“Several nights a week, and sometimes on weekends, my work takes me away, leaving my husband at home with the kids for the dinner hour. The routine is that he winds up putting my six-year-old in front of a screen so he can decompress, and then get some things done.
I’m struggling with this. I know my husband needs a break, but I also see that my son’s behavior changes after that much time in front of a screen. Something just doesn’t feel right to me, though I can’t say exactly what it is. What do you think?”
I think that these are complicated and challenging issues, with no clear cut or easy way to proceed. One way to begin, though, would be to identify a couple of themes in your question. That way you can take what makes the most sense to you and start there. Think of this as a layering process where each piece that you put your attention to creates a kind of chain reaction where you keep getting closer to who you most want to be as a family.
Let’s begin with you and the lack of ease that you feel about your son’s time spent in front of a screen. While not widely supported by our evidence-based culture, your personal observations, feelings, and instincts are invaluable sources of information. As a matter of fact, as a mammal, you are hard-wired in with the innate intelligence to know how to care for and protect your young. Therefore, when feeling uneasy, could you consider that as a valid message telling you that something is off? What if you trusted that, and got curious? For instance, could you try checking in more deeply with yourself? This works best when you can get a moment on your own to slow down and observe where and how in your body and mind you have that “off” feeling. This requires practice, patience and trust. And while it does take effort, the rewards are great. For when you can tune into yourself, you source your accumulated life experience, your inner wisdom, and your natural knowing as a parent.
As for your husband, in order for him to be present to what your son really needs, his needs must get met too. Every parent knows that place where your own level of exhaustion and unmet needs bashes up against the demands of being in charge of a child. Therefore, how is it that your husband might begin to explore ways to meet his own needs during the day so that he can be more available to your son later? And is there a way that you could brainstorm together around how to make the dinner hour work for both your husband and your son? Often, we use the screens to get a break, only to find that they create problems all their own once the screens are turned off. This is a very, very important thing to pay attention to. Case in point. Do you think there might be a connection between your son’s screen time and the unwanted behaviors that follow?
These are not easy questions to contemplate given the busy nature of many of our lives. Because of all that we are doing and are responsible for, it can feel sometimes as though each individual’s needs are in competition with other members of the family. Sometimes, though, just having this recognition and giving ourselves the permission to feel as we do can help to shift things somehow. However we do it, we want to remember that real human needs met in the daily lives of our homes is essential to all of our happiness and well-being. The question becomes then, how can we do this and still meet our responsibilities? There is no single answer to this question, and you are limited only by how much attention you put to this. At its best, it is about being engaged in an ongoing inquiry around who you are, what you value, and what you need as a family.
And now to your son. As with anything that we do with our children, there is a difference between things that are done once in a while, versus regular patterns that we fall into. Children are creatures of habit. What we bring into their world serves as a structure for them. It is what they come to trust and lean into because we, the ones they count on, have introduced them to it. The routines that we set up for our children are what they come to rely on for life to feel orderly and known. This is essential to their well-being. It helps to regulate them; making them feel safe and at ease.
That is why it is so essential to ask yourself some very important questions around the routine that has been established with your 6-year-old and screen time. Questions like: “What message are we sending to our son through this choice?” “Is anything important being lost?” “What is his behavior communicating to us around his experience of being in front of a screen?
Our children know us better than we know ourselves; sensing and feeling what is behind the decisions we make for them. While this is not at all your husband’s intention, you may want to wonder whether he is sending the message to your son that he does not want to deal or be around him. That perhaps he is too much to handle? Or an annoyance? When we as parents use the screens in a less than conscious way, we unwittingly pass on messages to our children that we would never intend. While likely your son may never verbalize this, is this, in fact, the way it feels to be on the other side of that choice? Most important of all, is this part of the reason for the behavior you are seeing when the screen gets turned off?
Our needs and our children’s needs do not have to be in conflict. We do not have to be vying for position with each other. The truth is, we all do best when everyone’s needs are considered and met over time. Maybe this means for your husband that he has to do a better job throughout the day of ensuring his basic needs are being met.
Maybe he needs to learn to say “No” more often at work so that he has something left over for family life. When we allow ourselves to be so drained by our work lives that we have nothing left to offer our families, we all lose out, and we leave ourselves with few options other than to plug our children in.
This becomes an enormous loss for all of us. In this case, there is a loss of opportunity for both your son and your husband where these dinner hours could be a precious opportunity for them to connect. A chance for it to be just them. A time for your husband to include your son in the preparations of a shared meal.
A six-year-old is certainly old enough to set a table, help get things out of the fridge, stir things, choose music or color nearby as you cook. It could also be a time for your son to learn how to entertain himself. But this will require your husband setting the table. It will mean he will need to find ways to structure the experience so that your son is included. Or expected to keep his own company for a bit. To do this means that he will have to feel as though he has the energy left over for this. And that takes us back to how he gets his own needs met during the day. For when we, as the adults, are taking good and necessary care of ourselves, that will always put us in the very best position possible to take care of our children’s most important and basic needs.
Susan McNamara is a certified holistic health counselor and holds a masters degree in counseling psychology. As an adjunct professor at Westfield State University, she explores the impact technology has on students’ health and well-being as part of an overall curriculum on stress reduction.
On Thursday, April 6th from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Jackson Street School she will be leading a workshop on Balancing The Use of the Screen Technologies with Your Family Values.
To submit a technology-
related parenting conundrum to her, email her at
thefarmatavalon@
hotmail.com.