If given the choice between never seeing me and never seeing their OtterBox-clad tablets again, my daughters, 5 and 7, would kick me onto the street without a second’s hesitation. I get it. I am less colorful than the pets in Crayola Create & Play and less charismatic than Zed in Zombies. (If you don’t know what any of that means, consider yourself lucky.) Yet I find the constant fretting over screen time reminiscent of the overblown “It’ll rot your brain” panic that once surrounded Super Nintendo and cable TV. We live rich, activity-packed lives; as long as our girls aren’t watching YouTube unboxing slop or self-medicating with Cocomelon lullaby hypnosis, my wife and I won’t sweat an hour on the iPad each day.
This relaxed attitude does not extend to restaurants, where we maintain a strict “no screens” rule no matter how tempting it is to load up Sago Mini and let them zone out while we eat some dry-aged branzino. The entire point of taking our children to a restaurant is to be together. As parents, it’s work — work to teach them to say “please” and “thank you” every time a server refills their water; work to help them understand why they might actually like fried calamari, even though it’s squid; work to help them sit still for a meal that stretches longer than an hour — that pays off in little moments, like a recent dinner out when my older daughter proudly announced she wouldn’t order a hamburger or pasta, both of which were available, and instead wanted the picanha. (She did get a side of fries; this still counts as progress.) We want to teach them to enjoy and engage with restaurants, not to endure them. If we did give in to the temptation of the Forbidden Apple, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would defeat the whole purpose of going out in the first place. They can turn their brains to mush when we get back home. —Alan Sytsma
