“After school, we usually go to the park to play games and ride the bike,” says their mother Vidya Seth, who lives in Mumbai. And when they want to unwind? “Aahir creates things with his building blocks and magnetic tiles while Naysa reads books and newspapers.”
Vidya does not attribute her children’s way of life to tiger-mom tactics but to the fact that the family has kept them away from tablets, mobile phones and other screens. “We made a conscious decision not to entertain our children with on-screen distractions,” she says.
Bucking the modern-day parenting trend where cartoons and games make for great nannies, some tech-cautious parents are refusing to let their children bathe in the glow of computers, smartphones and tablets, day and night.
Aloka Mehta says when she had her first child, she was influenced by other parents and showed her son nursery rhymes on the iPad when he was two.
“I felt it would make him a fast learner. Soon I realised he wanted more. If I switched it off after an hour, he would have a serious meltdown — crying and tantrums.
By the time he turned four, I stopped all screen time. He now enjoys solving puzzles and crafting things with his play dough. It’s only on Fridays and Sundays that gets an hour of screen time,” says Mehta, who kept her younger son away from screens from the start.
Many of these parents have come to learn that their children become apathetic and uninterested when not plugged in. “I believe a child should get bored and figure out ways to amuse herself,” says Natali Asrani, mother to a four-year-old.
“Technology is a poor substitute for personal interaction,” says Natali Asrani, whose husband is a mobile phone application developer.
“Did you know Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent? I guess tech parents have first-hand knowledge of the dangers of too much technology,” she says.
Kolkata-based English teacher Shiladitya Mukhopadhyay adopted a screenfree policy for his children five years ago, but faced considerable flak. “People ask us why we torture our children and deprive them of knowledge,” he says. The decision to go screen-free often meant the working couple had to put in extra effort to keep their children busy, but he says it was worth it.
Now, his five-year-old son spends hours with books, often reading them to his one-year-old sister too.
Bengaluru-based journalist and blogger Sandhya Menon ensures that her mobile phone is out of her children’s sight as much as possible, and keeps them engaged with books, games, and art and craft projects. She believes her screen-free policy has helped them inculcate long-term habits and personality traits they wouldn’t have otherwise.
“They retain a certain innocence I see lost in other children their age,” says Menon. “One of the biggest things they have developed is observation, because they aren’t looking at screens, they’re looking at things around them.”
Temper tantrums when devices were taken away and short attention spans were what prompted Tanaya Burman, mother to 11-year-old Anamika and 13-year-old Riya, to prohibit any kind of non-academic use of the computer. “As a treat”, she allows them to watch an hour of TV on weekends, though enforcing such a routine is increasingly difficult.
Honest conversations help children understand how screen habits may disconnect them from the real world. Though her children, aged 9 and 8, make daily requests to use the internet, Sandhya, who has decided to keep them screenfree till the age of 13, finds it easy to convince them. “I remind them why we do this — so that we can develop other parts of their personality and minds.”
According to Dr Samir Parikh, director, department of mental health and behavioural sciences, Fortis Healthcare, “Parents need to be role models. If a parent is accustomed to having a mobile phone at the dinner table, kids are likely to emulate it.” “We moved our TV out of the living room to our bedroom,” says Vidya, who sometimes finds herself surreptitiously checking her phone under the dinner table. “And if we’re caught, our daughters rebuke us.
Source : timesofindia
