Electronics are everywhere and sometimes it is unavoidable to expose your kids to some screen time (at least it is for us!). There are long car rides, flights, and a variety of other scenarios that need a little help from a tablet or phone to smooth things over. Kudos to other parents who don’t rely on it at all - much respect! Although I don’t think we rely on screen time, we definitely use it strategically and as a necessary crutch when we need to.

When I watch things, I tend to just watch things end to end no matter what and if I truly don’t like what I’m watching, I just stop watching it all together. It’s an all or nothing approach. When my wife watches anything, she tends to skip around. I don’t fault her for doing it because it’s actually super efficient for her to binge watch her shows. She will skip boring scenes, violent scenes, cringe-worthy scenes, and anything else she doesn’t want to see. What takes normal people an hour to watch something, she can reduce it down to 30 minutes (it seems!).

Although my wife never watches her content around the kids (and thus they never see her actually skipping around), somehow my 5 year old daughter started to do this a few weeks ago. My daughter started with skipping the intro to shows (which is actually a brilliant idea to whoever initially came up with the time saver). She then started to skip the credits. All normal efficiencies to me. Next came skipping scary parts. Fair. After that, she started skipping all kinds of things she just didn’t feel like watching. I haven’t stopped her from doing it even though I’m a bit worried (in my crazy anxiety portion of my brain) that it will cause her to lose her attention span for things.

Then, the other day…my 3 year old son started to do the same. He started skipping around on shows and movies since he learned how to do it on the tablet. He drags the dot around and fishes for certain parts of a movie or show. I couldn’t believe it since he sometimes asks his sister not to skip around. I don’t know whether to be impressed or slightly worried as well from the attention span aspect. I’m just overly sensitive to the TikTok and YouTube Shorts type of content where people cannot pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time to something they are watching. It almost seems like the dopamine they are seeking with social media content needs to be the perfect dopamine hit or else it’s on to the next piece to see if it lands better. This is just one of things wait and see type of scenario, but one thing is clear - I think skipping around is genetic!