What If 'Everyone' Just Hasn't Noticed Yet?

This line from the old movie Zoolander keeps popping back into my mind. Will Ferrell’s character is dumbfounded that everyone is missing the obvious and he feels like he’s the crazy one. For those that don’t know it and don’t want to watch the video he says, “Doesn’t anyone else notice this?! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

One of the most common causes of friction in our house is the discussion related to screen time. I’ve written about it before regarding the power of Fortnite. It’s recently reared its head again with cell phone usage.

This is our kids’ first year at public school so they keep meeting people and it feels really good to connect with them at school and, for our two oldest, via texting. I get that and I’m happy about those connections, but their screen time crept up until it was 4.5 hours per day on just their phone. They sometimes would watch an episode of a show with me or play Minecraft with their friends in addition to that.

I noticed this because I just started seeing less and less of them. They were much more content to be in their room because their phone had become a lot more entertaining. When I checked their screen time and realized that on school days they were spending more than half of their waking hours on their phones I had to speak up.

When we first broached the subject with them saying we wanted the time they spend on their phone to be less than an hour they were pretty surprised, insisting they were just doing what everyone else did. Cue the “I feel like I’m crazy” line! They had just never considered that responding to friends’ text messages could be detrimental.

Of course, it’s not the act of responding that’s the problem, it’s the fact that their policy of, “I respond to all texts all the time” could grow to take over their whole day. The way they think about texting needed to be reconsidered.

This is a fresh change, which is why it’s on my mind, so we don’t have any results yet. I do feel they understand that we really do care. They see most other parents unwilling to fight for things like this and some of their friends’ screen habits are really annoying to them like needing to watch TikTok when it’s not their turn during a board game.

My hope is that they will batch their communication to just a few times per day and see the value in having time to spend on longer term things like guitar, reading books, exercise, board games, and making things.

Maybe someone will see this and it will give them the courage and confidence to go against the flow even if it feels like they’re the only one.