There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  At that point, I sorely regretted ever having brought the tablet into our house and secretly wished that I could send it back to where it came from, but not before I had obliterated it with a few choice tools. When Maya was six I got what I had hoped for, but not in the way I had expected. I was in the middle of navigating a rental car through a busy roundabout in Italy, complete with honking drivers, frantic lane changes, a nonfunctioning GPS, and two different exits with signs pointing to Rome when it happened. First, the tablet made Maya carsick. Then it died. Fortunately, the girls’ cousin Oliver, who was also in the car with us, still had a functioning iPad, which he somewhat reluctantly shared during the remaining two hours in the car. But there was enough grief over the dead Kindle and bickering over the iPad that I vowed never to let my kids become dependent on electronic entertainment in the car again.

  For a full year, the Kindle was tucked away in a drawer and left for dead, mostly because I had no idea how to dispose of it in an environmentally sensible way. The girls got used to life without it, going on six-hour-long road trips with nothing but a few toys and some crayons in the backseat without complaints. Then, unexpected resurrection. “Mom! The Kindle is working!” Maya shouted excitedly one morning. Somehow the tablet had come back to life.

  I tried to embrace it, telling myself that even though I had been born in the Jurassic era, screens were going to be a part of my children’s future, and I knew that digital media would serve them well later in life. Plus, I figured that banning the Kindle outright would only make it more appealing. Instead I deleted Candy Crush, limited video games to the weekend, and tried to steer the girls toward some educational apps (most of which they quickly lost interest in). Eventually, as I grew tired of the girls squabbling over the only tablet in the house, I decided to buy Nora a Kindle of her own.

  Even with our new rules in place, it took a conscious effort on my part just to match their screen time with “green time,” and when Maya was seven and Nora four, shortly before we left for Sweden, I started to wonder if I wasn’t fighting a losing battle after all. When Nora’s preschool class got to make wish lists for Santa, her classmates listed things like a GI Joe, Legos, and a pet turtle. Meanwhile, Nora’s list was topped by an iPhone, followed by a laptop. Shortly after that, Maya told me, “I like playing outside, but I like playing Minecraft more.”

  I knew I was dealing with a first-world problem. But still, I felt like a failure.

  According to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average American eight- to eighteen-year-old racks up over seven and a half hours of recreational media use per day, not including texting. That’s nearly fifty-three hours per week—more time than they spend going to school. Younger kids are not that far behind. A 2009 survey by Nielsen showed that American children age two to five years spend over four and a half hours per day in front of a TV screen, not counting time spent playing video games. And this was at a time when smartphones were still a novelty and the iPad had yet to be released. In comparison, preschoolers in Scandinavian countries spent just one to one and a half hours watching TV every day in 2014. Excessive use of digital entertainment has likely contributed to the epidemic of children who “don’t know” how to play outside, as I often hear Americans who are my age and older complain. Plus, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a child who spends over four and a half hours in front of a TV every day—on top of playing video games, going to preschool or school, attending after-school activities, doing homework, eating, and sleeping—simply doesn’t have much time left for building forts in the backyard.

  My children were nowhere close to those numbers, but there were still several reasons why I decided to enforce strict limits on screen time at home. Aside from all the physical and mental benefits of playing outdoors, I didn’t want my daughters to lose their fascination with the “slow” entertainment mostly available in nature, or their ability to play imaginatively and creatively with very simple means (in Italian rental cars and elsewhere). I also spent enough hours working in front of screens every day to know that I didn’t want them to gobble up my kids’ childhoods.

  By the time we left for Sweden I was sick and tired of constantly negotiating and policing screen time, and I was wondering how our move would change the dynamics of this balancing act. Scandinavians are known to have a voracious appetite for new technology and Swedes have managed to digitize nearly every aspect of their lives, from the battery-driven robotic lawn mowers that roam in every other homeowner’s yard in eerie silence, to the stores and restaurants that have completely abolished cash in favor of electronic payments with cards or smartphones. Ninety percent of Swedes have broadband in their homes, and 97 percent have a cell phone. Many of the most popular computer games and apps, including Minecraft, Candy Crush Saga, and the Battlefield series, were developed by Swedes, as were the free call service Skype and the music-streaming app Spotify. In 2005, the average Swedish child started using the internet at age nine, according to the Swedish Media Council, a government agency that gathers data on children’s media use and is tasked with protecting minors from harmful media uses. But since then, the popularity of tablets has increased dramatically and made games and the internet more accessible to younger children. Today, a majority of three-year-olds have used the internet and 15 percent of the two-year-olds are online daily. In 2014, as many as 80 percent of Swedish two- to four-year-olds used a tablet at home, and 12 percent had their own, a number that has quadrupled since the last survey in 2012–2013.

  Swedish children watched a lot less TV than their American peers, but when it came to new technology, they seemed to be at least as plugged-in, if not more so.

  Considering how ardent Swedes are about fresh air and outdoor play, I’m surprised when I initially can’t find any consistent national guidelines on media use for young children. Turning to experts for advice on the topic is a little bit like listening to a PETA activist and a hog farmer discussing the merits of pig slaughter. On the one hand, there’s Hugo Lagercrantz, a renowned pediatrician and senior professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, who claims that children two years and under should have no screen time at all, since they need direct contact with a caregiver more than anything. Too much screen time for young children “fragments their lives and can lead to concentration difficulties, impaired language development and reading skills, and obesity,” he writes. On the other hand, some experts accuse Lagercrantz of fearmongering without good scientific basis for his advice, and argue that what you do in front of the screen is more important than how long you do it. Some even believe that the term screen time is outdated and obsolete, since so many of us pretty much walk around with powerful computers in our pockets and can access the internet at any time.

  Lagercrantz based his restrictive screen time recommendation on the guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the gold standard that I myself had tried to live by. But at the end of 2015, the AAP announced that the organization was planning to moderate its recommendations, acknowledging that “in a world where ‘screen time’ is becoming simply ‘time,’ our policies must evolve or become obsolete.” The new guidelines, which came out in 2016, lower the age at which electronic media may be introduced to eighteen months and lift the restrictions on video chatting for children of all ages. For children aged two to five, the new AAP guidelines keep the previous limit of one hour per day of high-quality programming. Some tech buffs and media outlets made the updates sound like a major game changer for attitudes toward children’s media use, but AAP’s core message for parents and other caregivers essentially remains the same: “In summary, for children younger than two years, evidence for benefits of media is still limited, adult interaction with the child during media use is crucial, and there continues to be evidence of harm from excessive digital media use.” Meanwhile, the Swedish Media Council has declared that it is not planning to referee the debate about screen time, leaving parents to figure things out on their own.

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bsp; When we arrive in Sweden, I’m not surprised to see that a lot of Swedish ten-year-olds have newer smartphones than I do, and it doesn’t take long before Maya notices too. “Can I have a cell phone? Pleeeeeaaaase? Everybody else has one!” The last part is not quite true, but I do notice that smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous. Most preschools, including Nora’s, even have an iPad or two these days.

  “We don’t let them sit by themselves with it and we don’t use it to comfort them if they’re upset, but we do sometimes let them play an educational game together,” Barbro reassures me when I quiz her about it one day. “And we only let them use it for short periods of time. It’s a pedagogical tool, not something to kill time with.”

  Many of Maya’s classmates are allowed to use their tablets every day, even if it’s only for half an hour or an hour while their parents are cooking dinner, and initially I feel like I’m the only parent in Sweden trying to limit my children’s screen time, akin to the cultural reactionaries who claimed that jazz music was the work of the devil or that train travel would cause women’s uteruses to fall out. Luckily, my sister Susanne is there to make me feel like a cutting-edge technology maven. Since she’s concerned about electromagnetic radiation, all laptops and tablets at her house are plugged into the wall and the Wi-Fi is turned off most of the time. This doesn’t fully eliminate her kids’ screen time, but it does make it a lot more inconvenient to get online. Especially since, in order to turn on the Wi-Fi, you have to make a treacherous climb up the cluttered, dark stairs that lead to the attic, where the router is placed on the dusty floor like a rejected Christmas present from Aunt Edna.

  My sister is far from a typical Swedish parent in her approach to screen time, but the more I talk to others, the more I realize that many of them are also concerned about the impact of electronics on their children’s lives. A few, like my sister, worry about radiation, but far more have noticed that digital entertainment is addictive and cutting into their children’s outdoor play and physical activity.

  Sara, the special education teacher whose daughter is in the same class as Maya, says that her five-year-old and nine-year-old have tablets, but that she has fairly strict limits on how often and how long they can use them. “I work with kids who come to school bouncing off the walls on Monday because they spent all weekend inside playing video games. I keep thinking that that’s going to happen to my kids, too, if I don’t set limits,” she says. “My five-year-old son would sit all day if I let him. After a while I get so stressed-out that I just say, ‘Now we need to put away the tablets and go outside.’ I think it was easier for our parents, because we didn’t have that kind of entertainment inside. We would go out on our own and stay outside for hours.”

  Petra, whose son Oscar is in Maya’s class, says that she appreciates her son’s iPad because it helps him learn English and practice reading. She likes that he knows how to use FaceTime when they’re apart and that he often plays video games together with friends, rather than isolating himself. But she also recognizes that the tablet comes with a downside. “We noticed that some games became addictive,” she says. “Oscar would panic and start to cry when it was time to put away the iPad. That’s when we decided that something had to change. We didn’t want him to become enslaved by it, so now we have a ban on the iPad during the workweek, at least when it comes to playing games.”

  Petra and her husband didn’t stop there. As they both work long hours—she as a middle manager and he as the head of his own advertising agency—they decided to put away their own phones and iPads from the time they get home until the kids go to bed. “When we’re home, we want full focus on being together as a family, and we want the kids to be outside and play, because I think it’s good for them.”

  As Petra and her husband had already discovered, it’s not only children’s overuse of digital media that can cause problems. A British State of Education report found that four-fifths of teachers are worried about children not being prepared for starting primary school (which in the UK happens at age five) due to poor social skills and delayed speech, which many of the teachers attribute to parents’ excessive use of smartphones and tablets. “There is limited parent/child interaction,” one teacher writes, according to the Guardian. “Four-year-olds know how to swipe a phone but haven’t a clue about conversations.” According to the survey, as many as a third of the students who are enrolled in primary school are not ready for the classroom.

  Pretty much every new technology that has revolutionized our everyday lives has been followed by some sort of moral panic, especially when it comes to how it will affect children and women (remember those flying uteruses?). But even though the claim that total abstinence from electronics is best for the youngest children has been called into question, experts seem to agree that what infants and toddlers need most for healthy development are interactions with caring adults in the real world. Occasionally playing with a tablet or watching a show on TV will not cause brain damage in young children, as some of the more sensational headlines have claimed. It can even boost cognition if done with the guidance of an adult. Moderation, however, is key. The side effects of too much screen time—increased risk of sleep deprivation, attention problems, anxiety, depression, and obesity, according to the National Institutes of Health—are real.

  Considering this, I find that the best advice regarding screen time comes from the national handbook for the nurse-midwives who counsel all Swedish parents during regular checkups from their child’s birth until he or she starts school. Acknowledging that it’s inherently hard to give advice about screen time, since it can encompass everything from playing educational games on an iPad to passively watching a movie, the handbook notes that both can benefit the child in multiple ways “as long as the family also spends time communicating more actively, stays physically active and spends time outdoors.”

  When, how much, and what type of screen time is appropriate comes down to the individual child, his or her age and personality, and how much he or she engages in other activities. The handbook suggests having set rules around screen time in families where the screens tend to cause conflicts—for example, by having a maximum amount of time per day or avoiding screens during certain days or times every week. It also helps to have screen-free zones in the home, like the children’s bedrooms or at the dinner table during meals.

  Lotta Bohlin, the nurse-midwife, says that the topic of screen time can be touchy for some parents, since it’s often a way for them to get some much-needed time to themselves. “For children under three years we suggest keeping screen time to a maximum of half an hour per day, and preferably in the company of an adult. Some programming for children is very intense and action-filled, so we recommend choosing quieter shows. Then you can gradually increase the time that they watch.”

  When I first started planning our trip to Sweden, I toyed with the idea of leaving the tablets at home and unplugging completely for six months. Then I decided that the girls would have enough changes to adjust to, including living in a tiny homestead with just a few of their regular toys. So the tablets came with us, along with the same limits on screen time that we had had in the States. But after a couple of months in Sweden, I find myself relaxing the rules a little bit. Nora spends most of her day at preschool, where there is no TV and the iPad is used sparingly, so her screen time is cut significantly and her outdoor playtime is increased dramatically. At Maya’s school, tablets are rarely used in the lower grades, and she’s already getting a lot of physical activity outdoors at recess, at fritids, and at home after school. We still save computer games for the weekend, but during the week both girls sometimes use the tablet to work on math problems, dance to music videos, curate their individual Spotify playlists, and occasionally look up information. Back in the States, the challenge for me had always been to get the girls outside enough after my workday was over, when I also had to prepare dinner, do laundry, help with homework, run errands, and do all the other little things that make a home go ro
und. We made it outside every day, but not always for as long as I’d have liked. Now I had all kinds of help making it happen throughout the day, every day. To say that it was nice would be the understatement of the year. And for the first time I feel like we’re successfully able to strike a healthy balance between green time and screen time.

  One Friday, Maya’s friend Liv comes over after school for a sleepover. They play outside as usual, and after a while I notice them coming back from the woods with a motley collection of nature items: a small bouquet of yellow coltsfoot and white wood anemone, three pinecones (one intact and two that had been decimated by a squirrel), some pine branches, a twig from a blueberry bush, and various leaves. They line up all the items on the front porch, then come in and get white paper, colored pencils, and Maya’s Kindle. Maya is in high spirits.

  “We’re going to make a nature journal!” she announces. “We’re going to look up facts on Google and write our own book. We’re going to be authors!”

  For an hour and a half, Maya and Liv secretively labor with their project on the porch. Then they present the result, a twelve-page nonfiction book called Facts About Nature. On each page, they have meticulously drawn one of the items that they have collected and written a few sentences about it. “This is a fun book. It is about nature,” the summary on the back of the book declares.

  “We’re going to read it to the class tomorrow and make extra copies of it. We might even ask if we can put a copy in the library,” Maya says, visibly proud of her achievement.