By Ummesalma Palanpurwala
It starts, as most of my worst habits do, just after midnight.
My sons have been asleep for hours. The house is quiet in that specific way it only gets once small children are unconscious—deeply, almost ostentatiously quiet—and I should be sleeping too. Instead I’m in bed with my phone, the blue light carving shadows across the ceiling, typing something like: how much screen time is too much for a two-year-old into a search bar, as though the internet has been waiting patiently all day to sort me out.
It hasn’t. It never has. But I keep asking.
The results are immediate and contradictory. One pediatric site tells me the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one hour of high-quality programming per day for children ages two to five. A parenting blog written by a woman with a very clean kitchen informs me that she doesn’t allow any screens on weekdays and her children are thriving. A Reddit thread reassures me that screens are fine, actually, and the research is overblown, and here are fourteen replies from parents who turned out okay despite growing up on Saturday morning cartoons. A think piece from a publication I trust tells me the real issue isn’t screen time, it’s what kind and how present you are during it, which means I now have to audit not just the quantity of my son’s television watching but the quality of my own attention while it’s happening.
By 12:45 I am more anxious than when I started.
This is the thing nobody warns you about when you become a parent in the information age: the research doesn’t calm you down. It just gives your anxiety better vocabulary. I no longer simply worry that my kid watches too much TV. Now I worry about passive versus interactive media, the displacement of imaginative play, and what it means that he asks to watch the same episode of Puffin Rock on a loop—whether that’s developmentally appropriate self-soothing or early evidence of an addictive personality. I came for reassurance and left with terminology.
I do this constantly. I research sleep regressions at 2am during sleep regressions. I look up “is it normal for a two-year-old to be afraid of the dark” while standing in the dark outside my two-year-old’s bedroom door. I have Googled “signs your child is anxious” and then, recognizing every item on the list, promptly Googled “can children inherit anxiety from parents,” which, yes, they can, and isn’t that a wonderful thing to learn at midnight.
The cruelest part is that I know, intellectually, exactly what I am doing. I have read enough about anxiety—because of course I have—to understand that reassurance-seeking is a hallmark of the anxious mind, that it provides momentary relief and long-term amplification, that every search is a small bet placed against my own ability to tolerate uncertainty. I know this. I search anyway. There is something almost slapstick about it: a woman Googling her way deeper into the thing she is trying to escape.
What I am actually afraid of, I think, is not screens specifically. Or rather, screens are just the current vessel for a fear that would find another container if I emptied this one. The fear is something closer to: what if I am doing this wrong and I won’t know until it’s too late? My older son is two. He is funny and stubborn and very serious about Puffin Rock. My younger one is seven months old and mostly worried about whether I’m still in the room. They are, by any reasonable measure, fine. But reasonable measures feel slippery at midnight, and the internet is right there, and it never tells me they’re fine. It just tells me more things to watch for.
There’s a particular irony I’ve been sitting with lately. The very thing I worry about—too much time on screens, the pull of the device, the way a phone can swallow an hour whole—is the thing I am actively, demonstrably doing while I worry about it.
I hand my son the iPad. I feel guilty. I pick up my own phone to research the guilt. There we both are, lit up in the same blue light, staring into our respective rectangles. He, at least, is watching something he enjoys. I am reading a study with a small sample size about dopamine.
I don’t know what the answer is. I know what the internet says the answer is: limits and consistency and leading by example and being present and finding your own calm first. Which is, I’ve noticed, the answer to almost every parenting question, repackaged. Be calm. As though calm is a posture I just haven’t tried yet. As though I could simply decide, right now, to put the phone down and trust myself, and the fear would accept that.
Some nights, I can almost do it. I put the phone on the nightstand. I lie there in the actual dark. I let myself not know. I let my son’s TV habits be a thing I’m uncertain about, and I let the uncertainty just sit there, ungoogled. It is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced anxiety—not painful, exactly, but alert, like standing at the edge of something. And then, slowly, it softens. Not because I’ve solved anything. Because I’ve stopped asking something I can’t answer to please answer it.
He is two. He likes puffins and pointing at things and the word “again.” His brother is seven months old and has just discovered his own hands, which are apparently extraordinary. They are both learning the world, and I am learning how to let them, and none of us is going to get it perfectly right.
I could probably find a study to confirm that.
I’m trying, lately, not to look.
Ummesalma Palanpurwala is a maternal health researcher and policy advocate with an MPH from NYU. A mother of two, she explores the intersections of health policy, systemic care failures, and the digital labor of modern motherhood.
Like what you are reading at Motherwell? Please consider supporting us here.
Keep up with Motherwell on Facebook, Instagram and via our newsletter.