Children Screen Time: Summer Will Never Be the Same

With sufficient will and support, parents can still give kids a mostly screen-free summer. There are summer camps that limit phone use. There are families who can organize enough device-free activity, and who simply ban the things from their house, or limit them very severely. Sometimes you can even give your child a kind of community of people doing much the same. Highly intentional private schools offer no-screen summer programs. Church groups exist where parents share the same suspicions about too much YouTube and too much iPad use.

What you can’t give your child is a summer before screens. The normal kind of summer you had, with long languid stretches of boredom that had to be filled by your imagination, is no longer the default. The closest thing to it today amounts to a highly constructed, organized, and counter-cultural choice, usually made by parents with serious resources to spare on the formation of their children. Feeling like you are protecting the mental health and bodily development of a child makes you seem half-Amish (or half-upper class).

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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With sufficient will and support, parents can still give kids a mostly screen-free summer. There are summer camps that limit phone use. There are families who can organize enough device-free activity, and who simply ban the things from their house, or limit them very severely. Sometimes you can even give your child a kind of community of people doing much the same. Highly intentional private schools offer no-screen summer programs. Church groups exist where parents share the same suspicions about too much YouTube and too much iPad use.

What you can’t give your child is a summer before screens. The normal kind of summer you had, with long languid stretches of boredom that had to be filled by your imagination, is no longer the default. The closest thing to it today amounts to a highly constructed, organized, and counter-cultural choice, usually made by parents with serious resources to spare on the formation of their children. Feeling like you are protecting the mental health and bodily development of a child makes you seem half-Amish (or half-upper class).