Tia Mowry Refuses to Feel Guilty About Her Son's Screen Time During the Pandemic

From Woman's Day

The idea of parenting guilt is not a new phenomenon. As Ann Smith writes for Psychology Today, it's common for parents to feel guilty about a whole range of topics, from focusing too much on work to being too lenient. Actress and wellness entrepreneur Tia Mowry is no stranger to parenting guilt, which has been compounded by the pandemic. In an interview with Chriselle Lim on the Being Bumo podcast, Mowry mentioned that she allows her son, Cree, to spend time on electronic devices after school, something that tends to come with a lot of shame and self-inflicted guilt. But, as Mowry told Lim, she shifted the way she thinks about life during the pandemic to keep the guilt at bay.

"How I look at it is prior to this, I had a different bag of survival tools," Mowry said. "Now that we are living in this pandemic, I've had to create another bag of survival tools."

Finding a new set of tools to use, including less strict monitoring of her son's electronic time, is "all about finding some sort of compromise or balance," Mowry said. And compromise doesn't mean it's a free-for-all when it comes to screen time. "If I were to let him play with the electronics all day, he wouldn't do anything else, you know," Mowry laughed. Instead, Mowry and her husband have set various time slots throughout the week when Cree can play with his electronics as much as he wants.

"You're still an incredible parent if you allow your kids to play with electronics," she said. And because electronics are one way for isolated kids to connect with their school friends who they're not able to see in person, it's not always a bad thing to indulge them in screen time. Mowry said her son enjoys that he can use his devices to play games with his friends and that through tools like FaceTime, electronics can be more social instead of isolating. Though navigating her son's electronic usage might look different now than it did before the pandemic, Mowry is choosing to roll with it. "I don't feel bad about it because there is some sort of structure around it," she said. "And at the same time, what are you going to do?"

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