So this week, mindful parents around the country will be shutting down down their televisions for Screen Free Week, a national effort to curb television watching for kids. This seems all well and good — too much of anything is a bad thing.
But over at Slate, lawyer KJ Della’Antonia points out that the initiative is probably more about parents than it is about kids:
Which leads me to the following counterintuitive (and admittedly somewhat self-serving) Suggestion: screen-free week is for kids who control their own screen time.
You’d think it would be just the opposite, right? After all, the younger a kid is, the less “screen time” is considered acceptable. But when it comes to younger kids, like mine, any parent who’s likely to go for “screen-free week” is probably already doling out the screen time with a pretty hesitant hand. Going cold turkey is far more about the parent in those cases than it is about the child.
Her point is that until kids understand why the television is going off, turning it for no reason makes very little sense. Videogame parents, what do you think?
(Are there even parents on Tumblr? I don’t even know.)