I have been thinking about The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and about the uncomfortable questions it asks of parents.
Not bad parents. Not careless parents. Just tired parents. Working parents. Parents trying to answer emails, make dinner, protect their children, survive a Texas summer, and occasionally finish a cup of coffee while it is still warm.
Parents like me.
My children have iPads. They play video games. I am not writing this from inside a perfectly screen free home filled with quietly occupied children arranging wooden toys beneath filtered natural light.
That is sometimes our life.
Other times, my daughter is having a complete meltdown because her iPad is not charged and she cannot imagine surviving a car ride without it.
In those moments, I have to wonder: When did a helpful tool begin to feel like a necessity?
The Screens Are Not the Villain
Screens have helped our family in real and meaningful ways.
My children were introduced to tablets young, particularly for long flights home to Malaysia. Educational programs helped with language development and introduced them to things we may not have taught at home. They now use Rosetta Stone to learn Japanese before our upcoming trip.
For my son, William, who has dyslexia, technology is not simply entertainment. Tools such as text to speech and typing can give him greater access to learning and help him participate more confidently.
Technology is part of the world our children are growing into. Pretending otherwise does not prepare them for that world.
But perhaps the question is not whether screens belong in childhood.
Perhaps the question is: How much of childhood are we willing to give them?
When Convenience Becomes Dependence
I work from home. Sometimes I need to take a meeting, and a screen is the fastest, simplest way to keep my children safely occupied.
There is no dramatic parenting failure in that sentence. Sometimes convenience is necessary.
The problem begins when convenience becomes our first answer to every quiet moment, every car ride, every restaurant wait, every complaint of boredom, and every afternoon that feels too hot or too difficult to manage.
I understand the temptation.
Outdoor play sounds wonderful until you remember the sunscreen, the bug spray, the water bottles, the heat, the mud, and the possibility that someone will be bitten, scraped, or emotionally devastated by a beetle.
Television feels safe. Video games feel contained. Inside, we know where our children are.
Parents are not keeping children indoors because we do not care. We are doing it because we care so much that we want to protect them from every possible hurt.
But while we are protecting them from scraped knees, are we unintentionally exposing them to something harder to see?
A shortened attention span. Constant stimulation. Unrealistic images of life. Mature content they are not prepared to understand. The belief that boredom is an emergency that must be solved immediately.
What Happens After Too Much Screen Time?
In our family, the effects are not theoretical.
During the summer, when the limits become looser and screen time becomes easier to justify, I notice the difference.
My children become more agitated. Their tempers shorten. Meltdowns arrive faster. Turning off a device feels less like ending an activity and more like removing something they believe they need.
And yet, when they move through the boredom rather than around it, something else happens.
On a road trip from Texas to Minnesota, I packed everything: tablets, a Nintendo, coloring books, sensory toys, and pipe cleaners.
Of all those carefully selected forms of entertainment, the pipe cleaners became the unexpected favorite.
They twisted them into characters, creatures, shapes, and inventions. They created their own entertainment from almost nothing.
Maybe imagination does not always disappear.
Maybe it simply gets crowded out.
Are We Letting Them Grow Up Too Fast?
When I worry about children growing up too quickly, I am not only thinking about screen time measured in minutes.
I am thinking about what screens allow them to encounter before they are ready.
Children can be exposed to adult conversations, adult expectations, unrealistic lifestyles, constant comparison, and polished versions of life that even adults struggle to process.
They see how everyone else supposedly looks, lives, travels, performs, and succeeds before they have had enough time to understand who they are.
Childhood used to offer more distance from the adult world.
Now, the adult world can arrive through a screen before a child has even learned how to sit through a quiet car ride.
What Might They Be Missing?
I worry that our children may become skilled at navigating digital worlds without learning enough about the physical one.
Do they know where food comes from?
Have they planted something and waited for it to grow?
Have they studied bugs, built forts, negotiated the rules of a game, solved an argument without an adult, or learned how to join a group already at play?
Real childhood is full of social contracts no app can teach.
It requires children to wait, compromise, make friends, lose games, repair disagreements, solve problems, and discover that not every moment is designed around them.
Those lessons are not always comfortable.
But neither is growing up.
Our Family’s Boundaries
We are not pursuing a total digital detox.
Screens are generally treated as a reward in our home, although I freely admit that the rules become more flexible during summer and whenever work demands more of me.
We also have firmer boundaries.
We do not allow YouTube in our home. We do not allow games that connect our children with other players. My children may use screens and play games, but I am not comfortable giving strangers access to them through online play.
We are also trying to protect one place from becoming digital territory.
The dinner table.
No tablets. No phones. No games.
Just food, conversation, interruptions, complaints, laughter, and the occasional argument over who received the better looking piece of chicken.
It is not revolutionary.
But perhaps reclaiming childhood does not begin with a revolution.
Perhaps it begins with dinner.
Making Room for Something Else
This belief is also part of why I love open ended toys.
Not because wooden toys are morally superior to video games, or because muted colors make someone a better parent.
But because simple toys ask children to participate.
They must decide what the object becomes. They must build the world, create the problem, assign the characters, and continue the story.
The toy does less, so the child can do more.
That is also the kind of minimalism I hope to teach my children. They do not need the newest, loudest, most advertised thing in order to be entertained. Sometimes a few thoughtfully chosen materials and enough uninterrupted time are all imagination needs.
The Childhood I Hope They Remember
Years from now, I hope William and Feia remember feeling safe.
I hope they do not believe they missed out because we had limits. I hope they remember travel, games, technology, and fun, but also forts, crafts, gardens, bugs, building, family dinners, and long stretches of play that belonged entirely to them.
I am not trying to raise children who never use technology.
I am trying to raise children who know they can live without it.
Screens can be useful. They can educate, connect, support, and entertain.
But childhood should not take place entirely behind glass.
Perhaps the question is not whether our children have iPads.
Perhaps it is whether the iPad is one small part of childhood, or whether it is quietly becoming the place where childhood happens.
Maybe tonight, we can begin with something simple.
Charge the devices later.
Sit at the table now.