Often times in conversations with parents on navigating problematic and excess screen time with kids, the word helpless comes up ever so often. There are times as digital parents, the screen-lite / screen free life seems unattainable and just downright impossible. It feels as though we are fighting a loosing battle with big tech and we keep trying to swim against the tide. When I deliver a workshop on screen time, I encourage parents to take a step back and take an eagles eye when thinking of screen time. You have to look at how parenting has evolved over the years, the rise of helicopter parenting over the past 30 – 40 years, the big push for safety – in playgrounds, in neighborhoods etc and just the overall shift in how we interact with our neighbors and those in our communities. We have become self sufficient as a society – long gone are the days you could ask your neighbor for salt if yours run out as you made dinner – our back yards are becoming larger while our front porches have shrunk in size. From the mid-50s with the industrial revolution, there was a big push for people to move closer to cities in search of work then there was the rise of two family incomes – all slowly fragmenting the social fabric of having close-knit families living around each other. The casualties of all these shifts is the loss of community and eventually childcare support – from family, the inability of children to play independently without hovering parents at playgrounds, and the resulting neighborhoods where the most conversation is an obligatory wave from across the yard.
Enter social trust. Loosely put, this is the belief that you are acting in my best interests and I the same for you. In South Africa, there is a belief in the word “Ubuntu” – I am because we are. We are all human. We all want pretty much the same things in life. Today our neighbors friend daughter (5) came to knock on our door to play with my daughter for the first time and off they went down the street. My daughter returned after a while with a popsicle and her friend and they continued playing at our place for over an hour. I offered them refreshments, I continued doing my dishes and read a book. Social trust. Even though my daughters friends mum and I have never formally meant, she knew her daughter was safe. Social trust. It is the idea that the kids are nobody’s but really they are everybody’s. Our role as parents is just to provide a safe space, and let them play.
We must try something. Anything. Childhood cannot stand the onslaught of the persuasive nature of technology without social trust. We need to go back to basics. If it means opening up our garage doors and putting out watermelons and drinks for the kids as they play, then lets get to it.
Social trust in communities is the secret sauce I believe to problematic screen time. If kids played more in neighborhoods – like I mean hours of uninterrupted play for hours, their cups would be so full that screens would be relegated back to their place – for entertainment purposes. I have been working on an initiative that hopefully will get off the ground by the end of summer. It is called “Until the Lights come on.” This is the idea of allowing kids the agency and providing the safe space for kids in neighbourhoods to play until the proverbial lights come on, until dinner is ready etc.