There’s no place like someone else’s home (for taboo media use)

It’s September and that’s means back-to-school time for most families with kids. Time to rekindle those rituals of selecting a new backpack, deciding on afterschool clubs and figuring out affordable lunch options. But decisions about media use belong in that list too. TV on school nights? Which apps to get? Video game play for how long? How often? Of course, those decisions aren’t only being made by the parent-- or the child. As kids fill their afternoons and weekends with new and returning friends, they will often find themselves navigating a media environment quite different from the one allowed in their home.

Lots of families media routines change during the summer; often to a more lax attitude. But when schedules start including hours of homework, days with sports practice and any number of other activities, finding time for media needs to find its appropriate niche. If you’ve actually given this some thought-- if you’ve considered how much media time and which apps to download and read about child-friendly ratings, you might be frustrated when you realize the decisions you’ve agonized over are completely different than those in the home of the friend your child is about to hang out with this weekend. Actually, you’ll probably never even learn about these differences. Your child might be old enough that the parents don’t pre-talk at all; kids meet and then text to make plans and just get together. If your child is still young enough that you’re talking to the parent to plan the get-together, you’ll probably talk about drop off times and pick up times, you may ask who will be home and make sure they know what foods your child is allergic to, but you probably won’t ask how many computers they have, who has access to them, whether they’re all connected to the internet, what kinds of apps have been downloaded, and whether they have pay-TV channels or online media accounts or…oh forget it, you can’t ask about everything.

Bottom line? You have influence on your child’s media choices for about 5 hours a day. Maybe.

I distinctly remember when I figured this out. My daughter was about eight years old and had a wonderful, sweet friend who was/is a year older. I’d met the parents. Really liked the parents. I’d been in their home to drop off and pick up my daughter. All good. Then, one day my daughter says “Mom, want to see this funny video on YouTube?”

Wait a minute. How could she show me a funny video on YouTube? If she’s seen anything on YouTube I would have been watching it with her. She knows she’s not allowed to watch YouTube without me.

“Sure,” I said. And then, in my most non-Mom-concerned voice I said, “Where’d you see it?”

“Oh, at (name of friend).”

“Do you watch YouTube at her house a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

My friends, this is what we call a learning moment.

For me.

Should I be angry with her? She knows she’s not allowed to watch YouTube without her Dad or me. But was I really clear about the un-clear territory of friend’s houses?

So I said this, “You know those rules we went over about how much TV you can watch or video games you can play and which ones are ok and which ones aren’t? Well, those aren’t rules that just live in our house. Those are Culver rules. They live inside you. So wherever you go, those rules go with you.

“Oh.”

Pause.

“So what should I do when she wants to watch YouTube?” Good question. Am I really asking my eight year old to stand up to peer pressure about the simple decision of what to watch on TV? Instead, I recommended that she suggest doing something else. And if that doesn’t work, watch YouTube.

It’s moments like this that make me feel like a really bad mom. (It’s also moments this that made me actually like the movie, Bad Moms.)

Media use decisions are difficult and multi-layered, and yet sometimes simple. Media time might mean family-together time or homework time, or it could mean looking-at-something-you-shouldn’t-be time. The choices aren’t just challenging for moms and dads and other concerned caregivers. I struggle too. And I work in this field. I teach about it at my university. I publish about it. I speak at conferences about it. And I still find myself in situations where I struggle with making the right decision. (To be truthful, I find myself in lots of situations where I struggle. But in the interest of keeping this post to a 2-minute read, I’ll stay focused on media rules.)

I’ve come to believe that the line I told my daughter-- “media rules live inside you”-- works pretty well (most of the time...). As with so many other temptations our children and the young people in our lives face, the best we can do is talk about it with them, give them some tools to navigate the terrain, and model the behavior we want. These seem to be the core three steps for everything from choosing friends, to staying away from drugs, to navigating the every-present media in their lives.

There’s no shortage of articles providing advice on this topic, probably because I’m not the only one who struggles with figuring out how to make the right decision. We’re all figuring it out as we go. Like last week when my husband and I had a conversation about how often it’s appropriate to post a photo of our now-teenage daughter on our Facebook when she doesn’t even have an account. (Instagram- yes. Snapchat-yes. But Facebook-- no interest.)

Sometimes I feel the biggest impediment to making effective media use decisions is that we rarely talk about it with the people that could help us most. If you’re a parent, that would be other parents. When I do workshops for parent groups, the parents often say they want my advice, but our conversations often turn into a cathartic experience where parents share their stories and concerns and start offering up ideas. Good ideas. This works. Try it.

So back to those three steps I mentioned earlier:

1. Talk about it with your friends, purposefully. Talk about with your kids, purposefully. Believe me, if you bring it up, they will have something to share.

2. Give your kids some tools to navigate the terrain. From the conversation in #1 ideas will come.

3. Model the behavior you want. That means being a bit more transparent about our own struggles when we try to balance our own media use. For example, actually saying aloud, “I really want to binge watch all those episodes of Game of Thrones I missed, but I’ve already spent all day at work looking at a computer screen. One episode tonight.”

Hmmm…on second thought. If your child likes Game of Thrones too, you might binge it together. Just once. For fun. Bonding time.

Yeah, it’s a struggle.