Comment by MisterTea
7 days ago
I was at a friends house for a party and their kids are not on screens. They are very active in their children's lives which influences their children's behavior. The kids were busy running around and playing with the other kids who came. They have a back yard and enjoy playing outdoors. They play card and board games. Both are on teams, one soccer, the other, baseball. They have a Switch and streaming TV but don't spend much time in front of them. They do this on their own. My friends jokingly groan of all the work they need to do but are rewarded by their children's happiness and well being. They read to their kids almost every night until around eight or so. Now the kids read books before bed because they want to. This is how I grew up.
Children learn from their parents. If you spend all day in front of screens, so will they. If you don't read, they won't read. School isn't the only place they should read. Doing activities outside of the home is also important. Go rent a cottage in the country and get out of the city.
This is true, to an extent, but one missing variable is peers, and the — sometimes outsized — influence they have relative to parents.
Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.
In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.
And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.
But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.
This is often true in adults, too.
Peer groups sort themselves to an extent. It's never everyone that does X or is into Y.
I recall being immediately out when one of the boys asked which football team I support, to which I replied "none". So I got sorted to the much smaller group of kids who are not into that and we had our own common interests to bond over.
Looking at my daughter's social circle it starts as early as in preschool.