Screen Time: The Thief of Joy

This weekend I sat with my almost two year old in the living room and we watched a mama bird sit on the nest she’d made in the vines overhanging our front porch. I was so thankful and it was so peaceful. 

I read The Montessori Baby while my daughter was in her early months of life. I read this book and Moms on Call. I was trying to decide what kind of parent I was going to be. I’m still on that journey and I’m very much a work in progress. Several things really stuck with me from The Montessori Baby and one of them was the reason why not to let your baby or toddler watch TV. 

TV moves so fast! I never realized how quickly one scene flips to the next until I started counting. I had a conversation with a fellow mom the other day about a certain dog show that’s popular with littles these days. “No matter how many warnings we give John, he just loses his mind every time we turn off the TV. It’s not like that with the other shows. With the other shows we’ll give him a one minute warning and then we’ll turn the TV off and move on with our day. But THIS show!” She told me she counted how many seconds per scene and this certain show changes scenes every two seconds. The least stimulating shows she could find for her three year old change scenes every four seconds. The real world does not move that fast! This is just a normal mom trying to limit screens and not overstimulate her child while also trying to make dinner.

My original motivation for not letting my daughter watch TV was so that we could keep our evening walk routine. I wanted her to be able to enjoy watching the trees pass by and the people walk around our local town square. I wanted her to enjoy the simple things. She’s more mobile now so we let her walk/run/bike some stretches but we have kept our routine.

It's about more than just our evening walk though. If I reflect on my own use of screens, screens keep me sitting and pacified and disengaged from my family, and worst of all screen time makes me dissatisfied with the world and people around me even after I’ve stopped watching. A walk through the neighborhood chatting with my husband is just not as great as the fun date night the characters in my rom-com just went on. My house looks more shabby the more I watch Architectural Digest. My own body is just not enough. My child and my husband are lacking. I am boring. I have no friends. I don't want this for my daughter.

My daughter is so good at being still and content with what is right in front of her. I’ve realized the less I spend on my phone the more still and content I’m able to be. The more present a mother I am. And it’s not that I just put away my phone while I’m with her. It is the effect of the phone on me long after I put it down that is the sickness I want to cure.