This morning, I was in bed, listening to the Today programme’s headlines, including a new Ofcom study that finds children are watching less TV, and more YouTube, although since YouTube is a content delivery platform, a better headline would be, “children watch less telly, in preference for more telly”. My 11-year-old was downstairs, also in bed, watching YouTube. I knew this not because I have any kind of parental surveillance system, but because if he wasn’t, that would mean the internet had broken, and I’d have heard about it.
The world of nostalgia can be divided in two: the people who just preferred life when they were young, because it was more enjoyable; and those who think the internet is inherently evil, and everything spinning out of it – including the personalities of coming up for two generations – is therefore, also, evil. For those who want to spread terror about screen time – that it can slow development, that it promotes, or at least enables, bullying, that it obliterates boredom and all the constructive thoughts that proceed from it, that it destroys social connections and tugs our young inexorably towards the state of hikikomori, the Japanese “modern-day hermit” – parents are easy meat. We know that screen time isn’t necessary, because we didn’t have it when we were young, unless you count half-watching Monkey and being cast into a pit of obscure martial-arts-philosophy despair. We know that almost everything non-screen related – flying kites, doing embroidery, making slime – is more wholesome. Yet we have – or rather, someone, somewhere has – found a way to take the entire scope of human knowledge and activity and locate it all in one portable device.
How do you fight that? Do you even know what you’re fighting? That’s before the hypocrisy freezes your backbone: it’s hard to be sanctimonious when you have your phone in your actual hand, and seems a peculiar kind of bad faith to put your phone down, for two seconds, in order to deliver your homily. I know two families with a solid, immovable code on screen time. One, in the Silicon Valley style, doesn’t let its young near screens of any sort, and doesn’t have a TV. The other has a very low base of minutes-per-day, enough to watch maybe one episode of Gumball, and the children can earn additional screen time with excellent behaviour. The rest of us muddle along in the post-authoritarian style, moaning, cajoling, relenting, getting surprised that Fortnite is actually quite good. As one friend put it: “We have excellent discipline in our family. We do exactly what they say. There’s only ever a problem when we don’t do it fast enough.”
That doesn’t mean I’m sanguine: vloggers horrify me. I bulldoze around, going “this person isn’t saying anything”, like a high court judge complaining about the Beatles. There’s a strain of young male vloggers in the Jackass tradition, who go around hurting themselves and others, letting fireworks off in each other’s pants. At least that you can comprehend: a timeless ludic masochism. But then there are people unboxing things, talking about nothing, cooking up theories about Pokémon genitalia, melting stuff.
My daughter watches a young woman who has elaborate new-right fantasies about the time she gave a made-up homeless person half her burger and he turned it down, and Jesus, what do these people want? Even though you can find more or less anything on YouTube, what it tends to mean for the committed watcher is an unmediated burble of emptiness. But could I say for certain that it has any less meaning than a radio breakfast show, or the conversations children have with their friends? Or, for that matter, the conversations I have with mine? Is it meaning I want for them, or modernity I abhor? I genuinely don’t know.
Raising children is a public and social act, which – in a paradoxical collective fantasy – we’ve recently chosen to conceive of as an individual and private one. When the world needed obedience and cannon fodder, even the richest raised their offspring cold and hungry, going to the lengths of creating educational institutions in which cold and hunger could be guaranteed. When we were big on liberty and nonconformity, the buzz phrase was “benign neglect”. A Cassandra reading would be that now the world needs consumers, and that’s what we’re producing: gentle passivity, the ultimate spectators.
But I know this isn’t right: we’re perceiving the screen itself anachronistically, as being on the wrong side of an old dichotomy between watching (bad) and doing (good) which hasn’t really been meaningful since the 1990s. Silicon Valley has spooked us with its no-screen private schools, its 20th-century parenting rules; it is unnerving, as if they had got us hooked on opium, only for their own children to emerge as an untainted superbreed. In fact, what they had created was an instrument that could be active or passive, educational or inane, inspiring or deadening to the spirit, since it contained all things. And you can police its use, but if you do so on the basis that screen time itself is inherently bad, your children will laugh. If you’re still worried, the best way to get children off screens is to let them melt stuff IRL.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
