Episode Summary 01: Building a better relationship with screen time

Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? Me too. Hi, I'm not Jen. I'm Jessica. And I'm in rural East Panama. Jen has just created a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes, and I got to test it out. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 Reasons your child isn't listening to you (And what to do about each one), sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and come over to our free Facebook group to continue the conversation about this episode. You can also thank Jen for this episode by donating to keep the podcast ad free by going to the page for this or any other episode on YourParentingMojo.com. If you'd like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or know someone who would find it useful, please vote it to them. Over time, you're gonna get sick of hearing me read this intro as well so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script she's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com and click Read the Intro. I can't wait to hear yours.

When I recently asked for feedback on the Your Parenting Mojo show, there was a fairly even split between people who said they love the detail of the longer episodes because they wanted all the information and people who said they found longer episodes overwhelming. So I'm trying something new. I'm gonna periodically really short episodes that summarize the conclusions of longer episodes. I don't plan to do one summary episode for every longer episodes. More likely, I'll do want to summarize two or three episodes in a series, so you can get the benefit of multiple longer episodes at once. So here I'll summarize the recent conversation with Ash Brandin, The Gamer Educator, as well as my follow up episode on what children learn from video games.

If you decide that you want to set limits on your children's screen time, just know that for many kids, it's going to be a long journey from you setting the limit to them finding balance in managing their own screen time. But it is possible and it can be done by breaking the responsibility down into small steps, starting with you managing the entire thing. You're setting the timer. You're telling the child when it goes off and turning the screen off, through them managing the timer but you being there to back them up, to them managing the timer without you and so on, until you both feel ready to test the idea of unlimited screen time and what that looks like to you both, and being willing to say, "I think we can keep doing that for a bit longer," or "I'm not sure we're ready for this yet." Neither one of these outcomes represents a failure. It's all just information, like the neutral feedback players get from video games. Your entry level curious take home here can be to see where you are on this journey right now and just make sure you're matching what you're asking your child to do with their capabilities. So if you've tasked your child with training off screen time, when the timer goes off, and they habitually don't do it, then that isn't really where you are on this journey. You're actually a couple steps further back, and they need your help to turn off the screen when the timer goes off. And that's totally fine because if you can accept that that's where you are, you're probably going to feel a whole lot less resentful than you do if you expect them to be able to do something they can't. And then each time they don't do it, you feel frustrated which compounds into resentment over time.

We can recognize the reasons why children find video games so enticing, which is because they make it easy for children to meet their needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness. And we can try to have activities ready that also meet those needs for them as we ask them to turn off screens like a game they enjoy playing or roughhousing if they liked that. I was surprised to learn that there is no compelling body of evidence that says that on average, children are going to be more violent if they play video games, because I had assumed that this was going to be something we would have to live with alongside the benefits of video games rather than it being kind of a non-issue. The vast majority of the population now plays video games and violent crime has decreased over that same period. Even in countries where the percentage of young people who plays video games is even higher than it is in the US, violent crime rates are lower than they are here. If you've seen evidence saying that video games do cause violence, it's likely that a number of factors are at play, including a publication bias in favor of studies that find a correlation between video games and violence, and that researchers tend to use measures of aggression that aren't ecologically valid, meaning they happen in the lab but would never happen in the real world. Studies mainly use college students as their subjects which doesn't actually tell us a lot about how video games affect young children. And the weakest effects tend to be found in longitudinal studies meaning studies that follow people over long periods of time, meaning you might be able to set a college kid in front of a video game and get them to act more aggressively in the lab. But chances are, they'd be back at baseline level of aggression within weeks, days, or maybe even hours. But averages can obscure what's happening for individual children. And if you're seeing behavior that you don't like in your children after they play video games, it's okay to not allow them access to certain games, especially if they're on the younger side, say preschool or early elementary school.

We have to be aware of the kinds of things that children are learning about our culture from video games. And it's not that these ideas only exist within gaming, but that they exist in the world so they show up in gaming. As long as misogyny and violence exist out in the world, they're also going to show up in video games. An example I gave in the episode was how an idealized form of female gamer is one who primarily supports a male player, often her boyfriend. She may only play video games because he got her into them. When she's playing, she takes on the healer role, so she gets the survival kit so he can take damage and then quickly heal and keep on fighting. I observed how a book series we've been reading The Green Ember primes children to take on these roles. The cover art features male rabbits with swords and armor and female rabbits, wearing dresses and carrying satchels, which we learned in the story are filled with medical equipment. The girls and women only fight as a last resort in self-defense, and their primary role is to heal the wounded. But of course, the lead medic from whom all the girls learn is a man. When a girl character is forced into the role of Queen because everyone thinks her brother who's the rightful heir is dead, she refuses to rule or exert authority, and defers authority to a more senior male. Books like these are priming our children to take on these roles later on in video games. And in the full episode, we look at some less savory roles to keep an eye out for as well. We can't protect our children forever from these ideas, but we can talk with them about it and help them spot the ideas when they show up and decide whether we want to take on those ideas or other ideas that fit better with our own values. So your second level learning homework is to see what are the cultural messages your child is getting from the media they're consuming right now, whether that's aligned with your values, and to have a conversation about what you're observing and ask what your child is observing as well.

And finally, we can see all of the amazing learning that children can do through video games as they truly enter a new semiotic domain as a producer of knowledge, not just as a passive recipient effects. Video gaming is a semiotic domain and we could even say that each specific video game is its own semiotic domain to the extent that they have their own vocabularies and actions and ways of approaching enemies and shared goals and strategies. Children are usually consumers of semiotic domains in school as they memorize facts that someone else has decided are important. This is how I learned math. I could memorize the correct procedure to enact when I saw a specific type of problem, but I was entirely a consumer. I couldn't do anything with my specific knowledge except to apply it in specific problem situations on tests. And I did that well enough that I got an A in math, but I couldn't have held a conversation about math with anyone who knows anything about it or produce new knowledge or use my knowledge and networks of people working on math issues. Children do all these things when they play video games, so at least they're getting some sense of how to be an active engaged learner in a semiotic domain, where we can see them engaged in scientific thinking, not the kind where they follow a set of instructions to get to a result that an adult in the room already knows, but the kind that real scientists do, where they form hypotheses, test their hypotheses and refine their approaches in pursuit of success.

Children often play video games creatively and develop persistence, and we can help them to connect their identity within the video game play with their identity and real world learning so they can navigate learning more effectively. So we can point out their creativity and persistence in their play, which might mean we have to watch them play or even play with them, and help them see how they can bring this creativity and persistence to their real world learning as well. Of course, it helps if they're learning something they really care about, like my daughter cared about learning how to dive because it's admittedly harder to get them to persist in something they don't care about, unless there's a goal on the other side of it that they do care about.

We can see how shared knowledge rather than only knowledge that's held in one person's head is going to be the way of the future as it is in video gaming. So your highest growth level of homework is to start to observe some of these things they're learning, both from a standpoint of the facts that they're learning from the game, but also how they're developing skills that they can use in other areas of their life as well. This thinking about thinking is called metacognition and it's a critical skill to have in higher order learning. We'll help both you and your child develop your metacognitive thinking in the Your Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop, which is open for enrollment right now, and we'll get started on Wednesday, August 7. In the free workshop, you'll learn how to see the deep self-directed learning that's happening in whatever activity your child is interested in. You'll see how to demonstrate this complex, multifaceted learning both to yourself, so you can believe it's happening and others as well. You'll reimagine what learning looks like is something that's fun and interesting and exciting as video games and not something you have to bribe your child to do. You'll understand your values about learning so you can do activities with your child that are aligned with those values. And you'll also both be and believe that you can be your child's best teacher, whether your child is in school or not. You can sign up for the free workshop at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher. That's YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher.

Hi, this is just from verlies Panama. I'm a Your Parenting Mojo fan and I hope you enjoy this show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can also donate to help den produce more content like this and also save us from those interminable mattress ads. Then you can do that and also subscribe in the link that Jen just mentioned. And don't forget to head to YourParentingMojo.com to record your own message for the show.