The Summer Couch Potato Dilemma
Summer is here, when kids and moms lose the structure of school to help us put a limit on how much time is spent in front of TV, online, playing video games et al. Come June, we let it slide, and a certain amount of that is fine and necessary. We all deserve a break. The problem is that it soon slips into 24/7 couch potato existence.
Why Worry?
In addition to the negative health impact on kids of not getting enough exercise and the excess sweets and junk food that often go with all that screen time, studies are now making a link between kids’ performance in school and the amount of time they spend in front of digital media.
To measure the impact of electronic media on school performance, a research team at Iowa State University looked at one aspect of how children learn: their ability to pay attention and keep a lid on their impulses. Researchers wanted to know whether watching TV and playing video games could harm a student’s ability to pay attention in class.
To answer this question the study compared school and homework performance with the media habits of 1,323 children in grades three to five, and in a separate study of 210 adolescent/young adults. The elementary school children were followed during the course of 13 months with parents helping kids log their TV and gaming time. Teachers were then interviewed to obtain assessments of each child’s classroom performance.
Researchers found that classroom attention problems grew worse in proportion to the total time kids spent in front of screens. Further they found that kids who exceeded the two hours per day of total screen time recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics were one and a half to two times more likely to have attention problems when doing homework. In reaching these conclusions, researchers took into account any attention problems children had before they entered the study. In the segment of the Iowa State study investigating the link between attention problems and media screen time for 210 senior high school and college students, the finding was similar to that of elementary school students. If the students spent more than two hours a day in front of either a TV or video game screen, they were twice as likely to have attention problems in school.
What’s a mom to do?
Most likely you’ve got some kind of structured day camp, sports, summer school, playgroup or group care situation set up to cover at least part of each day. Then we get to you. How many hours a week you are engaged with your kids without a video, TV, computer or hand held screen blaring back at you? Is it even an hour? If you said an hour or less, yours would not be an unusual household, especially if two parents work full time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something about it, without losing any more sleep or work time.
If so, now is the time to unplug and reconnect. Remember all the non-digital fun you used to have together. Even if it’s just for one day/evening a week, it’s okay to start with small steps.
• Have more family dinners; make the meals simple and delegate different kids to do the food preparation, cooking and clean up duties.
• Get out the board games. Let a different child choose the game each time.
• Get outside. Take a hike, city, suburbs, or country, get a destination and go.
• Get some art projects going; set up a dedicated wall for displaying the finished products.
• Have each child pick a volunteer project for a local charity or eco-project: consider park/stream cleanups, helping at a homeless shelter or food pantry, or raising money for a cause using a novel idea or their own.
• Read together, pick a book and read a chapter a night or week…and cuddle while you do it.
• Do weekend errands together and use these informal times to check in and talk with your children, especially if they seem out of sorts. Sometimes starting the conversation feels awkward, but you can get past that and simply say, “Hey you seem a bit blue lately, do you want to talk about it?”
• Reward effort and results. Give your kids appropriate praise when they make a serious effort to meet a set goal. (Don’t give unearned praise; kids know when they’re being pandered to).
Here’s to a great summer of small steps!
Victoria Costello is the mother of two twenty-something sons filling her empty nest by writing about psychology and parenting topics for her Psychology Today blog, and elsewhere. Her latest book A Lethal Inheritance, offers preventive mental health advice for at risk families.
