Kids These Days:

Most parents know that their discipline often sets a double standard for their children.

Some of the double-standard rules are legal laws, so to speak; some of them are moral laws. For example, parents may consume alcohol while their kids cannot. Parents can drive and stay out as late as they want. Kids cannot.

Kids understand most of the double standards, but there are some gray areas. Legal or moral, one of the most important actions parents can take is to work to set the right example for their children. If, for example, you don’t want your child to use profanity, you must not use it yourself. If you don’t want your child of legal age to get drunk, don’t drink to excess.

One of the subtle examples parents are failing to set is a regulation on the amount of time they spend in front of various screens, including computers, MP3 players, cell phones and televisions. One study estimates that the average American spends 8.5 hours daily in front of various screens. Not only is that much screen time not healthy, it may be the catalyst for creating the first generation of Americans who spend more time in front of screens than they do interacting live with other human beings.

In March, Time magazine reported on research done by Marie Evans Schmidt, a research associate at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston.

“Schmidt studied more than 800 youngsters from birth to three years, recording the time they spent watching television or DVDs as reported by their mothers, as well as their performance on language and motor-skill tests,” Time reported.

The results? “Schmidt found that babies who spent more time in front of the TV performed worse on language and motor-skill tests at age 3 than those who watched less.”

Now, here is the hard part for me. I spend many hours each day in front of a computer screen. Yes, a computer is essential to making my living, but I wonder now whether I have trained our kids that this much screen time is acceptable. Now multiply my situation by millions, and you have a key to the child and adolescent obesity problem in America. That is not to say that overweight kids are solely the responsibility of parents who are hooked on screens, whose children have grown up watching them sit in front of screens, but it cannot help. Am I addicted to my screens, and is this setting a bad example? Possibly.

After all, I spend about eight hours in front of a computer writing each day. I watch movies at home on another screen and watch my cell-phone screen. The question of addiction also raises the question of my ability to stop. In my profession, that would be career suicide. Fortunately, according to symptoms reported by the National Institute on Media and the Family, I do not have an addiction. These include: 1) playing computer games; 2) putting off meals because of computer activity; 3) incurring large bills for online services.

Other symptoms include screen-generated headaches and anxiousness at the thought of being apart from a computer.

Addiction or not, spending too much time in front of a screen is not only bad for one’s health, it’s a bad example to set for kids.

And this example has no double standard.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com .