For most of my life screens in one form or another have been vilified socially with parents and teachers ultimately limiting them in favor of active, engaging, outdoor times. We’ve for a long time limited our childrens’ “screen-time” to about 30 minutes a day. Sometimes longer to allow for a sporting event or movie we were watching. Or to address homework projects. What’s occurred to me so much lately though has been that maybe the incessant focus on limiting “screen time” has placed too much emphasis on the format of what they’re doing rather than its function. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely still favor active outdoor time anyday of the year, but I beg to refine the catch-all phrase “screen-time.”
A few years ago I talked with my kids about the difference between activities that serve a long term vs. short term benefit. I said we want to maximize the long term ones and minimize the short term. This was designed to help them balance time playing angry-birds (fill in the blank for whatever is its current iteration is) with creating movies with iMovie or playing chess. Or the difference between watching a series of 3 minute youtube clips and a full-length movie. But they still only had 30 minutes. I wonder if a time limit shaped their choices thereby gravitating towards the junk-food “screen-time.”
I find myself wanting to change the nature of their screen time to focus less on the form and more on its function. I learned from Jamie McKenzie many moons ago that Form follows function. Take for example ideas helpful to them in the long term: making travel books, creating fishing journals, making movies of what it’s like to live in your neighborhood, playing chess with friends, coding, researching places you’d like to travel to including flights and hotels, campsites and the like, blogs, programming, looking for foods you want to make. I had started with Destination Explore to foster that but alas it’s a significant challenge for me to keep something going over the long haul. Technology delivered via a screen can help make dreams happen and shape life’s pursuits and passions.
If they want to create a blog to document their fishing world, or create a commentary about the NCAA basketball seasons, or review soccer practice videos, or play chess with a friend who lives 500 miles from home, why would I limit that? If they wanted to explore on Google Earth all the places they wanted to visit or investigate new soccer goals or our next place to eat out, why limit that? Or look at the incredible photographs or webcams of animals or plants or buildings or birds, isn’t that what I want?
So how do I encourage these kinds of uses for technology and less playing Kingdom Rush? Well, maybe it’s getting rid of artificial limits on “screen time” as perhaps at 30 minutes it is sure to foster the use of it for low hanging fruit. Going forward I want to embrace its dreamy possibilities and limit it’s use for short term tedium and superficial games where what they’re learning is nothing more than scoring points by eliminating some peril.