Screen Time during the Infant Years: What We Learnt

One of the most important lessons learnt experience is regarding screen time and its effect on our son.

In his early infant ages, we would put on DVD's of Islamic lectures (such as Sajid Umar, as shown here). As he got older and learnt names of objects and creatures, we started putting on DVD's of BBC documentaries, such as "Planet Earth", "Human Planet" and "Natures Great Events". Initially, though he was quite engaged by the colorful and interesting visuals, he did not pay that much attention.

Over time, however, perhaps from the development of his senses, we did notice that he would get more and more engaged and gradually more hooked on to it. As time went by, he began requesting for it: saying "Fishy" while pointing towards the TV ("fishy" implying documentary about fish).

We gradually started to expand our content to include several types of non-music nashid, and some videos on YouTube that compiled cartoon visuals but helpfully paired it with Quran Recitation (obviously created for parental distraction purposes - by parents, for parents, perhaps?) and as time went by, it was clear that he was really engaged and enjoying the content. This worked well for us, it seems, at it easily bought us an hour of time. And as any parent can tell you, time is such a valuable and scarce commodity indeed.

But as the weeks passed by, we realized that things weren't going toward a positive direction. He would get increasingly hooked, demanding "fishy" and "batasa" (as in, the "alif ba ta tha" nashid) on a daily basis, and while it was adorable and exciting to see him slowly learning the words and tunes, we observed gradually unpleasant behaviors being developed over time. He would throw up uncompromising tantrums and would only stop if the screen was on. He didn't want to play with the cat, his toy cars, the swimming pool, the balls, nothing - he just wanted the screen.

At that point, we could not really tell if this behavior was a result of the screen time, or a “natural progression” of the development of “cheeky boys” behavior as they grow up.

We found out later that apparently, studies have revealed that screen time can have a negative impact on brain and mental development for infants under 2. While the long term effects of this development have yet to be established, the short term effects were apparent and was really scary: our cheerful, playful and cheeky son had slowly turned into an obnoxious, unpleasant and demanding screen junkie.

We decided to take immediate drastic measures to remove the TV entirely, and (at least for the time being), never use our phones in front of him, except for cases of necessity. 

We knew this would not be easy. We were expecting some tough withdrawal tantrums. Let's be honest: even us parents would also struggle at the thought of withdrawal from our phones! (Gasp 😱)

And with the screens away, this meant that keeping him occupied would require a lot more time, effort, creativity and patience. That limited "me-time" was about to get even more limited.

But we knew what we wanted, and we were willing to endure the short term pain for our son's long term development. 

Remember, parenting is all about the “Long Game”, so fundamentally we always have to reshape our paradigm: This is not “sacrifice”, this is investment.

Brace for impact. Bismillah. 🙈

One night, when he was asleep, I removed the TV and replaced it with his DIY-made race track playing mat for him… as we did in this photo. 

Initially, he was demanding for his TV. But he was also somewhat confused and disoriented. Wait, something was here, right?

To our utmost delight and surprise, something amazing happened. Although there were slight symptoms of initial withdrawal tantrums, it didn't take very long for him to readjust - and just the very next day, by the afternoon, he was back to playing with his toy cars and trucks, annoying our cat with his antics, playing cheeky hide and seek games with Ibu and Abah, climbing places he knows he's not supposed to, and his creative funny side suddenly revealed itself back once again.

And as he did that, we stared at each other in amazement and utter disbelief: our Muawiyah was back. 

The amazing thing is that we also noticed that Muawiyah had a significant, consistent positive change in his mood. It was much happier and healthier - no more demanding millennial.

Apparently, when the screen was present, Muawiyah went on vacation.

But wait a minute... Don’t hold your breath just yet. Is this a “once off” fluke? Could the screen addiction relapse again when he remembers the joy of colorful cartoons enlightening his senses?

Nope. Two, three, four days later. Until today, Alhamdulillah: no more screen junkie. Muawiyah was indeed back!

Lessons learnt: As long as you don't expose the object of desire, the desire won't be present.

This was a very important trial-and-error lesson for us in our parenting journey. Not everything that is categorically "halal" and can potentially bring good, is inherently "good" in every circumstance. Educational Nashid and Qur'an Recitation videos are indeed good in a sense, and served its purpose in a given context, but we have to view the impact in totality, and exercise wisdom in how and when we apply certain things. Educational Nashid and Quran videos will never replace the effectiveness of the human touch of sitting down to read and recite with our children, especially in these formative years, when they interact primarily with emotion rather than language.

As the months passed by, we also learnt a remarkable thing about his personality: because he isn’t raised being engrossed in gadgets and TV’s and not always having his sensory being assaulted with content after content, he can get easily engaged with the simplest of things. He enjoys looking at boats, airplanes (even static pictures in a book or on stickers), he loves playing with the same toy trains and police cars he played with when he was 6 months old, he finds creative little ways to play with us (more on that in another article, “Creative Little Fella”). And even until this day, he enjoys playing with the simple cardboard-crafted stuff that we make for him – with the added bonus of “we time” through the crafting process together, a benefit you won’t get were you to purchase a Transformers action figure at Toys R Us.

All in all, this was a challenging lesson for us, but Alhamdulillah we are glad we learnt it in and performed our “course correction” intervention in time, and we hope that may this be a beneficial lesson to others as well.

BarakAllahu fikum

#frominfanttolittleman  #raisingMuawiyah
#parentingreflections