Learner Dad: They’re so quiet when they’re watching YouTube you’d swear they weren’t there

"Bring screen time to an end, and I might get an hour out of them, reading a book. And then they start working me for food."

Picture: iStock 

How much screen time do you allow your kids when they’re off sick and you're trying to work?

Ou r two kids are taking it in turns to get sick at the moment , so while one of them skips off to school, the other is standing in front of whichever parent is on minding-duty at half nine in the morning, making their Kids YouTube eyes.

You know the ones that say: I’m too nervous to ask for screen time right now, but if you give it to me, I’ll leave you alone to work for a couple of hours. Or the whole day. You decide.

I usually decide to give them the screen time. Not least because I’m doing a one-man show at the end of March - I don’t think the audience in The Everyman would burst into applause if I stopped after 30 minutes and said I didn’t have time to write the rest of the show because I’m worried about my kids having too much screen time.

So I send them off for 30 minutes of screen time, with a warning that they must stop when the time is up. They never do. That’s a relief – no one really wants their kids to rat on themselves, it doesn’t augur well for their later life.

I usually remember they’re on screens after about an hour and give them a five-minute warning. (Top tip: if you’re new to kids and hand-held screens – give them a five-minute warning that you’re going to take it off them. These are highly addictive devices, you don’t want them going cold turkey out of the blue.)

Sometimes, if I’m tied up with work, I forget and suddenly it’s 12 noon and now I have two problems. The first is that they will be like sleep-deprived weasels after too much screen time. The second, more serious problem, is that they’ll tell their mother when she gets home from work. (It’s funny, they never rat on themselves, but they’re more than happy to rat out their Dad.)

My wife is more conscientious when she is the one trying to work and mind the kids at the same time. She reckons that too much screen time makes for a ratty child, and she has the research to back it up, which is a husbandy way of saying my wife is right on this.

But they’re so cute and quiet when they’re playing Roblox or watching Kids YouTube, particularly with their headphones on, you’d nearly swear they weren’t there.

Bring that to an end, and I might get an hour out of them, reading a book. And then they start working me for food. Sometimes they come straight out and ask for a treat. (They’re not very sick, as you might have guessed.) Other times they make a sad face and say that they’re hungry. A bit of investigation here and it turns out they’re hungry for a treat.

Basically, anything that will free me up to do work will either make them google-eyed or obese.

It wasn’t that bad in peak Covid times when we were all just living from day to day, and it wasn’t unusual to eat a packet of fun-sized Kit Kats after breakfast. In the early days,  we caved in and allowed ourselves to allow them to watch screens and eat treats like Billio, before we got a grip and imposed some routine. But Covid is gone as a phenomenon, even though it lives on as virus that can lock you into your house with your kids for a week.

So, back to the questi on:  how many hours of screen time is too much for a child, sick or otherwise? The HSE is non-committal, saying children aged over six should have a limit imposed, without specifying those limits. The NHS is equally non-committal, but a British government outfit called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) comes out with a two-hour limit.

I don’t know anyone in NICE, but I suspect they’ve never had kids off school sick. Anyway, I’ll try to keep it to two hours a day. Unless I forget.