“Please don’t tell the parents!” » This plea is not that of a little boy caught red-handed, but that of a grandfather. What did he do that was so serious that we should not under any circumstances repeat it to his son and his daughter-in-law? He occasionally looked at family photos on a tablet with his 3-year-old grandson, when he was strictly forbidden to show him screens.
Ah, the screens! A real scarecrow of parenting, source of countless (contradictory) studies by researchers and family disagreements… As the Christmas holidays approached, while many parents were preparing to entrust their offspring to their own parents, anxious instructions have multiplied: no more than twenty minutes a day. No cartoon, the confiscated tablet!
“With my mother, screens are limitless, annoys Anne-Sophie (many interlocutors requested anonymity), executive in a large Parisian company. No matter how much I tell him that I don’t want my children to have access to it, nothing works. I raised my voice countless times, she doesn’t understand, and said to me: “You watched TV when you were little, I don’t see the problem.” » This 42-year-old mother is very annoyed when she has to entrust her 5-year-old and 8-year-old children to their grandmother for an evening or a weekend. She continues: “When I say, ‘No screen, huh!’ , she understands “no TV”, so she allows videos on her phone. “It’s not the same thing,” she replies. » Anne-Sophie believes that the screens have it “diverted from reading” when she was younger. “I was raised on TV, and I played a lot of video games. I had rotten marks in the French baccalaureateshe breathes. I don’t want to replicate this at home. »
For her part, Marianne, 64, retired, « doesn’t argue badly » with his son “opposed to screens” when she babysits her 4-year-old granddaughter two days a week. “I read a lot of stories to her, she loves it. We reviewed all the Disney books. Read and re-read ten times. She knows them by heart and she likes it. I decided to show him the cartoons because I think it’s a good complement to the books. My son yells at me: he thinks she doesn’t need a screen, I think it’s good for her, these are films made for children and that’s all I show her. »
Discuss limits
In terms of screens, we imagine a little quickly the “cake” grandparents, more permissive, wanting to please children. Flore Guattari, clinical psychologist and member of the 3-6-9-12 association, created by Serge Tisseron, receives children or teenagers alone or accompanied by their families, depending on the situation. She nuances: “I also meet very permissive parents who find themselves face to face with grandparents who don’t understand why the children don’t go out for walks more. Both situations exist. »
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