We aren’t an Instagram-ready family. On our best days my wife and I are like an off-brand Jason Momoa and Lisa Bonet, elder millennial creatives with a little edge. It’s me and her against the world, building our family together and watching with gratitude and wonder as our kids grow and become fully realized people. There’s not an owner’s manual for this thing… its mostly about figuring it out as you go along. It’s like putting together a piece of Ikea furniture with no instructions, or no idea what its supposed to look like when you’re done. Is it a table? Is it a bookcase? Am I using the right tool? What are all of these extra pieces?
At this stage, with a nine (almost ten) year old boy and an eight year old girl, we’re starting to see the results of many of our parenting decisions. Not all of them have been great. There’s always a “chicken or egg” debate about certain behavioral or developmental struggles that we encounter. I tend to be a bit more on the “nature” side of things as opposed to my wife who leans toward “nurture.” I’m not sure we can really connect our children’s current condition to specific parenting decisions and I’m not really ready to micro-analyze things in that way. Children are, in large part, who they are. We have less impact than we might think. That has historically been my position.
That being said, we have concerns. Our 9YO son, we’ll call him Jimmy, has been diagnosed with Autism and ADHD as well as anxiety. It’s been quite a long road in addressing his particular needs and we’ve made fairly good progress. He does well in school academically. Lately, however, he’s been having severe meltdowns, and we’ve been seeing some very concerning behaviors including violence and very dark existential language. We’ve sought professional help but it seems to be very difficult to access this kind of care and there is much debate on its effectiveness anyway.
I’ve long had a nagging sense of guilt and dread around screen time. Both kids love their screens and my wife and I have not been terribly disciplined in regulating it. We occasionally clamp down for a week or two but after a while its off to the races, and Jimmy is back on screens with somewhat reckless abandon. Waiting for the chickens to come home to roost, I know down deep that our lackadaisical approach to screen time is something we will come to regret. As parents we’ve resolved to make a last-ditch effort to liberate our children from their screens, or at the very least see what happens when we try!
This SubStack will document our SCREEN FREE SUMMER! We’ll be trying to drastically reduce screen time over the summer months, issuing draconian restrictions and experimenting with new strategies. Will this be a disaster? Probably. Will we stick with it? I am determined to. Will our children complain about us to their therapist in 20 odd years? Most definitely.