On the holy brilliance of screentime

The best parent in my household has a charging port

I have four (five!?) jobs and my husband has two jobs and we have two children. We pay a very kind and smart woman $85 million annually to be our baby’s nanny and my dad primarily hangs out with our oldest child after school several days a week. All childcare leaves at 5:30, and several (three!) of my jobs are with people on the west coast, so my day often runs through dinner and bedtime.

I have missed probably fewer than ten dinners and bedtimes in my children’s lives, but I have taken phone calls and made semi-important career decisions during 6,000 of them.

The solution to this is the iPad.

I was raised by television, and now I work for television. Nepo baby, baby! My children are now being raised by that same caretaker for 30 minutes a day if I get a call from a 310 number just as the noodles hit the pot. For 30 (haha 45) minutes, they are The New Ms. Frizzle’s children, and she is an excellent mother.

I believe, all things considered, there is no better place for wound-up raccoon children running on fumes and a 3:30pm granola bar than in a trance in front of a glowing screen.

I was not always this way.

Before my second child was born when my oldest was two and a half, he had watched maybe 48 seconds of a show, by accident, over my shoulder. The day the baby came home from the hospital, my son met his new mother: WALL-E.

I felt extremely guilty about this at first.

Television, as the prevailing wisdom goes, is bad for children’s developing brains. I am not a pediatric behavioral psychologist, but I am the mother of two reasonably intelligent (twice-in-a-generation geniuses) children, and I have been closely following the longitudinal development of a 3-decade-long TV experiment: Myself. I was raised by television.

Both my parents worked when I was a young kid about my son’s age, and my mom had real, actual doctor-related emergencies to address at various hours of the day, and she somehow made us dinner every night, so when the Bill Nye and Magic School Bus VHS tapes were on their last spin, we were often plunked in front of Nickelodeon, which would play an early-evening zoetrope of Lambchop, Wishbone, Clarissa Explains it All, Guts, Hey Dude, What Would You Do?, All That, Pete and Pete, and if the chicken parm went long, Salute Your Shorts.

Between all these neon, gross-out, shout-y shows, there were commercials that became indelible because I watched them so often. They represented the two primary 1990s genders. One: An easy-bake oven and an eating (and shitting?) baby doll that ate cherries from a jar. And the other: Hot Wheels and Nerf Guns. (The third gender was Gak)

I inherited my mom’s activism when she popped in and huffed, “They never show little boys playing with baby dolls in these.” I wanted to write a letter to The White House.

I loved these shows. I learned everything I know despite and because of them. I still know what “Neutrally Buoyant” means because Bill Nye taught me with a hovering red balloon when I was six. When I was diagnosed with a particular respiratory infection in my twenties, I thanked the pre-SPANX Ms. Frizzle for teaching me what exactly the parts of the lung did. “Ah, yes,” I nodded at the Columbia-trained doctor, Hot Wheels theme song in my head, “The alveoli are where oxygen exchange happens.”

This morning at breakfast, my son told me, as I struggled to open a jam jar, that I needed to “use more force” to get it unscrewed. I asked where he learned about that. “From Blaze and the Monster Machines,” he told me, proudly.

“Ah, yes,” I thought. “His mom.”