scrolling online, between social networks, the deaths in Israel and Gaza (how is it that wars continue?), mattress sales and news about Argentina. I went to bed at 2.30am.
What stayed with me through all of this that I saw last night? As well as a not yet written newsletter (and the frustration that comes with), I would doubt to say much else. This morning it certainly meant I was more tired than usual during the morning routine with Lorenzo.
I also felt a kind of absurd binge hangover from the internet, a voracious consumption of it (I just took a peek at my search history: between 22:01 and 2:10, I opened or refreshed 423 tabs).
So, once I’d dropped off the little man at school, I turned off all of my notifications and put the phone away. It’s more tiring to write this newsletter than it is to scroll, but it is also a bigger challenge and a major satisfaction than navigating without a direction on the internet for hours.
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Thanks for reading and sharing as usual.
See you next time.
With love,
Nacho
📣 Nabeelah Shabbir, a member of this community and a friend, edited and improved this newsletter with lots of love. Thanks, Nabeelah! 🙏 If there are mistakes, they are my fault, not hers! (and please forgive me for them!)