Are screens bad for children?

An interview with Matt Bateman, philosopher and school founder, about children and screens

Parenting in the digital age is characterized by a deep sense of conflict about children engaging in digital life.

Many conscientious parents feel confronted with an impossible choice: either marginalize tech in your child’s life to the point of complete elimination, like a new sect of digital-Amish OR throw up your hands, embrace the brave new world, and allow your child to become an iPad zombie.

One of the few voices offering a way out of this false alternative is Dr. Matt Bateman, a Montessori historian, philosopher, school founder, and inveterate digital-age optimist. I sat down with Matt to discuss why he is so positive about parenting in the digital age and how he focuses on cultivating agency, not fear, around modern tech.

Matt Bateman, philosopher at Montessorium — a school that blends the high-agency Montessori approach to education with the accelerated AI-powered curriculum of Alpha

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“Screen Time” is not a helpful concept

Samantha: I wanted to start with the very concept of “screen time”. This term is used ubiquitously by parents and pundits, but I’ve heard you say that it’s not a helpful or valid way to think about issues in this realm. Why is that?

Matt: Concepts are helpful when they group together things that share some sort of common, essential causes, or like effects on something that you care about. An example analogous to “screen time” for children would be something like gross motor time or tummy time. There are things that about those times and activities that bear on the development of children in various ways that you might want to think about.

You might ask, for example, “Is my child moving around enough? And are they making big movements, not just fine movements?” It’s a useful perspective to look at things from.

But I don’t think “screen time” is a useful perspective in this way. Not all the things that happen on screens really resemble one another in terms of their developmental effects on children.

Just to take a really simple, grown-up example: doom-scrolling on Instagram or mindlessly playing Candy Crush for two hours at midnight instead of going to sleep, is not the same thing as writing a poem in a word processor, or FaceTiming your grandmother, or publishing a substack, or watching a documentary on YouTube or on your TV. They’re just so fundamentally unlike one another.

I also think books are like this, so maybe this has something to do with information technology platforms. I don’t think that all reading is equal, and I wouldn’t call any time a child spends with print material, “page time”, or recommend grouping anything under that heading.

Comparing “screen time” to “page time”

Samantha: The analogy to “page time” is really illuminating. It occurs to me that, with books, even though nobody uses the phrase “page time”, you often hear sentiments that group all reading together indiscriminately, just like people tend to do with screens.

Although, here, the grouping tends to carry positive connotations. You might hear, for example: “Any reading a child does is valuable, just get them reading!” Indeed, you might even be accused of elitism if you make a distinction about what kinds of books you prefer your child to read, like if you want to encourage the classics and marginalize Dog Man, for example.

Matt: There’s an analogous sense in which all “screen time” is good, as a kind of learning. It’s not that obvious, for example, how to use digital technology and how to navigate it and how to interface with it. There are skills you get, believe it or not, by, like, doom-scrolling Tik, Tok. There’s little bits of knowledge that you get.

And if you’re reading crap in books, there’s something similar happening. You are gaining something. You’re gaining fluency with reading; you’re gaining something that the people who lived in pre-literate or not fully literate societies didn’t have.

But there are differences between books and screens too. Right now, the realm of screens is where more sewage tends to live. But there are also books that I think are just worthless. And put aside books. Once you’ve narrowed it to the category of books, you’re already talking about a long, multi-page thing, as opposed to, like, a comic book or a magazine.

With screens, if you narrow the category to something analogous, like feature length films, you’ve already eliminated a lot of crap, right? With a film, you’re sitting and watching something self-contained for an hour and a half, two hours, not just ten minutes or 10 seconds; it has a plot that you’ve got to follow the whole way; it ends, and it doesn’t just auto-continue because it’s not a TV show or a YouTube series.

There’s something relevant about the specific container that content comes in. Books tend to have more positive features, so the analogy isn’t perfect.

Samantha: Why do you think the potential positives of any kind of reading are more salient to parents than analogous potentials with screens?

Matt: I think the parents who use the concept of “screen time” almost always tend to be insensitive to the good things that can happen on screens. Most parents who use the term “screen time” are not that aware of all the amazing resources on YouTube that their children would be really into, for example, and that they would probably be really happy as a parent if their kid spent time on them.

ChatGPT is good to use. Social media is good for kids to use, or it can be. You can use these tools for garbage, but you can also use them to learn or meet good people.

All of these things require judgment. But they require more judgment than just, “Is it on a screen or not?” or: “Is it social media or not?”. In a lot of cases, you need to look beyond the container.

Looking beyond the container

Samantha: That leads right to the next question: how do you curate content for your children who are 3 and almost 6-years-old? What are you looking for? What kinds of activities do you encourage?

Matt: My children both understand that I think some things are junk, and then I won’t let them watch it, and they mostly accept it. Sometimes they don’t accept it or are confused by it, and then we’ll talk about it.

But, of all the standards that are hard for me to enforce in my home—and there are many—this has actually not been one of them. From an early age, I’ve told them, “I don’t want you to watch this. This is junk. Here are some things that you can watch instead.”

I’ve never just said, “Turn off the TV.” I’m telling them to watch longer things, not shorter things; watch higher quality things and not lower quality things; and I give them specific things to look at.

I do more curation than limiting. It’s very rarely the case that I’m telling my kids not to watch something and they really want to watch it. Instead, I’m thinking: “What’s something that I would be really excited for them to watch? And how do I set that up for them?”

There are a million other particular things that I could talk about. My daughter, who is almost 6, uses ChatGPT a fair bit, mostly for curiosity questions. We set her up to do that with her own account, and we can review it. We’ve never found anything bad; it’s only been a pure positive.

She takes a lot of pictures, which I like and promote. She uses her laptop a lot at school.

Matt’s daughter in her classroom at Montessorium

My three year old’s “screen time” is mostly watching TV. Sometimes he interacts with phones, but he doesn’t do that much yet, which is pretty much where my daughter was when she was three. But he’s learning how to read, so we’ll get there pretty quickly.

Samantha: When your daughter was learning to read around that age, you set her up to be able to text family and friends on an iPad as an experiment to practice with reading and writing. Are you planning to do something similar with your son?

Matt: Yeah once my son has his letters and can kind of make words, I plan to do the same thing I did with my daughter, which I’ve written about extensively.

An example of Matt’s daughter practicing reading and writing via text when she was first learning to read.

Matt: For all of these things, I’m approaching it by thinking about which opportunities are just at the edge of what my children can do or might appreciate. I’m always trying to use technology to push that edge.

It’s no different than when I install a shelf in my house, for example. That’s an opportunity to help my kids learn how to use hammers and drills. It’s all the same thing for them, except it’s just a much wider and more varied range of things, because the digital age is wider and more varied.

Thinking about the risks

Samantha: Are you worried about any of the common pathologies that we hear dire warnings about? For example, you’ll hear about people being “addicted” to their screens, or that social media causes self-esteem issues or deteriorates mental health.

Matt: So my children are young and my answer might change as they get older, but I’m not really worried about these things. Once they’re old enough, I’m happy for them to be on social media. I want them to be on social media, and I want to teach them how to use it in a certain way, how to use it wisely.

I was born in 1982 and so I started using the internet in 1992 before there were web browsers; the World Wide Web didn’t really exist. I was 10, and this was the early days of the internet.

Some of the things I was exposed to were pornographic. As a 10 year old, I didn’t even really get them. I kind of knew that they were salacious; they had something to do with sex, but I didn’t really understand it.

Other things were, like, the Anarchist Cookbook which was big. There was this anarchic ethos and hacker culture in the late 80s and early 90s which I was exposed to. And it included overt law breaking, like hacking into a computer system, or manuals on how to make explosives.

There’s all kinds of dangers and risks. All those dangers and risks exist now, except there’s more of them, and they’re more salient, and it’s easier to fall into those rabbit holes.

But, the positives! I mean, growing up being in South Carolina, rural South Carolina, as a smart, nerd kid, and connecting to the entire world, even when most of the world wasn’t yet connected to it? Even in this form, I made friends. I interacted with people who didn’t know that I was 10 and talked to me like an adult, not in weird ways, but in good ways. I could just talk to them, get to know them. I played games with people. I learned a lot of skills, a lot of technical skills.

I felt like I had access to a world that the other grown ups in my life didn’t fully understand, and pretty quickly, I was better at navigating it than they were. And it was a permissionless world. I didn’t need to ask my mom to take me somewhere. Once you’re in, there’s a tremendous amount of freedom. It’s a sandbox and I got so much value out of it.

It was probably the single biggest source of value in my childhood, between when I was 10 and 18—with the friends that I made and the knowledge that I got.

I just refuse to believe that the internet isn’t like that now.

In a lot of concrete ways it’s not—the internet is not new in that way, and it really has connected the world now. But we have a global 24/7 dinner party with 1000 ways to participate, in 1000 parlors and 1000 drawing rooms and 1000 libraries. Some of them are awful, yes. It’s easier than ever to find shitty communities, but it’s also easier than ever to find good communities! It’s easier than ever to share your work and to get skills and to grow rapidly and to explore.

I just can’t imagine keeping that from children. I can’t imagine thinking about it in any terms other than, “This is the greatest resource in the world.” And yes, there are risks, so I’m going to help them navigate those risks, and I’m going to help them get the character traits they need to get the most out of this.

Whatever the bad effects of social media—and they do have bad effects, like the bad habits that you can get, addictions, negativity, isolation—there are also people on social media who don’t suffer in these ways. So . . . just figure out how to get into the positive category. And get your kids into the positive category. You don’t have to worry about the demographic problem. I just don’t think about it like that with my children.

Children want to be on the frontier

Samantha: This reminds me that you often use an analogy to the frontier when talking about giving children access to these tools. What do you mean by this? How is living in the digital age like living on the frontier?

Matt: So, if you think about westward expansion, like the literal frontier in American history, you were taking your family and you were moving west. You were doing it because you wanted land, because you wanted opportunity, because you wanted to join a different kind of community. There are all sorts of reasons why people did it.

Driving out into the wilderness is dangerous, and it used to be even more dangerous. Yet people did it in huge numbers.

And as a hinterlander or pioneer, you need to acknowledge: “This is probably less safe for my kids than staying put. We’re further away from people in civilization. There’s less law and order. There are fewer established American cultural norms, and some places where there might be none. Things could happen where we’re in danger. There are snakes, there are wild animals, there’s bandits, there’s Indians, all of which were real risks and threats.” Many people died, for example, on the Oregon Trail.

But it’s also an opportunity to live a kind of life, including to have children with a kind of childhood, that might be overall better relative to your current circumstances—even though it has risks.

And so what you do as a parent is: teach your kid about rattlesnakes. Teach your kid about safety, about how to set a fire in a way that doesn’t cause so much smoke that draws unwanted attention, about treating wounds and preserving meat so it doesn’t get diseased. There’s all sorts of things that you teach your kids.

And that’s the internet. It’s this awesome frontier, with risks, but where there are opportunities that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

I think it’s hard, even for people who have been alive longer than I’ve been alive, to remember what life was like before the internet. The information sources that I had growing up were sparse. There were, like, five TV channels that had the news, and then there were a few mainstream newspapers and a few local newspapers, and that was it. And if you if you thought things or believed things that were not expressed in those venues, then you had no community.

And it’s not just that you had nobody representing your views in the global discourse, you didn’t even have anybody to talk to about those things. That is no longer true of anybody today. Almost everyone is a part of some online community, even if only passively. And that’s a good thing! It’s a good thing even though that also means that people who have terrible hobbies and views also find each other and form communities.

It’s a much better world we live in now. It comes with risks that we’re learning to manage. But you’re on the frontier, and so raise your kids like they’re on the frontier, take the risk seriously. But that’s where they’re growing up, and probably your kids want to be on the frontier. Children naturally want to be on a frontier.

Cultivating agency with technology

Samantha: Speaking of teaching children skills to navigate this frontier, what skills are top of mind that you’re helping your children build or you hope to help them build in the future?

Matt: I’m excited to teach my children about better habits and the reasons to have better habits. I think my five year old, for example, now kind of understands why I prefer her to watch longer things instead of shorter things.

So, sometimes I do let her watch shorter things. It might be ten minute or five minute episodes of something, or we’ll get together and watch a bunch of how-to videos which I actually think are pretty good, but they’re still pretty short. Or sometimes she’ll watch more junky how-to videos, crafting content that I don’t think teaches much, and she gets really into them.

And then I’ve reflected with her, like, “I’ve noticed that you’re talking a lot about Titanic, a three hour movie that we watched a couple weekends ago. And even though we haven’t seen it since, it really stuck with you and you got a lot of thoughts and ideas. . . Do you remember how yesterday we were watching all those videos?”

And she has to think about it, like, “What videos? Oh yeah, I kind of remember them.”

Then I go, “Oh look, you forgot them almost right away. That’s interesting.”

I just draw her attention to the more short-term gratification of short film, and contrast it with the things you really sink your teeth into, that get you deeply interested in something. I help her notice how those tend to be longer, deeper—there’s something different about them.

And I think she is starting to notice it, and that’s the kind of thing that you need to notice if you’re going to have independently motivated self-regulation.

There are other skills—coding skills and technical skills—I want to impart to my children. Very basic things. I want them to know what a variable is and what a function is. I want them to know something like Python. Even something like HTML. I want to put them in a position where they have a basic understanding, not necessarily so they can be creators, but just so it’s not a mystery how the computer works.

If there were a way for my five year old to be on social media in a positive way, with other kids or something, I would like that. I don’t even know what it would look like. The product doesn’t exist. I’ve set her up to text people that she knows, so that she can experience the phone and the iPad and get that the purpose of these things is to communicate with people who she loves and who love her.

I want her to emotionally center on that. I wish that there were a way for her to kind of get the idea, “I can meet new people across the globe.” I think it’s a little bit hard at this age.

Really, I just want her to think of the computer as a friend.

The unseen cost: cultivating cynicism

Samantha: Most children, and most people generally, don’t get a message like this. It’s rare to hear that we should see a computer as a friend, that the internet is an inconceivably precious resource, or that social media is like a lively global dinner party.

Instead, we continuously hear messages that cast us in the role of a victim. The algorithm is out to addict you. Your social media feed is hijacking your attention or your dopamine.

I worry about the cost of messages like this, in addition to practices that seek to shelter children from digital life, in demoralization, fostering cynicism, and in creating a sense of internal conflict and shame where there needn’t be one.

Do you think there’s an impact on a child’s developing optimism or cynicism depending on how we approach this realm?

Matt: I definitely worry about that. But I think that that’s true of whatever the bleeding edge of industrial civilization happens to be. The bleeding edge is always subject to that kind of cynicism, or at least it has been in our lifetimes.

I do think it affects children, even when it doesn’t affect them at the object level. It affected me. It alienated me from adults when I was a kid. I was like, screw you, this thing is awesome. You’re wrong, you don’t get it. Adults are clueless. The world is run by people who don’t get it. And that was not a good view.

If I could go back, I would tell my 10 year old self, “All of your exploration with technology is important. It’s going to matter for you. It’s not just fun and games. It’s worth exploring.”

Not even telling myself that this will add up in his life, or will have all kinds of positive effects, but just: “This matters. It matters like going to the library matters, like international travel matters, like studying at school matters. This is in the category of important things, and you should take it seriously.”

I didn’t have that view for a long time, like until my 20s. That would have really helped me.

Samantha: It’s something I worry about because I can see the seeds of it in my step-children, especially in my 12-year-old stepdaughter who is more sensitive to messages of shame. She might shun things that are real, true, positive values to her, like certain video games, because she hears messages that she should be ashamed of her interest.

Matt: Making kids feel bad about enjoying video games is not good, even if the video games suck. I don’t think that that’s the right approach. I would take the view of, “How can we elevate it? What else can we do?”

If a kid likes Roblox, maybe you try to get them into Minecraft. If they like Minecraft, maybe introduce Factorio. If I watch them play video games on a server where everyone is acting like a jerk, I could call this out and ask, “Can we find a better server where people aren’t jerks?”

I would be trying to determine, like: are you obsessed with the game in a way where you’re actually learning and growing and becoming better and better? Or are you obsessed with it a way where it’s just a time suck, where it’s just a way to spend two hours between school and bedtime?

I have a reaction against the notion that it’s the specific tool that’s the problem. I don’t even think Tik Tok is bad. I’ve seen people use Tik Tok well, you know?

Samantha: It goes back to what you said earlier about people needing to look beyond the container. We need to use judgment in this realm, and that judgment needs to be deeper and more robust than just, “Social media bad. Video games bad. iPad bad.”

In the end, that rigid way of thinking is really just a short cut that leads nowhere. It certainly doesn’t build any skills, teach any agency, or help a kid see their world, themselves, or other people in a positive light.

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Matt Bateman is a philosopher at Montessorium, a classical Montessori program with an AI learning platform used by the students for two hours a day, and where his daughter attends school.

You can find Matt writing on topics in education and parenting on Substack as Matt Bateman and Twitter as @mbateman.