Here we go again.
BREAKING: @ongov to announce (imminently) schools will go online for the next 2 weeks. As bitter a pill for some who will struggle mightily during this time, this will afford some needed time to upgrade safety measures, defuse the surge of Omicron.
— Abdu Sharkawy (@SharkawyMD) January 3, 2022
My kids are 7 and 5 years old. That’s grade 1 and senior kindergarten. Before COVID, my wife and I read as much as we could about how much screen time kids should have at their ages. Most experts agree that it should be limited, with some experts saying that any screen time at that age could be damaging. It makes kids distracted, grumpy, and impacts other areas of development.
Then COVID hit, and our kids were getting 3-4 hours daily of screen time, and that was just for school. And because whenever my daughter looks up at me with those perfect, blue eyes, I tend to give in, even if it means even more screen time. I would only give her a half hour, but I still felt like I was doing damage that was completely unnecessary.
Kids under the age of 10 should not have to attend online classes live, but most schoolboards do not allow a correspondence option for kids, and so every child is forced to stare at a laptop screen when trying to learn. My daughter is especially non-compliant, tossing up a look at me every 5 minutes as if to say, “What the fuck is up with this shit, Dad?”
To which I would respond with a look that says, “I fucking know, baby girl. But the dipshits in charge won’t give us other options.”
Sometimes, in the middle of online classes, I would just close the laptop and my daughter and I would snuggle and watch The Simpsons instead. Despite the questionable content, I am convinced my daughter learned more watching Lisa Simpson raise her hand in a cartoon classroom than she did watching a dozen other 5 year olds fiddle with toys and eat pudding as their teacher would play learning videos from the 1970s.
Whenever I was expelled from school as a teenager, I would end up utilizing correspondence courses to get my high school credits. I’d receive a packet of schoolwork, finish the work (usually the night before it was due), and hand in the packet. I’d then receive the next packet and repeat. The system worked because I wasn’t in class to disrupt my classmates with my often-hilarious antics and comments, but the credits I needed were still secured.
Young kids have proven to be quite durable during this pandemic, and we adults have asked a lot from them. Nobody talks about how we all understood that parking your 5-year-old in front of a computer screen for hours at a time was awful parenting yet that is exactly what our education system has become under COVID. We know it is bad for them, we know that a correspondence option could fix it, but neither the government nor the teacher unions seem to have the will to adjust for the sake of these kids.
So have fun watching your kids stare at screens for the next two weeks. My kids will be watching the good people of Springfield instead.
