Opinion: I’m making room during the winter break for this guilty pleasure

Editor’s note: Lynda Lin Grigsby has written for various national news outlets. She is a former editor of the Pacific Citizen, a national Asian American newspaper. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.

As I write this, five tween boys are sleeping in my living room after a day of playing tag and football outside. It’s my son’s birthday, and he wanted his close friends to sleep over.

It is also their winter break. They ran their heads off in the park and when it was time to come inside, they turned on a movie. Then they watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas” because one kid said it was so good.

What does it sound like when tween boys watch television? It’s a symphony of talking that never ends. Lots of iterations of “bruh” that makes me smile from another room.

At this age, they don’t want a party with the prescriptive singing of “Happy Birthday.” They just want to be. And I want to get some sleep. We are all so grateful to Marvel for providing entertainment. Rather than dictate and restrict, I let them find their own balance. As the party wears on, sometimes that balance involves more screen time than not, and that’s OK.

I’ve long since learned not to indulge parental guilt about the hours my kids spend in front of the television. I grew up on a steady diet of television. But in my childhood home, screen time wasn’t debatable; It was a necessity. My working-class parents did not have access to after-school childcare. Extracurriculars for my brother and me were financially out of reach.

In our sprawling Los Angeles suburb, transportation to and from after-school activities was also hard to come by. Instead, I spent my afternoons in front of the gentle glow of the screen, which entertained and educated my young mind.

My parents, refugees from Vietnam, worked long hours in and outside of the home. The television was my companion and tutor. It taught me about the complicated workings of US presidential elections and the double-edged importance of grit and perseverance at the highest level of competitive sports.

Many social experiences that my children consider rites of passage — sleepovers, summer camps and play dates were off limits to me. Instead, I ingested all of those staples of American childhood by proxy from TV.

My eyes soaked in the moving images and my brain cataloged the social mores for future use. When a romantic relationship created a wedge in our high school friendship circle, I knew exactly what indignant facial and verbal expressions to conjure because of “Beverly Hills, 90210” and many other teenage shows of its ilk.

For most of my childhood, there was a tacit understanding between my parents and me that governed my unfettered access to television: do my schoolwork and keep up my grades. As long as I did this, no one questioned what or how much I was watching. This expectation was the guardrail to create my motivation and reward system: get all the A’s, so I can watch “My So-Called Life.”

I often think back to my childhood TV consumption when I hear debates about this generation’s relationship with technology.

I’m not naive on the issue of television. I read the same articles that parents everywhere do about how detrimental it is to watch television for hours at a time. I sometimes wonder how many brain cells I must have fried and wonder now how much better versed I’d be in crocheting, or that I could be a chess grandmaster by now, if I could reclaim those hours.

Yet, my childhood was my childhood, much of it spent, during waking hours, staring at a screen. And to be honest, I think I’m none the worse for it.

Still, for many of us, limiting screen time is a parental obsession. At my son’s back-to-school event earlier this fall, it was the dominant topic of conversation between the teachers and parents. The group discussion was in reaction to a sixth-grade text chain, in which kids actively engage all hours of the day and night. I once did my 6 am neighborhood run to the soundtrack of continuous text pings, most of which I found out later were from kids greeting each other with emojis.

As a parent whose kids are growing up in the digital age, I know the struggle to separate from devices is real. And despite my childhood carte blanche screen time, I worry about my kids’ digital footprints. Screen dangers are well-established. There is no shortage of research on the potential harm of too much screen time, including one alarming study that found that kids ages 12 to 15 who spend more than three hours per day on social media face double the risk of symptoms of depression and anxiety. Get on the floor with your kids and play board games instead, parents are advised.

If I were to go back in time and present my mom with this information, I am sure she would pause to think about my childhood television overconsumption. But she almost certainly would have asked, who would put food on the table while she played Candy Land with me?

I used to consider myself a lucky exception to the widely accepted vice of childhood TV overconsumption, like a multi-pack a day smoker who somehow avoids chronic illness later in life. Now, I see my unfettered screen access as being tied to the human struggle to survive, in a country without guaranteed parental leave or childcare rights.

When I became a parent, I went the other extreme for the one I experienced as a kid: I fell into the fear-driven “screens-are-evil” rabbit hole and kept our living room TV a blank canvas. I wanted to create conditions pediatricians described as the most fertile environment for little brains to flourish. But I soon discovered that our “off” button was one I couldn’t control for long. Screens are part of our culture and landscape. To try to avoid it ultimately puts more unrealistic expectations on already over-tired parents.

Science cannot change the economic realities of working-class families like the one in which I was raised. The soundtrack of my childhood is orchestrated with murmurs of the television and the staccato hum of the sewing machine, which my mom sat in front of for hours to attach sleeves and lapels onto countless department store blazers.

But even those with substantially more means that my parents had can find it a challenge to indulge in what can seem like the luxury of a midday walk or a potentially never-ending game of Uno.

In our home, we try to maintain balanced, age-appropriate relationships with screens, not with carte blanche access or over-surveillance and avoidance, but with frequent discussions about digital boundaries and citizenship. It’s an imperfect practice that works some weeks, but can veer off course the next.

Amid the chaos of a recent home renovation project, I countered my kids’ chorus of “I’m bored” with the offer to start a movie, not because I’m a bad or lazy mom, but because I am a human mom.

Almost invariably, we emerge from our screen time binge renewed and ready to put the guardrails back on. The occasional screen indulgence may even create space for that board game, like the pre-teens playing Monopoly in my living room, where I overheard the clatter of the dice this weekend as someone yelled, “I’m buying Boardwalk, baby!”

There was something absolutely magical about that. But this was also the birthday where they  watched “The Avengers” and danced in front of the television like Charlie Brown.

That, it turns out, was magical as well.

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