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WITHOUT FAIL, ONE of my most hated regular smartphone notifications is the screen time ping on a Monday morning.
Most of the time I clear it before I can fully berate myself over what is usually an eye-watering number of hours. Occasionally, the figure gets burned into my memory, and I instantly start to regret all the time I spent doomscrolling absolute rubbish.
I call it my digital hangover. It’s not that different to a real hangover. Instead of getting flashbacks to singing Wonderwall on a karaoke machine or saying yes to that dodgy kebab on the way home when the answer should have been no, these flashbacks tend to involve remembering how long you spent mindlessly scrolling things like stupid cat videos, people scooping slime, or even filthy rugs being cleaned with machines called ‘Dirt Reynolds’ (don’t knock it until you watch it, it’s deceptively hypnotic.)
My screen time varies, but last week, it was 41 hours and 28 minutes. Granted, nine of those hours were spent watching TV shows or movies, and three went on productivity and finance, but over 19 of those hours were spent on social media.
I felt sick, and thanks to the old digital hangover flashback, I knew exactly what I spent a particularly wasteful portion of those hours watching. One evening, I watched a live TikTok of an American guy sitting in his room putting elastic bands on a giant watermelon until it exploded. I feel like I need to bathe my eyeballs after admitting that.
I’d like to tell you that I saw sense and gave up after about ten minutes, but I did not. For some reason, at 11.30 pm when I should have been trying to sleep, it was strangely compulsive viewing. The live video, from a content creator I didn’t know or follow, popped up in my feed and caught my attention for a few seconds. Before I knew it, I had clicked into the live and stumbled into the grimy underworld of the exploding watermelon corner of the internet, where hundreds of other viewers kept commenting with guesses about how many elastic bands it would take before the very large watermelon exploded. It was sort of like a scene from The Deer Hunter with fruit instead of POWs.
It took 528 elastic bands in case you’re wondering. The ‘explosion’ was also very underwhelming and more like a slow, sad collapse than the big bang that had been promised. God knows what fruit or vegetable will be next on the elastic band chopping block, but I hope the algorithm doesn’t bring me back for that particular sequel.
Some of the content on TikTok is useful, very funny or even educational, but a lot of it is just plain weird. I came across an account that is simply a hydraulic press mushing different objects to see what can withstand its force.
The other night, I came across a video from an American woman who had her leg amputated and asked the hospital if she could keep her leg so she could de-flesh it. She planned to document her ‘journey’ on TikTok, adding that she wanted to make earrings out of the toes. Yeah. That was enough internet for me that particular night.
The point is, while I waste hours going down online rabbit holes regularly, how on earth can I lecture or judge my own children about their screen use this summer, when I haven’t got a leg to stand on?
Summer screen time is a constant battle for most families. In my case, while neither of my children has smartphones or unfettered access to the internet, they both have Nintendo Switches, love Netflix, and we’ve got a household iPad.
Like most children their age, especially now that the summer is here, they tend to spend more time on those screens than usual and increasingly I feel the pressure from my nine-year-old to have more access to the internet.
According to research by Yoto, 29% of Irish parents find that keeping children entertained is their single biggest source of summer stress, with 40% admitting they are more likely to allow children extra screen time over the summer. Perhaps no surprise then that research last month by the European Commission found that Irish parents were the least likely in the EU to consider their children spend too much time on screens.
Anecdotal evidence from parents of teens also suggests that this battle to keep kids busy gets harder as they get older. At least at the ages of six and nine, my two can be kept entertained with summer camps. For children from around 13 onwards, who may have outgrown summer camps, it’s easy to see how they might gravitate towards their smartphones and screens to fill the gap.
But it’s not just kids that feel the draw. I stood on a packed Luas the other day, and because we were wedged in like sardines, I couldn’t reach for my own phone to pass the time, which was a good thing given my recent usage, but it meant I had a bird’s-eye view of the teenager’s smartphone that was sitting down beside me.
He spent the entire journey scrolling TikTok, not lingering on anything for more than a few seconds and never looking up from the device for the entire 40-minute journey. It wasn’t just him, of course. I had planned to do the same, most likely, and one glance around the rammed carriage showed almost everyone, young and old, doing ditto with their head in their phone, not looking up for air or eye contact.
I watched my fair share of TV as a kid in the summertime, and I think children need to be allowed the space to relax and unwind over the summer, but there’s a huge difference between that and doomscrolling for endless hours on social media.
We know that online platforms like TikTok are addictive. You don’t need to just take my watermelon-watching shame as evidence. Go on the app, and you’ll soon find yourself served up some banal but engrossing content. Earlier this year, The European Commission accused TikTok of creating an “addictive design” which could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of children and vulnerable adults.
We know that screen use in the very young has the potential to be damaging. According to a landmark study in the UK, screen time for babies and toddlers under the age of two has been linked with long-term negative effects on health and quality of life, yet we’re still giving children as young as nine smartphones out of the box to get them hooked on that addictive quality.
We know the response to all of this is that a ban on social media for under-16s is edging closer in Ireland, via the EU.
Still, I can’t help but feel like that’s not going to be the magic solution we all think it will be, especially when children, like mine, see their parents on their phones for so many hours a day. In fact, mine even drew a helpful picture of me on my phone to hammer home the point.
“It’s of you mum, on your phone again!”
Ouch. That one got me in the heart, but sometimes the truth hurts, especially when it comes with the absolute clarity of a young child’s perspective.
It doesn’t matter that much of my daytime smartphone use is in fact work-related – emails, research and so on, or that much of it is me ordering stuff for my kids or organising their lives, play dates or activities, etc.
It doesn’t matter that it might be me doing the online grocery shopping, banking, reading an e-book or watching a TV show. My children don’t see all of that; they just see mum with her head in her phone and think, well, we should be doing that too, right?
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance journalist and parenting columnist for TheJournal.ie.
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