How can I help my kids live healthy digital lives?

A time capsule letter to my children

Dear kids,

You’re seven and three years old as I write this, but I’m going to post this online in the hopes that you won’t find it for a while. And if you do, please don’t read it until you’re at least 25 or so, okay?

So, how are you? I hope you’re healthy and at least relatively happy, and that you don’t have to sit at a desk, staring at a screen for hours on end every day, like I did (or still do). (You know, it’s funny, but my dad - your Papa - used to say the same kind of thing to me, only he’d be talking about working in a machine shop.)

I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about your relationship to digital media, and the whole online landscape, and my responsibility as your dad to help build your media literacy and your relationship to the internet in general. If that sounds complex to you, in the early to mid-2040s, imagine how I feel. To you, the notion might seem incredibly quaint. But to me, right now, in 2023, few concerns weigh more heavily on my mind.

Do we, or did we ever, need ‘the Reading Rainbow of today’?

Recently, I showed you bits of an old episode of Reading Rainbow, on YouTube. Given that it was an episode from the late 1980s, I was worried that it would appear too antiquated to you—that its magic would be lost to time. But to my relief, you got it. This got me thinking.

Reading Rainbow was an American public television show, hosted by LeVar Burton, which ran for 26 years. When I was in elementary school, it was appointment viewing. In each episode, Burton would explore some aspect of science or culture in a way that was immediately appealing and understandable to young people, and then, actual kids (like me!) would recommend books they’d read recently. All of this was an obvious ploy to encourage kids to discover the magic of reading, and hey, it worked on me. These days, it would be labeled wholesome.

I got the urge to show it to you for two reasons. One, I still idolize LeVar Burton to this day—his podcast, LeVar Burton Reads, in which he, you guessed it, reads short stories, is a treasure trove. But more importantly, two, I’ve recently been noticing you starting to develop your own tastes in video entertainment. You’re starting to branch out, which is good. You seem to have interesting taste, which I love. I’ve gone out of my way not to influence your viewing or reading habits by forcing you to consume the stuff I loved as a kid. But at the same time, damn, you have literally millions more options at your disposal for stuff to watch at any given time of day than I did at your age.

If I and your mom aren’t there to help guide you toward the useful stuff and away from the vapid, I genuinely have no idea what kind of content you might stumble across. I know it’s hard, when you’re little, to understand why it’s okay to watch some episodes of Numberblocks, while the weird-looking episodes with the strange sound effects are off-limits. By now, however, I’m sure you have a thorough understanding of user-generated content, and why it can be a nightmare to parents of young children.

I’m not crying for a return to the television-as-babysitter model that so many pre-internet kids remember (fondly, in some cases). It just used to be a lot simpler. You knew that from four to four-thirty on weekday afternoons, you could depend on half an hour of Reading Rainbow time. Nothing shocking would happen, it would be pleasant and mildly educational, and you might even be inspired to turn the TV off and go read a book. Everybody knew what it was, and everybody had made up their minds how they felt about it. There’s probably something like Reading Rainbow now, in 2023, but I don’t know what or where it is. There’s probably something like Reading Rainbow in 2042 as well, but I sure don’t know what or where that is. It’s just that the parameters have all changed—the medium itself, the formats, the act of consuming information. There’s so goddamn much of everything now.

So it’s not that I’ve been focused on shielding you from the wrong kinds of content (although I certainly have done that), it’s that I want to help you build and maintain a sustained attention span, insofar as that’s possible anymore. To me, that’s still a useful thing to have, and I hope that will continue to be the case long into the future.

How concerned should I be about never-ending screen time?

More and more young kids are being given prescriptions for glasses these days. While we don’t know precisely why that’s the case, some doctors have suggested that it’s a combination of indoor activity, and intense ocular concentration on screens.

I know that I won’t be able to protect you from screens forever, and I also know that looking at screens can bring a lot of joy! Through screens you can learn about every topic in the world, you can interact with people, and you can sift through your own thoughts (like I’m doing now). I’m so impressed by the way you’ve already figured out the basics of programming, and digital illustration, and Zoom calls. And I’m still charmed by the way you assume that every screen you encounter is a touchscreen.

But I have to tell you how much joy it brings me when I come home at the end of the day, having stared at screens the whole time I’ve been gone, and I find the two of you playing with cards together on the floor, or reading books that we’ve borrowed from the library, or drawing pictures on paper with pencils. How much I love hearing the stories you tell me when I pick you up from school or from hoikuen, about all the games you’ve played, and the things you’ve built, and the arguments you’ve had with your friends without even really understanding why.

It's not because I believe these activities are inherently superior to screen time (though I suspect that they often are), but because I believe that engaging in them as much as possible now, while you’re young, will give you the kind of calm, quiet foundation that will help you in your inevitable transition to overwhelming screen time, sometime in the future. Because whenever that does come, you will someday also crave a retreat from screens, even if only sporadically and temporarily. I hope that when you do take those breaks, to refresh your minds and your eyes and your bodies, that you also experience a bit of happy nostalgia in the process.

We can agree that sharenting is a form of child abuse, right?

I’m not very active on social media. That’s what we currently call the spaces online where people share the minutiae from their lives in the hopes that as many strangers as possible will like and support and maybe even share that minutiae with larger numbers of strangers.

But I know that a lot of people use social media a lot. Like several hours a day. I hope that neither of you will ever use it that much. But more importantly, I hope that however much you do use it, you’ll have a positive and beneficial relationship with it. But that’s just my old man bias. I was alive when there was no commonly available internet at all, remember.

The point is, I have never once shared an image or video of either of you on social media. I don’t think I’ve even mentioned either of your names. This is an intentional choice I made before either of you were born. I believe that you should both have the right to choose whether and how much of your lives to share online. What age is appropriate for that kind of decision-making? I think it depends on the individual. But I know for damn sure that the age isn’t “baby” or “elementary school child.”

I can only imagine how I’d feel if my parents had grabbed the photos they’d taken of me ­– all twelve or so of them, each one carefully printed onto a piece of paper at the local drug store – and stuck them up all over the neighbourhood for any creep to see.

Some parents do share their children’s lives online for all the world to see, and hey, I guess that’s those parents’ right as human beings on this planet. But I don’t know, man. I just don’t see it.

Should we have played more Mario Kart together?

This is the tough one, morally, for me. I have a complicated relationship with video games. Up until relatively recently, I really loved them. Loved playing them, collecting them, thinking about them, and interacting with fellow game likers. But for most of those years spent being an enthusiast, there was a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that I was kind of wasting my life. I could never fully, 100% enjoy video games for that reason. I’ve always wondered what my life might have been like if I’d never gotten into them at all. What could I have done, what skills could I have gained instead, with all those hours spent navigating virtual worlds? I’ll never know. Luckily, I never really got addicted to them, the way I know some people do. For that, I am thankful. I do still play games occasionally, though not nearly as much as I used to. But enough about me.

At some point, you’ll try video games for yourselves, and decide how you feel about them. By the time you’re reading this, the term ‘video game’ will probably be outdated—entertainment forms will have merged to incorporate interactivity in ways that I can’t currently imagine.

My policy, though, has always been this: If, one day, either of you comes to me and explains that you’re interested in playing video games, I will happily share the ones I own with you. We will create a plan together, involving how much time you’ll spend playing, what your priorities are, and what kinds of games we’ll try. We will of course prioritize playing together, as that’s always much more fun (plus I want you to git gud if you’re indeed going to play). But I’m not going to be the one to foist games on you. There’s too much else in the world that I want you to experience first.

Internet porn ceased to exist completely sometime around the year 2028, right?

It did? Oh, thank god.