Rethinking "Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19 (Part Two)

Sangita Shrestova:  I was struck by Henry’s observation that parenting through media calls for a different set of parenting skills.  In reading what has been said so far, I am starting to see some of the contours of what such skills might need to be. Clearly, there is a lot to be said for a mindset that appreciates, rather than denigrates, the important role that popular culture plays in children's lives. We also need to be able to recognize the opportunities for discussion that TV shows, and other media content provide. And, we need to have the tools to encourage the imagination at opportune moments. For me, this all begins with a need for open-minded listening, which was so poignantly captured in Susan’s recounting of the conversation she had with her friend’s daughter about Disney princesses. As Jackson Bird, a trans-activist and former staff member of the Harry Potter Alliance, once said in an interview, “We need to learn to listen, to really listen.” On some level, this may seem to be an almost banal observation, and, yet, I see again and again, that we (adults) often do not really tune into what children are saying, and just as importantly, what they are not saying (but are communicating in other ways) about their relationship with popular culture. 

I am particularly tuned into the non-verbal aspects of “listening” because of my own background in dance and performance. I also spent years working with Bollywood dance fans, whose imagination is activated when they re-choreograph the dances contained in Hindi films. For these dancer fans, choreography becomes the space where the imagination is activated. This is where they engage, critique, re-interpret popular culture content.  I realize that this may be too far afield, but I actually have been thinking a lot about the performative and embodied possibilities for parenting through media, particularly at this moment when our physicality is limited in such profound ways and where I see so much desire for imagined and actual co-presence. Henry described action figures as “authoring tools” for re-imagined stories. I am really interested in encouraging improvised and staged performances inspired by popular culture as moments that allow us to embody and share our imagination.

Henry Jenkins: Amidst the many great questions that Susan posed for us, the one that struck me the most was the question, “When do we feel pride about our relationships to popular culture?” As a culture, we are programmed to feel shame and guilt, but rarely pride. Watching television, one of my mentors used to say, was like masturbation. We all do it sometimes, but we don’t like to talk about it, and never in front of the neighbors. I used to wear a button that said simply “I Love TV” and people would struggle so much to figure out what TV stood for, because it couldn’t possibly mean television. Why would you wear a button proclaiming your love for television?  

I think this is part of the hidden curriculum of the concept of “screen time.” We start from a logic which says this is something we should minimize because it has no intrinsic value and in many cases, is associated with some social harm, if nothing else because it takes time away from other, more valuable activities we should be engaging with, and “Aren’t you ashamed to let your children watch television instead of reading books or socializing with their friends or playing outside?” Well, Covid-19 is shifting our priorities on some of those other things, leading many people around the world to the conclusion that maybe it is better -- for now at least -- for children to socialize with friends (or go to school) through a screen. 

“Screen time” talk starts from a series of normalized assumptions about what it means to consume media. The first of those assumptions is that what happens on screens is completely separate from the other activities in our lives. So, in Sangita’s example above, television is assumed to be a mental activity (of a relative low order) which has little or nothing to do with our physical bodies (or more accurately, it involves bodies at rest rather than in movement.) I wonder if the people who make this mind-body distinction have ever seen children watching (or perhaps playing with) television. They are rarely sitting still, they are only sometimes giving it their full attention, it IS integrated into a range of other activities, and they are often physically moving around in one way or another while they are “watching” the show. One reason they watch the same programs over and over is that they catch different bits each time, though the other reason is that the ritualized nature of certain moments are comforting and familiar. We know that children learn stories through their bodies and their voices, and contrary to our high-low culture assumptions, this is as true for television as it is for children’s books.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is socially isolating, ignoring all of the signs that television content becomes a social currency that enables conversations with others and that cutting kids off from shows that are part of the shared mythology of their peer group is going to be far more socially isolating than allowing them the time to watch the show itself. And of course, much of what kids do with screens already involves real time or asynchronous social interaction with others with whom they are chatting or playing games or just hanging out on Zoom.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that watching television is less apt to spark the imagination than reading a book. The logic goes that we have to construct in our mind’s eye the physical world where the story takes place and television’s visuals give us that information too easily. Fair enough, but books often tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling, where-as television requires us to interpret implicit social cues and thus fosters emotional intelligence through perspective taking. 

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is a site of pure consumption (often understood in passive terms) whereas the research suggests it is often a site of active cognitive interpretation and the starting point for a range of other creative and expressive activities for our children (go back to what I said about action figures as authoring tools.) 

“Screen Time” talk assumes too often that everything kids do with screens is more or less the same, rather than focusing on the range of activities in children’s lives, and what aspects of those activities get conducted on screens under what circumstances, and how those aspects are connected integrally to things that children are doing when they are not focused on screens. 

What I am calling for is that we move beyond the fragmentation and border policing that regulating “screen time” requires and begin to think about our children’s lives in a more holistic manner.

Susan Kresnicka: Funny, as I was reading through the deconstructions of 'screen time' we've been listing in this dialogue, I noticed for the first time how tellingly shallow the term itself is. (I suspect I'm way late to this realization!). We don't call it 'content time' or 'story time' – we've named it after the most superficial and non-dynamic attribute we could identify: the cold, hard, physical screen. Speaks volumes...

I've been incredibly grateful for this conversation over the last few days. It's been a difficult week for my family, with the start of this weird, virtual school year. My son, entering his sophomore year in college, is deeply resentful that we haven't agreed to let him move halfway across the country to live in an off-campus apartment while the school grapples with the intersection of a pandemic, an impulse-driven quasi-adult population, and its own financial realities. My daughter, starting her senior year in high school, has a heightened sense of anxiety surrounding this significant year. At varying moments, this week brought tears, cold silence, door slamming, and awkward dinners. Do you know where we found relief this week? TV. And not because we curled up in front of our respective devices and watched our own things to zone out. Content offered relief during this fraught week because, at moments when we felt disconnected from one another, it created an opportunity to reconnect. After a particularly tense few days, our son began to shift (slowly) into acceptance about the college decision. The very first signal that this shift was underway was when he told me how much he was enjoying watching The Boys. "What do you like about it?," I asked. "Well, it's about this guy whose girlfriend gets killed by a superhero and how he changes as a result. You should watch it." It was the first uncharged conversation we'd had in days, and it served as an invitation: "I'm moving past my anger," he implied, "and I want you to understand the ideas that are speaking to me in this difficult moment." I learned long ago that if my children tell me I should watch something, I should. I'm now on S1E5 of The Boys, and my son and I have a new point of connection to draw upon as we work through this. With my daughter, content has been our relationship salve for years. At the end of a truly wrenching tear-filled night this week, as we tried to patch ourselves (and each other) up, she asked if I would stay in her room and watch TV with her. We crawled under the covers, held hands, and watched Hugh Laurie demonstrate the tension between exceptionalism and human connection in an episode of House ("Sometimes, you just have to watch an episode of House," she told me.)

In my research and in my own life, I see time and again how shared content experiences – whether synchronous or not – help us forge, maintain, deepen, and repair social bonds, including those with the people we love most. When we dismiss and demonize entertainment media, we conveniently ignore this crucial function. An incredibly insightful friend once told me, "You can't understand something if you are judging it." I believe that this chronic cultural judgment of entertainment media, hypocritically embraced and lauded as a measure of responsible parenthood, cuts us off from a full understanding of how entertainment operates in our lives, including its potential for strengthening our relationships with our children