The omnipresence of screens in families obviously upsets children’s relationships with them, but also parents’ relationships with their children and, in turn, children’s relationships with their parents. Faced with such a complex situation, however, the temptation is obviously great to reduce it to a single component: children’s relationship with screens.
This was already the mistake made in the 2000s by the Collectif Inter-associatif Enfance et Media (CIEM). Many teachers were already alarmed by the behavioural and attention problems of children who had watched television programmes in the morning before going to school. The CIEM then blamed the existence of “audiovisual maltreatment” and held it responsible for the problems observed. This seemed less difficult, and above all easier to get accepted, than calling into question the behaviour of parents who left their children in front of the television in the morning, unable to do otherwise, alas, for many of them. But it diverted attention from looking for solutions to remedy the situation. That is when I proposed setting up “decompression” and relaxation airlocks for pupils on their arrival, from which the idea of the Jeu des Trois Figures emerged.
In what is happening today, there is no longer any talk of screen maltreatment, but once again screens are blamed as the sole cause of the signs observed. Yes, of course, many children are massively and prematurely overexposed to screens, and one day research will indeed have to be launched to understand which of these overexposed children develop problems and which do not. But we will also have to ask why these children look at screens so much, and what comes first in their early experience of the world: the presence of the screen, or their parents’ lack of interest in them. And since the psychiatrists and psychologists who claim to attribute the new problems they say they observe to screens alone never want to “make parents feel guilty”, let us recall a few statistics that dare to say it.
A survey carried out in France in 2017 reveals that 50% of parents admit to being distracted by their mobile phone while talking with their children. According to another survey, 36% of parents check their phone during meals with their children, and even 28% while playing with them. Many parents today probably spend more time looking at their mobile than at their child. Parental excesses do not escape children either, nearly half of whom say they suffer from them. In 2013, a study revealed that 45% of 8–13-year-olds thought their parents checked their phone too much, and that 27% even dreamed of confiscating it. In France, in 2017, 26% of 12–14-year-olds thought their parents used their phone too much, and 21% thought they used their own too much. It is true that most children avoid commenting to their parents on this: they rightly consider that their parents’ massive overuse is the best guarantee that they will not try to limit their own use. But then, what would they say, at the age of one or two, if they could speak?
Today’s children come into the world and grow up, often, in contact with parents glued to their smartphones. Of course, colourful movements have the power to capture the human gaze. This is precisely an ability with which nature has endowed the human infant so that they turn their gaze towards what is naturally the most colourful, the brightest and the most mobile thing in a human face, namely the eyes. But if the child does not find the gaze they are seeking, if they do not find exchanges that match their expectations, there is a great risk that they will stick to screens as a refuge against a form of parental abandonment that is largely unconscious. Two other factors well known to child psychiatrists also play an important part in this capture by the screen. The first is motor imitation. For let us not forget: in the first years of life, children are above all formidable imitators. And even if they do not yet have a mobile phone at that age, they already reproduce the behaviours associated with it, including in their most excessive aspects. I have told elsewhere the story of those very young children who grow up with one hand stuck to their ear because they constantly watch their parent in that posture. How could children, who are formidable imitators from birth, not very quickly start imitating their parents’ interest in screens?
The second factor is joint attention, which prompts the child, from 9 months, to turn their gaze, and their desire, towards what seems to absorb all of their parent’s interest: they naturally look at what the adult is looking at. How could they not turn to a screen when their primary caregiver constantly turns their own gaze towards that of their smartphone, or of the television? We have all come across those parents who, on the metro, have eyes only for their phone, ignoring their child who, in front of them in the pushchair, is trying to attract their attention and capture their gaze. Alas, this sometimes ends, in desperation, with the child crying. The adult then sometimes hands over their own smartphone, in despair of imagining any other possible response.
So what comes first? Is it that the child turns their gaze towards a screen because someone has switched one on? Or does the child turn to the screen because the parent turns away from them to look at their own screen? Try the experiment: interact with a very young child who does not live in an environment where the television is on all the time, and switch on a screen near them. If you look at them and talk to them, it is probably your face that they will look at rather than the screen. But if they have grown up in an environment where the television is constantly on, and where they have become used to only too rarely finding a human face to interact with, then they have probably lost trust in this essential form of human communication, and they will prefer to return to the screen with which they have already compensated for the absence of a human face.
Yes, of course, research is needed, to use the standard phrase of all scientific publications. But those who blame screens today, as those who spoke of “screen maltreatment” did 20 years ago, risk once again missing a major component of the problem: namely, making parents take responsibility, not only for their behaviour towards their children, but first of all for their own behaviour.
Let us dare to say it: the world has changed, and everyone’s availability for interactions away from screens has shrunk. Therefore, anyone motivated by a desire for a child must ask themselves how to organise their life after the birth so as to be “sufficiently” available to this little being whose relational needs are immense. That is the real problem posed today by technological acceleration. Creating a new clinical category that brings children heavily exposed to screens into the pathological field would only delay the moment of this indispensable realisation. Of course, it is painful, but it alone can lead to a different future. For parents’ distraction by their mobile phone is nothing compared with what will be caused tomorrow by the famous chatbots, those robots endowed with verbal interaction abilities similar to those of humans.
www.3figures.org
Tech observatory, Observatoire des pratiques mobiles, CSA Research, survey carried out between 20 and 30 July 2017 on a sample of 201 French people aged 12 to 14.
2017 edition: focus on 12–14-year-olds
Survey carried out by AVG Technologies among 6,117 parents and children
AVG Technologies, op. cit.
Tech observatory, op. cit.
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, doctor of psychology accredited to supervise research, member of the Académie des technologies, and associate researcher at Université Paris VII Denis Diderot (CRPMS).
