The Chinese government has ramped up its weird assault on the amount of time children are allowed to spend on smartphones. New proposed guidelines will restrict those under the age of 18 to a maximum of two hours a day, an hour for eight- to 16-year-olds and just 40 minutes for under-eights.
It’s time to update that old tree falling in a forest adage too: if a few hundred million Chinese teenagers cried out but nobody was there to TikTok it, is it a meme?
The strict proposals from the wonderfully named Cyberspace Administration of China are to stop “the problem of minors’ internet addiction”.
For once it’s hard to disagree with the Chinese censors. There is a problem with how much time children spend on screens. Case studies of adverse effects are legion. If you can, keep your children away from them for as long as possible, is the dominant advice. It also helps if the parents have their own strict rules about screen time during family time.
When former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke at the Discovery Leadership Summit in 2018, she made the point about the “height of irony ... [is] if you go to Silicon Valley, those parents are doing everything they can to keep their own children off screen devices”.
Citing a New York Times article that revealed this, she said: “They are doing it because they understand how addictive these devices are.”
Anyone who has a small child can tell you that. Or a large one.
They are doing it because they understand how addictive these devices are
— Hillary Clinton
I was joking with close friends, all of whose offspring are now over 18, about modern ways of, how else do you say this, disciplining teenagers. All of them replied with a variation of: “You have to change the Wi-Fi password.”
Does the Cyberspace Administration of China know something the rest of us don’t? Perhaps if the government institutes such a draconian measure, it will be good for parenting. A hundred million grateful parents who will be forced to apply the “minor mode” on smartphones — which prevents children from using phones from 10pm until 6am, except for emergency calls — will shrug and say: “The government made me do it.” Parents and teenagers can be on the same side for a change, against the tyrannical, but family time-boosting, measures.
Can it be such a bad thing to allow children to play only three hours of video games a week, as China decreed in 2021?
As one mother told The New York Times in 2018: “Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little. If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”
And that is the nature of addiction. Adults are bad enough, but the next generations will inherit not just our incredible innovations, such as smartphones, mobile broadband and cloud computing with all its joys, but the same terrible inability to be without it all the time. Time to start doing a digital day off on weekends, if you don’t already. It’ll increase your family time.
*Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa
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