If there is one thing parents universally lie about it is how much time there kids spent in front of the television or computer screen, and if they aren’t lying about it they are adamantly explaining defending or justifying it.
I know because I do it.
So let’s stop lying.
I’ll start.
When my cranky infant was four months old my husband went out and spent one hundred and twenty-two dollars we didn’t have on the entire Baby Einstein set.
I berated him a bit but if the kid had sat still I would have let him watch the entire twelve part series of animal puppetry dancing to classical music while I slept for four hours straight.
Once when I was tired from working late during holiday season (i.e. hung-over), I let Donovan watch Harry Potter from start to finish. Not the movie, the series.
One Christmas vacation after Beau opened his present of Guitar Hero for Play Station Two, he only left the basement for sustenance and bathroom breaks and I let him.
He mastered every song before New Years Eve; by the time the ball dropped he was like Jimi Hendrix without the hair and all was well.
I once watched an entire season of a television show in one evening/night/ morning/afternoon and would have kept on going to season two if I hadn’t had a 3:30 call time at the museum.
Ooooooh, I feel dirty.
It is an epidemic, and I have come down with it a time or two.
I’m not going to quote a bunch of statistics but I will tell you this, studies say that infants as young as three months watch an average of 2.6 hours of television per day; between ages eight and eighteen they manage to bump that number to an astonishing seven hours a day.
Fifty hours a week.
That’s more hours than you spend at your full time job.
Kids who still carry lunchboxes with cartoon characters on them have cell phones and smart phones and I-touches and laptops in their room, in their pockets and in their backpacks and they are online…a lot.
I have no problem with technology. Nothing helped my writing reach the world more than the great wide web; I would never have had that amazing 20 year reunion without the help of a little friend called Facebook and I have been able to reach new and old friends through the internet but excessive electronics keep you from exercise, fresh air and human contact.
Anything else that kept us from all those things we might call prison.
In the end you will never fondly look back on an afternoon spent alone with your Wii; you will never open a scrapbook and find a picture of you hugging your laptop and you will never ever reminisce about that awesome game of Angry Birds as you linger on your death bed.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it and by my calculations at fifty hours a week starting at age eight your kids will lose twelve years of their life to the screen by age fifty.
Twelve years is a long time and a lot of wasted life and that’s a price nobody should be willing to pay.
About Rebecca Suder