
I have an eight-week-old baby and a three-year-old son, and my obsession with screen time was ruining our lives.
At various times since my first child was born, I had introduced a relatively screen-free lifestyle. We’ve gone for months at a time without my son having any access to a screen at all.
We’ve also had periods of time where we have had excessive exposure to screens; where breakfast, lunch and dinner have all been consumed with a side dish of YouTube.
In the first couple of weeks after our baby was born, the three-year-old spent a lot of time snuggled with us watching movies, or playing at our feet accompanied by the iPad. Initially, I was accepting of this.
I had a new baby, I was recovering from a C-section, and my husband had come down with a virus that meant he wasn’t in a position to provide a great deal of support.
So I let the screen thing happen, and we all relaxed into the adjustment to becoming a family of four.
Then, as all started to return to life as we knew it, the screen time exposure naturally started to reduce. We began returning to our regular activities, I began to feel more confident going out and about with a newborn and a three-year-old, and we found ourselves using the screens less than we had been in the earliest days – but still more than we had before baby arrived.
One night, I started reading articles online that talked about the dangers of screen time exposure. About the importance of having our children outside, engaged in the natural environment, for hours every day. And I started to worry that maybe our screen time was doing damage to our kids.