How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  The first method is going to be a lot more effective.

  Every time we switch tasks, we lose time to the switching process. Decide what you’re going to do, then do it. That in-between state is frustrating for us, and it’s frustrating for our kids. Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, asked one thousand kids how they felt about their parents’ smartphones, and the most prevalent answer amounted to “excluded.” Kids know when we’re not all there, and they don’t like it.

  You won’t always be able to get it right, and even if you do, things will come up. I try to remind the kids that it’s the phone—which may look to them like the reason I spent the first period of the hockey game in the parking lot—that makes my job flexible, which is the reason I can drive them to a Friday afternoon tournament game in the first place. It’s good for kids to see how you balance responsibilities, too.

  DON’T SET A DIGITAL DOUBLE STANDARD

  Someday, if they don’t already, your children will have their own phones, laptops, and tablets. How they use them will reflect how you’ve used yours. If your phone has been a regular presence at the dinner table, theirs will be, too. If you regularly look at a screen instead of at them when they’re talking to you, they will someday do the same.

  The two rules above—give yourself time offline, and all or nothing is better—establish standards you’d like your children to use later. We don’t want our kids to be on their phones during family meals. We want them to be able to set the phone aside for a conversation with the people who are with them in the room or the car, or even at the grocery store. If they’ve grown up watching us use a phone as a tool, not a constant companion, it will be easier to teach them to do the same. If we’ve told them we will be spending the next forty-five minutes managing work emails, and then we will put our laptop away—and followed through—then it will be easier, later, to say something like “Please finish texting with your friends and then join us for miniature golf.”

  It will also be easier to accept reasonable screen time and phone use from your teens. It’s fun to be able to text your friends a picture of your hole-in-one under the swinging dinosaur tail, whether you’re fourteen or forty. This isn’t to suggest that you have to follow the same rules and limits around screen time that you set for your children, or even your teenagers. But if you share family values around how and when you connect or go online, setting those limits and keeping them will come more naturally than if you try to persuade your children to do as you say, not as you do.

  IF YOU CAN DO IT OFFLINE, DO

  If you value what you’d consider non-digital activities, like reading and writing, yet you tend to do those things in digital ways (ebooks and email), maybe it’s worth making a concentrated effort to show your kids how much time you put into those things by removing them from your gadget (where, as far as your kids are concerned, you could be playing the latest addictive game) and bringing them visibly, ostentatiously, back into the physical world.

  In other words, why not read a book or paper magazine, and subscribe to the paper version of your local newspaper or a favorite national publication? Send a card or a letter to a friend? Draw a few pictures, write in a journal, doodle on a grocery list?

  Reading an actual book in the evening or on a plane or at the beach is one way to counteract that sense of imbalance we sometimes have about the ways our devices consume our waking hours. A physical book does not contain within it the siren song of email or social media. Notifications from various news sources will not drop down onto its pages. And your children will know, without a doubt, what you’re doing. You’re reading. Quietly engrossed in the printed word.

  You might find you prefer it. I do, although I don’t mind reading ebooks and in fact use the larger iPhone so that I can read on that screen if an unexpected opportunity presents itself. Many children and teenagers say they prefer physical books, too—64 percent of teenagers told a (surprised) British marketing research firm that print books were their favorite, while just 16 percent preferred ebooks (the rest were indifferent).

  Printed newspapers and magazines have another strength: they are themselves alluring. If you want to raise a child who’s informed by the Dallas Morning News or the New York Times, the constant arrival and departure of physical copies of those is the best possible recipe. The front-page headlines and images are designed to evoke curiosity, and the presence of all the available topics, from sports to crime to human interest, as well as the ever-shrinking comic pages, increases the odds that a curious child will pick one up. The same goes for magazines. If you want to raise a New Yorker addict, the covers and cartoons are the gateway drug.

  CONDUCT AN ANNUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT

  Want your kids to have good social media practices later? Start with yours now. Somewhat dubious statistics suggest that most parents put a picture of their newborns on social media within the first hour of the child’s life. That’s followed by milestones and candid shots and family photos and funny stories and more (to the point where some childless friends may find subtle ways to say “Don’t show me more like this”).

  There comes a point, though, when your children might prefer that you shared less. When researchers studied 249 parent-child pairs distributed across forty states, they found that, for the most part, kids and parents agreed on what tech rules families should have: don’t text and drive; don’t be online when someone wants to talk to you. But while children ages ten to seventeen wanted rules for how their parents shared things about them on social media, their parents, for the most part, didn’t even put that on the list. We don’t even think about it. When Karen Lock Kolp’s Facebook page popped up a video she had posted of her son as a four-year-old five years earlier, imitating Gandalf the wizard declaring, “You shall not pass,” she reshared it immediately and called her then-nine-year-old to see.

  He was humiliated. “Please,” he said, “do not share that again.” Since then, she asks first, posts second.

  If you’re prone to posting things on social media now that your child might not appreciate later, balance your desire to share with future searchability. Send the video to a few friends instead of putting it up on YouTube; keep bath-time photos in your personal cloud. I once, during my time as the editor of the New York Times’ parenting and family column, received an essay from a writer about her concern that her infant son’s penis was too small. The writing was good, the topic probably one with which many parents could relate—and yet. I explained, as gently as I could, that I was rejecting the submission on behalf of her future teenager. There are some things that don’t belong in the Times.

  Keep in mind that even young children can feel exposed when their lives are too public. Your six-year-old might be a little surprised, and a little resentful, if a neighbor asks if the tooth fairy returned the tooth she took last weekend—thanks to your post about the resulting tears. Your eight-year-old will be mortified if the rabbi or pastor asks if she’s going to do better on her spelling test next week. Some family things should be kept in the family.

  REMEMBER, YOUR FUTURE DRIVERS ARE WATCHING

  One last thought about you and your phone—if you aren’t putting that phone aside while you drive already, start doing it now, in a big, loud, pointed way. “I’m putting my phone in my bag because I’m driving!” you should say. “I’m not answering my phone even on the hands-free because I’m merging onto the highway!”

  Pull over to send a text. Have a child read you texts and type replies if you really must be in contact while you drive. Pull over to set up a new podcast or audio book, or to have a conversation that involves anything more than just “Yes, we’re having trouble finding a parking place.”

  Don’t touch the phone while the car is moving.

  Why? Because that toddler in the backseat will be the driver in the front seat one day, and he is watching and learning from what you do far more than from what you say. You may thi
nk you can glance down at your phone real quick and then back up at the road (you’re wrong). But do you want your sixteen-year-old to do the same?

  If you don’t want them to do it while they’re driving, you can’t do it while you’re driving.

  Kids and Teens and Screens: Limits That Leave Room to Grow

  We’re parents. We set limits; that’s what we do. If we haven’t actively set them, it’s often because our unspoken limits haven’t been pushed up against—yet. Screen time is not an exception. When I first began drafting this chapter, I thought I’d be considering two perspectives. Call them “the case for limits” and “the case against limits.” But there was a catch, and a big one: I couldn’t find any parents who didn’t have any limits at all. Many initially said they didn’t have limits, and I presume those are the same parents who respond to surveys by saying they don’t set limits on either content or time spent online.

  But dig a little deeper, and it’s quickly clear that “no limits” is a fiction. “No limits” means no set rules, not a household online Wild Wild West. Some parents said they had no set limits, but that they did put a stop to watching or playing if they perceived that it had gone on too long. Others limited passive but not active uses, or had no limits on certain games and shows “as long as chores and homework were done first.” Parents might allow iPad games and interactive books mixed in with everything else in the toy box but limit television, or allow unlimited television (on the theory that it would get old after a while) but not gaming. They might not restrict a teen’s use, but still require that the phone stay downstairs at bedtime or turn off the Internet at a certain hour. And even the very most permissive of parents limited content, with violent first-person shooter games having age limits and porn off-limits entirely. Show me a parent with “no limits,” and I’ll show you a parent whose child hasn’t tried to download The Many Faces of Death. The question isn’t whether you need limits. It’s how specific and spoken those limits will be.

  We’re right to set boundaries in this area. Children need structure in their lives, and providing that structure (even if it’s just a sense that we’re not going to let them watch or play for “too long”) helps them feel like part of a steady, secure, predictable system, which makes almost everyone happier. Technology is specifically designed to make all of us—young children, teenagers, and parents, too—want more. Limits help us combat a force that’s larger than we are.

  But while we should be looking for the right limits to use with our family (more on that later), we shouldn’t be panicking over letting our children, even very young children, watch and play in moderation, and in ways that work for us. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics recently revised its guidelines away from suggesting “no” media for children under two. Some screen time with age-appropriate material is fine for kids.

  On the other hand, research on whether some media can actually benefit children, usually by teaching them something they did not know before, is limited and somewhat inconclusive, but that’s okay, too. If you’re the parent of a baby, toddler, or preschooler, and you just need a break to take a shower, you don’t need that break to actively teach your child Mandarin Chinese. You just need to be able to take it without guilt—and you can. A little bit of video, designed to let you catch your breath, regain your patience, shower, or have an uninterrupted conversation with a friend, will have no observable effects on your child’s future.

  For children at every age—and even for yourself—don’t think of your technology rules as limiting something dangerous. Instead, think about them as protecting something valuable: the time you and your children spend, together and separately, doing other things. That time does need protection, because there is an entire industry dedicated to pulling you and your kids away from reality and into a world populated with advertising, consumer messages, and in-app purchases. Remember, too, that protection is not enough. Your goal is not only to control the ways your children interact with screens, but to teach them, as they grow, to control themselves.

  Setting Limits for Happier Screen Time

  The “right” rules and limits look different for different families. Ask your peers what they do (as I did) and you’re likely to get answers that range from a total ban (usually for younger children) to “we just yell at them when it’s too much” (heard especially from parents of teenagers with smartphones). There are a whole lot of ways to get this right, and a clear need for our policies to evolve as both our gadgets and our children change. We’re not working toward an absolute, but toward a balance that blends technology with everything else we want to do in life.

  Like nearly everyone else, I’ve wrestled with the question “What kind of limit should we set?” against a constantly changing landscape of what, exactly, we were limiting. I set our family policy long ago, when my oldest child was eight and his younger siblings five, three, and three. I had the first iPhone, but it was far too precious to allow little hands to hold. iPads didn’t exist. I was limiting a desktop computer, a portable DVD player with limited battery life, a Nintendo system, and satellite television—and yet, the policy I came up with then still works for us today.

  As much as I’d like to tell you that our screen-time policy reflected much deep thinking about our family values and our future, it did not. Instead, it was entirely based on how much I hated the begging and negotiating that had begun to surround any kind of media time. Can I watch a show? Can I? Can I? Why not? Can I? Just one? Just part of one? Can I play my DS then? Just for a few minutes? Can I? Why not? Can I? Can I? Our younger daughter even had a special abbreviation for “Can I”: Ki? Ki watch? Ki play? Ki? Ki?

  I needed a rule that would let them answer the question for themselves. My goal wasn’t really to lessen their time with video games and screens, which was in a fine place, but to lessen my involvement with it. I considered time limits, but how would I track them? If each child had an hour on the single computer, how would that work if three kids wanted it an hour before bedtime? If everyone had an hour of TV a day, would that end up being four hours, or would I be banishing children who’d used their hour from the room with the TV? I knew I’d be forever setting timers and repeating “It’s time to get off” and giving warnings and dealing with “Just one more minute” and “I’m almost done.”

  So instead of “how long” limits, we set a black-and-white “when” limit: nothing on weekdays, open season on weekends unless things got out of hand, with any complaints or whining about a “turn it off” request being met with an immediate removal of the next day’s privileges. I was willing to be hard-core about that (in part because I was always happy to have an excuse to turn the screens off entirely), and I think it only took twice before they figured out that I meant it. When school breaks and summer vacation rolled around, we kept the same clear rules and found an unexpected benefit: with clearly defined times when video entertainment just wasn’t available, the kids always had an expectation that some days they’d be doing other things.

  Those rules have worked for us for eight years, and they’re largely working still. I might not have sat down with our family values in mind when I came up with the weekends-only rule, but I turned out to hit upon the one thing about screen time that mattered to me most. My kids internalized the idea that there should be a limit, and that they should know what it was and stick to it. (Amazingly, in all this time, we’ve only had a child sneak screen time once.) Having established rules contributes to our family happiness, and mine: everyone knows what to expect, and even when technology changes, the rules are simple enough to stay the same. We also tell children when they’ve had enough, if we need to (it’s amazing how many hours a child can spend with a screen over the course of a rainy Saturday).

  When our two older children were able to buy their own phones and laptops, we asked them to respect the rules regarding games and television, and they do. So far, we haven’t had to limit their phone time—which doesn’t mean
we won’t. They’ve had the experience of realizing they’ve frittered away a day they’d meant to spend doing something else with time online, and they don’t like it. They have learned (slowly) that the limits in place on other media help them do other things they love or just things they need to get done. I encourage them frequently to apply that knowledge to their phone, to keep their notifications off so that they control when they choose to engage, and to be aware that time spent scrolling Instagram doesn’t usually feel good later and is often a sign that you’re not feeling great in the first place.

  Don’t imagine that this doesn’t mean I’m not driving along telling my daughter to put her phone away and to tell me about her day at school, because I am. But they use an app that tells them how much time they’re spending texting and scrolling (it’s called Moment, and I use it, too), and they are slowly coming to see the value in leaving the phone across the room when they do homework or in their pocket when they’re out with the family. The limits they’ve been following for years have set the tone for limiting themselves.

  But as much as I like our rules, they’re not for everyone. When you’re trying to set your own family tech rules, you’ll consider both your own preferences and the age and needs of your kids, and you’ll need to be open as things and kids change. In this case, you don’t have to get it right every time translates to you don’t have to get it right the first time. You’re allowed to make adjustments as you go—in fact, you’ll probably have to. Here’s what you should be thinking about for younger children and middle graders in a household where media access is largely through devices controlled by parents, and what you should consider later, when the children possess media access points (phones, tablets, laptops) of their own.