Digital media: «Separating fun and learning is difficult»
Mrs Hipeli, how did you manage with parents working from home and children in distance learning during the coronavirus pandemic? Has media time been increased in your family?
For us, it was limited. There wasn't much prescribed screen time from school. More screen time automatically resulted from Skype sessions or Threema chats with my children's friends and grandma and grandpa. This naturally increased media time somewhat, which we as parents thought was fine. Special times call for special measures. We also explained this to the children.
Online distance learning, Ufzgi WhatsApp chats, meeting friends on Skype and then streaming films. The agreed screen time disappeared completely in many families during coronavirus. How do you create a separation between media for fun and media as a learning tool?
An artificial and rigorous separation has never made sense to me. We live in a digital age and are constantly connected. There is only one screen time and that includes everything you do with digital tools. I find it difficult to separate fun time and digital time. An educational game, for example, can also be a lot of fun. Playing is a purposeless activity. Even digitally.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that a screen break after corona is quite healthy.
Without a doubt. When I ask around among my friends and acquaintances, there are two groups of children. There are those who have got used to the extra media use and still want to spend a lot of time in front of the screen. The children in the second group, on the other hand, can hardly wait to switch off and go out again. You don't even have to «lure» them away from the screen, they want to be with their friends.
How do you get the first group off the screen again?
Humans are creatures of habit. Parents shouldn't use the knee-jerk method and tell their child that from tomorrow they can't game as much as they did during coronavirus. Rather, they should empathise with the child's situation and let the child explain why they want to use a certain medium right now. In this way, the newly acquired habits can be slowly reprogrammed back to the level that the parents are aiming for. What certainly helps is to sit down with the child and explain to them that non-media activities are also possible again. I would certainly allow a few weeks for this reprogramming. Parents and children need patience.
Many parents fear social alienation within the family, with each member immersed in their own digital world.
The image of the family gathered in front of the TV screen in the evening, watching an evening show on TV at a certain time, is almost a thing of the past. If parents and children are all sitting together on the sofa with tablets and everyone is watching something different, many mums and dads get a queasy feeling. The same picture, everyone engrossed in a different book, that's okay again. But what's the difference? The important thing is simply to keep talking to each other as a family despite all the media use, to show interest in each other and to look after each other. And that in addition to tablets, games and computers, children are also offered attractive, media-free activities that they can do together as a family.
«The older children are, the more they need to be able to organise their own time.»
We've been talking about the digitalisation of schools for a long time, and now we've been able to experience it collectively through corona. Is a new digital understanding of schools currently emerging?
I'm afraid the lockdown period was a little too short. Many teachers were simply taken by surprise. Now that the measures are slowly moving back towards «everyday life», I think we will quickly fall back into a «courant normal». Of course, a small part of everyday school life will continue to be digitised, if only because of the curriculum. But many parents will continue to be sceptical about the digitalisation of schools. Personally, I would like to see the digital implementation of lessons continue, at least in part, because it can support individual learning and the digitalisation of society is a fact that influences the lives of young people.
Negotiating with the child and not running after the minutes is a tip you would like to give parents.
Yes, because the joke is that the older children are, the more they need to be able to organise their own time. Even with the media. Parents shouldn't play the 24-hour watchdog. I suggest setting rules and scheduling media-free time, but that also means setting an example as parents. And that is perhaps the most difficult thing.
Read more about media consumption:
- Use your smartphone mindfully
What does conscious use of smartphones and other media look like? How do we integrate devices into our everyday family life without being controlled by them?
- Media education: accompanying children and being a role model. This is how it works.
Experts agree: in order to teach children how to use new media in a healthy way, parents should be role models and accompany their children in their media consumption right from the start. Our tips.
- New 3-6-9-12 recommendation for screen time
When psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron invented the 3-6-9-12 rule in 2008 to limit screen time at certain ages, he was still thinking about the television. His updated rules are less strict because screens are omnipresent in everyday family life.