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SCREENS ARE FUN, LIMITING THEM IS NOT
In your children’s eyes, screen time is already fun. Who are we kidding—adults like their screens, too. In this case, it’s not a question of making something fun. That’s covered. But making screens a part of a happy family life means finding a screen-use balance that leaves plenty of time for everything else, and ensuring that maintaining that balance doesn’t itself lead to unhappiness.
Every year, a new set of data emerges alerting us to what we already know: we—parents, teenagers, children—spend a lot of time watching or interacting with screens. Some of the latest numbers show parents—parents—of children ages eight to eighteen reporting an average of more than 7.5 hours a day of personal screen media use outside of work, although it’s important to note that some media use is concurrent with doing other things, or even counts double—surfing the Internet on a tablet while watching television, for example. Teenagers (using the same standards) report a little under nine hours of non-school-related screen time, and tweens (eight- to twelve-year-olds) about six hours a day, again excluding screen time spent on work, school, or homework. Younger kids appear to watch and play less: parents report that children five to eight spend about 2.5 hours a day on media; two- to four-year-olds, 2 hours; and children under two, about an hour.
So much of our conversation around screens and kids is about setting limits, but those numbers suggest that while we’re good at limiting the screen time of children whose time is easily controlled, the minute children become more able to access screens themselves, the game changes. If the goal of limiting young children’s media usage is to teach them to set reasonable limits for themselves later, it looks like we’re failing. In fact, it looks as if we can’t even limit ourselves. Yet, in that same survey in which parents reported a whopping seven-plus hours of daily personal screen time, the majority (78 percent) also cheerfully declared themselves to be “good role models” when it came to media and technology use.
I think we can safely say that we’re serving as role models, yes. The “good” part of that, though, we might want to question.
This is a large part of what makes the screen time piece of the parenting puzzle so very difficult. Ask a few hundred parents to name their top three worries about their children at any given moment (as I have), and complaints about some form of screens, media use, or “SnapFREAKINGchat!!!!” will pop up in the top five overall. We know we want to do something to manage the technology that has come so recently to surround us. We know that while some of what we do online is great—we learn, we connect, we read, we expand our thinking—some of it leaves us cranky and wondering where the last three hours went. Our kids face the same struggle, but figuring out what sites or gadgets or activities belong on which side of that line is hard and constantly evolving as screens, media, and our children themselves change. It’s hard to feel happy and comfortable with our choices when the ground is always shifting under our feet.
What Goes Wrong
What’s happening here? For starters, different is always scary, and in no single area are our children’s lives more different from our own collective childhoods than when it comes to screens. The amount of media that’s available for our consumption now is truly overwhelming, but it may be the change in the way we communicate that’s most disturbing to us. Where we hung out in person, passed notes in class, sent letters to pen pals, and spent hours on the phone, our children are hanging out online, posting, texting, messaging, and photo-chatting. The evolution of our civilization is reflected in changes in the way we interact and exchange information, and we are, as individuals, dependent on how we master those skills. It’s only to be expected that big changes in how we communicate, changes that make it hard for us to teach our children to do as we have learned, would be disturbing.
When Common Sense Media asked more than one thousand parents to describe their concerns around screen time, most fell into two categories: worries about what the children aren’t doing (face-to-face conversations, reading, playing outside) and worries about what they are (spending too much time watching or playing, using social media, accessing pornography or violent content). Both of those mirror fears older generations have long had about their children: What are they doing that we didn’t do? What will they lose if they don’t do as we have always done?
Add a bonus challenge similar to the one offered by junk food—much of this stuff is designed to be much more exciting and alluring than its real-world counterpart—and then factor in that final element of our own difficulty in handling technology, and you have a recipe for a problem that seems almost designed to suck the fun out of life.
Finding a comfort level with that kind of uncertainty is hard. It means that we can’t focus on the apps, gadgets, or sites themselves, all of which can and will change without notice. Instead, we must make choices and set limits, based on deeper family values, and then teach our children to do the same, or admit we’re muddling along with them in the same struggle. We are trying to help our children master something that many of us have not mastered ourselves.
Happier Tech for Grown-Ups
It’s impossible to write about screen time and a joyful family life without first considering our own screen use. Often, we’re ambivalent about it. We set our own goals around our phone use: We’ll turn it off an hour before bedtime! We’ll take a walk in the woods without it! We struggle with when to return email, how to put our full attention on what we’re doing, how much time to spend on social media, and how we feel after a bout of Facebook or Instagram. When Manoush Zomorodi’s Note to Self podcast on NPR created a project designed to help us manage our information overload, more than twenty-five thousand people joined in.
Some of us are perfectly happy with our screen time. Smartphones and the Internet have been game changers for parents. They’ve replaced the physical village with a virtual one, which may not be able to babysit, but can answer most questions far more quickly than we can reach a doctor, our own parents, or even a knowledgeable friend. Many of us do our work at least partly online, which enables us to be physically present in our children’s lives in ways our parents could not. If we struggle with a particular parenting challenge, we can connect with a community of similarly affected families no matter how rare the issue.
But for many of us, there is a downside: because we can always be connected to a world outside our homes, it gets hard to disconnect. We appreciate the blurring of the line between work and home when it allows us to take a quick call in between innings; we resent it when we feel compelled to respond to a boss’s email rather than read bedtime stories. We love sharing our own photos, but when our house is chaos and we’re spending spring break snowed in with norovirus, other people’s beach pics don’t help.
Deciding how we want our family to interact with that digital world means first deciding what we want from it ourselves. It means thinking about what comes first when your attention is being pulled in multiple directions, and why. We’re not likely to nail this on our first try. But if we keep the following things in mind when it comes to our own adult screen use, we can pave the way toward a happier family tech experience overall.
GIVE YOURSELF REAL OFFLINE TIME
Many of us carry our phone everywhere, toting it around the house, laying it on the table next to our plate at meals, balancing it on the toilet paper holder in the bathroom. Even if we feel like we’re not constantly looking at it, we probably are, and having it always at hand means it’s always the go-to in even the smallest moment of downtime.
That is, as I like to tell my kids about some snacks, “not a healthy choice.” And it is a choice. Even if you have a job that requires you to be reasonably accessible, or if you have children with a caregiver who needs to be able to reach you, it’s okay if it takes a little while. If it’s possible for you to turn off your phone during a root canal, you can also do it during a yoga class, a half-hour walk through the park, or a deep-concentration work session. During the evening, and on the weekend, let yourself travel back in time to before your phone was a constant companion. Leave it at home to go to the beach or even the grocery store. Plug the phone in wherever it goes and sit down with a book for an hour.
Make a conscious decision about whether you want the phone at every opportunity, and find ways to make it easier to leave it behind, or to use it only for the purpose you intend. I carry my phone in case of emergencies on horseback trail rides, but I keep it wedged in a strap around my waist that’s hard to access, and I put it in there hoping not to take it out until I’m back in the barn. When I run outdoors, I use a similar strap, and I turn on a podcast or music before I start—because I know that if messages pop up, and I can see them, I’ll be stumbling along trying to text at 4.4 miles per hour.
The more often you set the phone aside, the more often you’ll want to. It’s wonderful to know you can reach a friend, entertain yourself, or get help in an emergency at the touch of a button, but it’s equally wonderful to know that your time and attention are your own, to give as you choose. What did you do for fun in 2006? Next time you have a few minutes, instead of picking up your smartphone, do that.
ALL OR NOTHING IS BETTER
Let’s say you’re going to have to work some at home this weekend—two hours on Saturday afternoon. You could do that in a couple of ways: you could shut yourself into your closet for two hours and emerge with the work done, or you could sit at the kitchen counter and work one minute, then answer a kid’s question another minute; work two minutes, spend two minutes getting the knot out of someone’s hair; work another minute, get up and make someone a sandwich; work five minutes . . . you get the picture. By dinnertime, you’re fried, and no one has had any fun.
The first method is going to be a lot more effective.
Every time we switch tasks, we lose time to the switching process. Decide what you’re going to do, then do it. That in-between state is frustrating for us, and it’s frustrating for our kids. Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, asked one thousand kids how they felt about their parents’ smartphones, and the most prevalent answer amounted to “excluded.” Kids know when we’re not all there, and they don’t like it.
You won’t always be able to get it right, and even if you do, things will come up. I try to remind the kids that it’s the phone—which may look to them like the reason I spent the first period of the hockey game in the parking lot—that makes my job flexible, which is the reason I can drive them to a Friday afternoon tournament game in the first place. It’s good for kids to see how you balance responsibilities, too.
DON’T SET A DIGITAL DOUBLE STANDARD
Someday, if they don’t already, your children will have their own phones, laptops, and tablets. How they use them will reflect how you’ve used yours. If your phone has been a regular presence at the dinner table, theirs will be, too. If you regularly look at a screen instead of at them when they’re talking to you, they will someday do the same.
The two rules above—give yourself time offline, and all or nothing is better—establish standards you’d like your children to use later. We don’t want our kids to be on their phones during family meals. We want them to be able to set the phone aside for a conversation with the people who are with them in the room or the car, or even at the grocery store. If they’ve grown up watching us use a phone as a tool, not a constant companion, it will be easier to teach them to do the same. If we’ve told them we will be spending the next forty-five minutes managing work emails, and then we will put our laptop away—and followed through—then it will be easier, later, to say something like “Please finish texting with your friends and then join us for miniature golf.”
It will also be easier to accept reasonable screen time and phone use from your teens. It’s fun to be able to text your friends a picture of your hole-in-one under the swinging dinosaur tail, whether you’re fourteen or forty. This isn’t to suggest that you have to follow the same rules and limits around screen time that you set for your children, or even your teenagers. But if you share family values around how and when you connect or go online, setting those limits and keeping them will come more naturally than if you try to persuade your children to do as you say, not as you do.
IF YOU CAN DO IT OFFLINE, DO
If you value what you’d consider non-digital activities, like reading and writing, yet you tend to do those things in digital ways (ebooks and email), maybe it’s worth making a concentrated effort to show your kids how much time you put into those things by removing them from your gadget (where, as far as your kids are concerned, you could be playing the latest addictive game) and bringing them visibly, ostentatiously, back into the physical world.
In other words, why not read a book or paper magazine, and subscribe to the paper version of your local newspaper or a favorite national publication? Send a card or a letter to a friend? Draw a few pictures, write in a journal, doodle on a grocery list?
Reading an actual book in the evening or on a plane or at the beach is one way to counteract that sense of imbalance we sometimes have about the ways our devices consume our waking hours. A physical book does not contain within it the siren song of email or social media. Notifications from various news sources will not drop down onto its pages. And your children will know, without a doubt, what you’re doing. You’re reading. Quietly engrossed in the printed word.
You might find you prefer it. I do, although I don’t mind reading ebooks and in fact use the larger iPhone so that I can read on that screen if an unexpected opportunity presents itself. Many children and teenagers say they prefer physical books, too—64 percent of teenagers told a (surprised) British marketing research firm that print books were their favorite, while just 16 percent preferred ebooks (the rest were indifferent).
Printed newspapers and magazines have another strength: they are themselves alluring. If you want to raise a child who’s informed by the Dallas Morning News or the New York Times, the constant arrival and departure of physical copies of those is the best possible recipe. The front-page headlines and images are designed to evoke curiosity, and the presence of all the available topics, from sports to crime to human interest, as well as the ever-shrinking comic pages, increases the odds that a curious child will pick one up. The same goes for magazines. If you want to raise a New Yorker addict, the covers and cartoons are the gateway drug.
CONDUCT AN ANNUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT
Want your kids to have good social media practices later? Start with yours now. Somewhat dubious statistics suggest that most parents put a picture of their newborns on social media within the first hour of the child’s life. That’s followed by milestones and candid shots and family photos and funny stories and more (to the point where some childless friends may find subtle ways to say “Don’t show me more like this”).
There comes a point, though, when your children might prefer that you shared less. When researchers studied 249 parent-child pairs distributed across forty states, they found that, for the most part, kids and parents agreed on what tech rules families should have: don’t text and drive; don’t be online when someone wants to talk to you. But while children ages ten to seventeen wanted rules for how their parents shared things about them on social media, their parents, for the most part, didn’t even put that on the list. We don’t even think about it. When Karen Lock Kolp’s Facebook page popped up a video she had posted of her son as a four-year-old five years earlier, imitating Gandalf the wizard declaring, “You shall not pass,” she reshared it immediately and called her then-nine-year-old to see.
He was humiliated. “Please,” he said, “do not share that again.” Since then, she asks first, posts second.
If you’re prone to posting things on social media now that your child might not appreciate later, balance your desire to share with future searchability. Send the video to a few friends instead of putting it up on YouTube; keep bath-time photos in your personal cloud. I once, during my time as the editor of the New York Times’ parenting and family column, received an essay from a writer about her concern that her infant son’s penis was too small. The writing was good, the topic probably one with which many parents could relate—and yet. I explained, as gently as I could, that I was rejecting the submission on behalf of her future teenager. There are some things that don’t belong in the Times.
Keep in mind that even young children can feel exposed when their lives are too public. Your six-year-old might be a little surprised, and a little resentful, if a neighbor asks if the tooth fairy returned the tooth she took last weekend—thanks to your post about the resulting tears. Your eight-year-old will be mortified if the rabbi or pastor asks if she’s going to do better on her spelling test next week. Some family things should be kept in the family.
REMEMBER, YOUR FUTURE DRIVERS ARE WATCHING
One last thought about you and your phone—if you aren’t putting that phone aside while you drive already, start doing it now, in a big, loud, pointed way. “I’m putting my phone in my bag because I’m driving!” you should say. “I’m not answering my phone even on the hands-free because I’m merging onto the highway!”
Pull over to send a text. Have a child read you texts and type replies if you really must be in contact while you drive. Pull over to set up a new podcast or audio book, or to have a conversation that involves anything more than just “Yes, we’re having trouble finding a parking place.”
Don’t touch the phone while the car is moving.
Why? Because that toddler in the backseat will be the driver in the front seat one day, and he is watching and learning from what you do far more than from what you say. You may think you can glance down at your phone real quick and then back up at the road (you’re wrong). But do you want your sixteen-year-old to do the same?
If you don’t want them to do it while they’re driving, you can’t do it while you’re driving.
Kids and Teens and Screens: Limits That Leave Room to Grow
We’re parents. We set limits; that’s what we do. If we haven’t actively set them, it’s often because our unspoken limits haven’t been pushed up against—yet. Screen time is not an exception. When I first began drafting this chapter, I thought I’d be considering two perspectives. Call them “the case for limits” and “the case against limits.” But there was a catch, and a big one: I couldn’t find any parents who didn’t have any limits at all. Many initially said they didn’t have limits, and I presume those are the same parents who respond to surveys by saying they don’t set limits on either content or time spent online.
But dig a little deeper, and it’s quickly clear that “no limits” is a fiction. “No limits” means no set rules, not a household online Wild Wild West. Some parents said they had no set limits, but that they did put a stop to watching or playing if they perceived that it had gone on too long. Others limited passive but not active uses, or had no limits on certain games and shows “as long as chores and homework were done first.” Parents might allow iPad games and interactive books mixed in with everything else in the toy box but limit television, or allow unlimited television (on the theory that it would get old after a while) but not gaming. They might not restrict a teen’s use, but still require that the phone stay downstairs at bedtime or turn off the Internet at a certain hour. And even the very most permissive of parents limited content, with violent first-person shooter games having age limits and porn off-limits entirely. Show me a parent with “no limits,” and I’ll show you a parent whose child hasn’t tried to download The Many Faces of Death. The question isn’t whether you need limits. It’s how specific and spoken those limits will be.
We’re right to set boundaries in this area. Children need structure in their lives, and providing that structure (even if it’s just a sense that we’re not going to let them watch or play for “too long”) helps them feel like part of a steady, secure, predictable system, which makes almost everyone happier. Technology is specifically designed to make all of us—young children, teenagers, and parents, too—want more. Limits help us combat a force that’s larger than we are.
But while we should be looking for the right limits to use with our family (more on that later), we shouldn’t be panicking over letting our children, even very young children, watch and play in moderation, and in ways that work for us. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics recently revised its guidelines away from suggesting “no” media for children under two. Some screen time with age-appropriate material is fine for kids.
On the other hand, research on whether some media can actually benefit children, usually by teaching them something they did not know before, is limited and somewhat inconclusive, but that’s okay, too. If you’re the parent of a baby, toddler, or preschooler, and you just need a break to take a shower, you don’t need that break to actively teach your child Mandarin Chinese. You just need to be able to take it without guilt—and you can. A little bit of video, designed to let you catch your breath, regain your patience, shower, or have an uninterrupted conversation with a friend, will have no observable effects on your child’s future.
For children at every age—and even for yourself—don’t think of your technology rules as limiting something dangerous. Instead, think about them as protecting something valuable: the time you and your children spend, together and separately, doing other things. That time does need protection, because there is an entire industry dedicated to pulling you and your kids away from reality and into a world populated with advertising, consumer messages, and in-app purchases. Remember, too, that protection is not enough. Your goal is not only to control the ways your children interact with screens, but to teach them, as they grow, to control themselves.
Setting Limits for Happier Screen Time
The “right” rules and limits look different for different families. Ask your peers what they do (as I did) and you’re likely to get answers that range from a total ban (usually for younger children) to “we just yell at them when it’s too much” (heard especially from parents of teenagers with smartphones). There are a whole lot of ways to get this right, and a clear need for our policies to evolve as both our gadgets and our children change. We’re not working toward an absolute, but toward a balance that blends technology with everything else we want to do in life.
Like nearly everyone else, I’ve wrestled with the question “What kind of limit should we set?” against a constantly changing landscape of what, exactly, we were limiting. I set our family policy long ago, when my oldest child was eight and his younger siblings five, three, and three. I had the first iPhone, but it was far too precious to allow little hands to hold. iPads didn’t exist. I was limiting a desktop computer, a portable DVD player with limited battery life, a Nintendo system, and satellite television—and yet, the policy I came up with then still works for us today.
As much as I’d like to tell you that our screen-time policy reflected much deep thinking about our family values and our future, it did not. Instead, it was entirely based on how much I hated the begging and negotiating that had begun to surround any kind of media time. Can I watch a show? Can I? Can I? Why not? Can I? Just one? Just part of one? Can I play my DS then? Just for a few minutes? Can I? Why not? Can I? Can I? Our younger daughter even had a special abbreviation for “Can I”: Ki? Ki watch? Ki play? Ki? Ki?
I needed a rule that would let them answer the question for themselves. My goal wasn’t really to lessen their time with video games and screens, which was in a fine place, but to lessen my involvement with it. I considered time limits, but how would I track them? If each child had an hour on the single computer, how would that work if three kids wanted it an hour before bedtime? If everyone had an hour of TV a day, would that end up being four hours, or would I be banishing children who’d used their hour from the room with the TV? I knew I’d be forever setting timers and repeating “It’s time to get off” and giving warnings and dealing with “Just one more minute” and “I’m almost done.”
So instead of “how long” limits, we set a black-and-white “when” limit: nothing on weekdays, open season on weekends unless things got out of hand, with any complaints or whining about a “turn it off” request being met with an immediate removal of the next day’s privileges. I was willing to be hard-core about that (in part because I was always happy to have an excuse to turn the screens off entirely), and I think it only took twice before they figured out that I meant it. When school breaks and summer vacation rolled around, we kept the same clear rules and found an unexpected benefit: with clearly defined times when video entertainment just wasn’t available, the kids always had an expectation that some days they’d be doing other things.
Those rules have worked for us for eight years, and they’re largely working still. I might not have sat down with our family values in mind when I came up with the weekends-only rule, but I turned out to hit upon the one thing about screen time that mattered to me most. My kids internalized the idea that there should be a limit, and that they should know what it was and stick to it. (Amazingly, in all this time, we’ve only had a child sneak screen time once.) Having established rules contributes to our family happiness, and mine: everyone knows what to expect, and even when technology changes, the rules are simple enough to stay the same. We also tell children when they’ve had enough, if we need to (it’s amazing how many hours a child can spend with a screen over the course of a rainy Saturday).
When our two older children were able to buy their own phones and laptops, we asked them to respect the rules regarding games and television, and they do. So far, we haven’t had to limit their phone time—which doesn’t mean we won’t. They’ve had the experience of realizing they’ve frittered away a day they’d meant to spend doing something else with time online, and they don’t like it. They have learned (slowly) that the limits in place on other media help them do other things they love or just things they need to get done. I encourage them frequently to apply that knowledge to their phone, to keep their notifications off so that they control when they choose to engage, and to be aware that time spent scrolling Instagram doesn’t usually feel good later and is often a sign that you’re not feeling great in the first place.
Don’t imagine that this doesn’t mean I’m not driving along telling my daughter to put her phone away and to tell me about her day at school, because I am. But they use an app that tells them how much time they’re spending texting and scrolling (it’s called Moment, and I use it, too), and they are slowly coming to see the value in leaving the phone across the room when they do homework or in their pocket when they’re out with the family. The limits they’ve been following for years have set the tone for limiting themselves.
But as much as I like our rules, they’re not for everyone. When you’re trying to set your own family tech rules, you’ll consider both your own preferences and the age and needs of your kids, and you’ll need to be open as things and kids change. In this case, you don’t have to get it right every time translates to you don’t have to get it right the first time. You’re allowed to make adjustments as you go—in fact, you’ll probably have to. Here’s what you should be thinking about for younger children and middle graders in a household where media access is largely through devices controlled by parents, and what you should consider later, when the children possess media access points (phones, tablets, laptops) of their own.
Tech Limits for Young Children
WHAT’S OUR PROBLEM WITH MEDIA (AND DO WE HAVE ONE)?
Parents of young children who aren’t happy about the household’s screen time tend to have one of two problems. Either the children are watching or playing too much, or they’re begging and pleading too much. Even when the screen time itself isn’t an issue, the negotiations around it can make anyone crazy.
If neither moderating nor negotiating screen time is an active problem, you may not need to codify what’s working. You probably already have what amounts to an effective policy, even if it’s just “you can watch when I say you can.” Don’t mess with what works, even if part of the reason that it works is that it works for you. If you’re good where you are, there’s no need to change to conform to someone else’s ideal.
Our oldest child, as a preschooler, regularly got up at five a.m. His infant sister kept us up nights, but often slept in the mornings, from four until about eight. On the weekend, one of us would get up with our son, give him a tray of breakfast, set up some form of video or television long enough to maximize our sleep, and then stagger back upstairs. If he watched a full three hours of television at that point we counted it a victory for our health and sanity, even if the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends no more than an hour a day of media at that age, might have thought we needed more limits.
If what you’re doing isn’t working, take the time to think about what the problem is. Like me, you may feel that your kids aren’t watching or playing too much—but you yourself are spending too much time and energy negotiating over every minute. If that’s the case, setting a limit might not change your kids’ overall screen time, but it might save your sanity.
ARE YOU IN CONTROL?
One of the first questions you should answer as you consider what’s happening with your family and screen time is this: who’s the decider? Do you choose what, when, and where they watch or play, or are you more likely to be giving in to their requests (or demands)? When your children are young, most of their media choices should really be your media choices. If, by any chance, you don’t feel that’s true—if you’re feeling at the mercy of your child’s begging or insisting or weeping or tantrums when it comes to what, or how much, she watches or plays—then know that you can take that control back. If you set a limit, and you stick to it, eventually that limit will become routine.
This may take what feels like a lot of time, and it may require removing a phone, tablet, or laptop that your child has come to consider “his.” But it is far easier to regain your sense of control over your child’s media at this age now than it will be later. If the transition to “off” is a trouble area with toddlers or preschoolers, try using the technology to help you wherever you can. In one small study, parents found that turning off continuous play on videos or digital players, using a DVR with only one show recorded, or taking advantage of tools that cause digital gadgets to shut down after a certain amount of time can ease transitions. You can also install limits on computers or video-delivery services, and even set your house Wi-Fi to turn off at a certain time.
Here, as with nearly everything, giving in to whining or repeated requests only invites more of the same next time. You might even consider, as we did, making any demand to extend time or change the limit grounds to take away the next watching or playing session, especially if continual whining for more screen time has really become a drain on your ability to enjoy your family time. It’s fine to be what your kids may consider unreasonably harsh in this area, especially while you’re making changes to limits. Did I mention that there is no evidence that some digital media use harms kids? There is no evidence that no digital media harms them, either.
DO YOUR KIDS KNOW THE GOAL?
Limiting screen time and ending the begging is only half the battle. What you really hope to be doing is establishing a baseline for how much is enough, and teaching your children to make their own decisions about that later and stick to them. So talk about why you’re limiting screen time and making healthy media choices. If your child’s school has a media education program, or the pediatrician asks them about time spent online, use that to your advantage. Would your child want to tell her doctor or teacher that she spent six hours playing a video game or watching a cartoon? If she wouldn’t, why not? Our kids often have a sense that they need limits—make sure that instinct becomes a concrete belief in the importance of moderating time spent on screens.
WHAT’S IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO PLUG THE KIDS IN?
Let’s not indulge any illusions around the benefits of screen time—for adults. It really is a free babysitter, even if not one that lets you head out for a night on the town. When you need them to be distracted, you can achieve it, so take time to consider how you want to use that power (and keep in mind that for most children, especially young children, the magic wears off with overuse). Will you offer a device or video on an airplane? We did and do. At the grocery store or during errands? We didn’t and don’t. There’s a lot to be seen, learned, and experienced while shopping. In the car? Long trips were a yes for us, but we never used a video for anything under an hour. Car time is great talking time. Setting a precedent that it’s watching and playing time now is probably something you’ll regret later. At the doctor’s office? In general, this was a no for us with an exception. Research suggests that video games can work as pain relievers under some circumstances, and they certainly relieve anxiety for many children. When a shot or a scary procedure is in store, the tablets come out.
At a restaurant? When our oldest son (now fifteen) was a toddler, we decided that, because we love to eat out, and we expected him to learn to enjoy that experience with us, we wouldn’t offer him any distractions at the table beyond a book, crayons, or small toys. That was sometimes difficult. We left a lot of food behind when his behavior was disruptive, and I spent a lot more time than I would have liked dividing my attention between a good meal and a picture book. At the same time, we had close friends who simply brought a DVD player to restaurant meals. They ate and talked; their child ate and watched.
I admit it, we mocked them.
But that child is now fifteen, too, and is a lovely human being, not overly attached to devices, not at all inclined to watch Dora the Explorer during meals, and every bit as delightful and successful at being a person in the world, and in restaurants, as my son. This makes me a little resentful, and I’m still inclined to say that videos shouldn’t be used as a pacifier in a situation in which a child should learn to behave. But as long as you’re not always offering a gadget instead of doing the harder work that teaching a child what’s appropriate in a public place entails, it’s all going to come out in the wash.
DO I WANT PARTICULAR TIMES OR DAYS TO BE ENTIRELY TECH FREE?
You may be willing to allow your children to use gadgets and media pretty freely for an hour a day, or to let them watch a daily TV show or play games for a certain amount of time or after doing certain tasks. But if there is a time of day, like before school, when no form of media use will work for your family, or a time when certain uses will conflict with what you or others need to get done (one child gaming while another does homework, or children watching television you dislike nearby while you’re making dinner), then build that into your policy.
DO I WANT TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TOYS AND TOOLS?
Some media uses are passive (watching videos), some active but in ways that don’t require much thought or creativity (many video games), some are nominally educational (a category to be regarded with suspicion, unless a child is actually doing homework), and some are creative (meaning they encourage the creation or production of something—a game, a video, a song, a poem—that did not exist before). When your children are old enough to understand that difference, you can shift your screen time limit to allow them to use screens as tools (eventually you will have to do this for homework in any case). If children want to write or code or read using a device, or if they have an app that allows them to measure or identify constellations or design a T-shirt, that’s a form of screen time you’ll want to encourage (in moderation). If you’re lucky, they’ll find they prefer creating to using the creations of others.
HOW INVOLVED DO I WANT TO BE IN ENFORCING THE POLICY?
One reason I chose our weekends-only policy was that even the youngest child could distinguish a weekend from a weekday during the school year, and my older kids could remind the others the rest of the time. One parent told me that his children are allowed a minute of digital media for every minute of reading. My mind boggled. I saw that as involving an astronomical amount of monitoring; for them, it works.
WHAT ABOUT SCHOOL-PROVIDED TECH?
Some schools provide a tablet or laptop to each child as long as they’re a student at the school. Those schools also usually attempt to limit what can be done on the device, but it’s the rare child who can’t get around those limits, and the Internet access the devices provide creates the opportunity to do a lot of watching videos and messaging under the guise of “homework.” Kids with school-provided tech will need to develop the ability to monitor themselves, but you’ll need to discuss with your child how you’ll help her focus on schoolwork when distractions beckon, and how your policies will be enforced when you can’t realistically quarantine the gadget. While they’re learning, consider having them do any online homework in a public space, where you can easily glance over and see what’s on the screen—even if it means quieting other distractions. A little quiet never hurt anyone.
WHAT’S RIGHT FOR MY KIDS?
Some children will stick to limits more easily than others—and some are just less interested in various forms of media. Many families have different limits for different children, because “not too much” works for one, while another needs “one hour a day, two on the weekends” because she will max out that time. In families like mine, where unequal treatment would create disharmony (oh, how mild that sounds, compared to what the actual result would be), the tech rule may be set to the lowest common denominator, with exceptions granted when appropriate.
DO I WANT TECH TO BE A REWARD?
Many families allow tech after chores and homework are done, as a prize for good behavior or grades or as a trade-off for other desired activities (usually reading). Others worry that setting up tech as the ultimate goal of reading or finishing other tasks discourages an appreciation for reading in itself, or glorifies the tech above all other forms of fun. But families who do use the “reward” policy are happy with it—and it gels with the way many adults use everything from television to social media to games as a reward or a way to wind down when the work is done. “My kids have a weekly chart of responsibilities we created each worth one minute of playing time,” says Alexai Perez, a mother of three in Florida. “We also hand out consequence slips, which deduct two minutes of playing time, for noncompliant behavior after being asked and reminded once. We add up all the minutes (usually works out to about an hour or an hour and a half of earned time). They get to use their time playing on the weekends only after daily chores are completed.”
Teaching children to monitor themselves in this way can help them do the same as teenagers, although you will probably need to suggest it to them and help them stick to it, maybe by holding a phone until homework is done or showing them the kinds of tools adults use to keep their technology in a “work” mode until they’ve met their goals.
IS THERE CERTAIN CONTENT I WANT TO AVOID?
Some programming or games might be acceptable in some homes, but not in yours. Violent or sexual content is an obvious place for limits, but you might have other household no-goes. Some toddler programming might grate on your nerves (for example, the whining of PBS’s Caillou). Many families actively forbid tween sitcoms from networks like Disney and Nickelodeon (as one friend told me, “We blocked Disney and Nick on the TV because it made her obnoxious”). The day your daughter puts her hands on her hips and dons an unfamiliar cutesy expression and tone before declaring, “You’re a big fat meanie!” and flouncing off may be the last day for certain shows at your house. Some parents even forbid all television on the same grounds. Another friend, during the same conversation, said, “We stopped letting them watch TV one day because we realized that they were bigger jerks when they did.” You do you. My children know certain shows can’t be watched within my hearing, because the plots and performances drive me wild, and worse, from their perspective: they bring me into the room to comment on the gender stereotyping, the dumb choices, the way the characters treat one another, or just the sheer stupidity of it all.
Apparently this isn’t as much fun for them as it is for me, which makes this a rule we can all agree on.
WHAT HAPPENS AT OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES?
Tech rules obviously differ from house to house. Few parents object to their children coming home after a sleepover having used far less media than they might have spent time with at home, but when it’s the other way around, some worry. Whether you’ll talk to the other parent is a separate question (and unless you’re very close and the play is frequent, I would address nothing other than the question of scary TV and movies or age-inappropriate games). But will you expect your child to adhere to your rules at someone else’s house? Erin Brown Croarkin limits her eight- and ten-year-olds to an hour a day, weekends only. “They cannot have it at a friend’s house if they have had it at our house,” she says. “Right now, they are honest.”
I don’t expect my children to take our rules elsewhere (other than those around appropriate content), but I do ask that they follow other house’s rules and ask their friends to follow ours—and not spend a friend’s visit, or a visit to a friend’s house, online unless they’re online together.
WILL MY CHILD CHEAT?
If you don’t feel that you can trust your child not to try to get around the media-use rules you set, it’s even more important to set rules that are easy for you to monitor and enforce. Consider things like whether your child is frequently alone with the opportunity to use digital media (including an iPad or gaming device), and how likely you are to use other forms of monitoring, like checking the timing of DVR use or looking at browser histories, in order to know what’s happening when you’re not looking.
Consider, too, what you might do if your child does cheat. When my younger son was eight, he ordered a game for his Nintendo device that he was incredibly excited about. It arrived on Tuesday. Tuesday! Days until the weekend, when he could use it!
That night, after bedtime, I walked into his room and caught him playing. He was, I think, genuinely remorseful, but he still lost game and device privileges for the entire next weekend (as well as all other media use). That same child has given in to temptation a few times since, and we both learned that he needed external limits for a while. I held the devices, controlled the passwords, and reminded him of the consequences. When he got older, we gradually loosened up so that he needed to rely on his own willpower again, but it’s something he and I talk about more than I do with his siblings.
DO I HAVE SAFETY AND PRIVACY CONCERNS?
Prepare to discuss your family rules around things like logging into multi-player online games, using a parent’s email to sign into websites, use of the desktop camera, and sharing of passwords. And, of course, as your child joins different gaming or social platforms, you’ll want to revisit those rules, as well as any family rules about what can be shared online.
THE TWO-HOUSEHOLD QUESTION
If you parent with a partner but maintain two separate households, this question becomes even more challenging. Even partners who live together need to take time to agree on a policy and how it will be enforced. When you and your child’s other parent aren’t on good terms, this can become one more thing you don’t discuss or don’t agree on.
“My almost-six-year-old gets about twenty to forty minutes on weeknights. Friday nights are pizza and movie night. And she gets an hour or two on Saturdays and Sundays,” says one mother. “My struggle is that she gets a lot more at her dad’s house. I already feel like I’m pretty liberal, although I will take it away if she starts getting cranky or bratty. But I can see the impact of her coming home from Dad’s after an entire day of screens. And there’s not a damn thing I can do.”
Parents who think their child spends more time with digital media in a second household might try working with the child to set an overall limit—one that covers both houses and allows most of the screen time to take place there without turning you into the bad guy. Many schools and pediatricians’ offices talk about limiting screen time, and parents in a tough co-parenting situation can turn this to their advantage, maybe by helping the child create a chart that echoes a limit suggested by some other source, and talking about how that three-movie marathon last weekend was fun, but might mean it’s a good idea to do other things this weekend.
Of course, especially with younger children, the parental benefits to a child taking some screen time can be considerable, and if you’re losing all of those to an ex, you’re bound to be frustrated. While the situation evolves, you may just have to let what happens there stay there, while you focus on setting the right balance in your own house.
Setting a Family Media Policy for Preteens and Teens
Your control over limits—and how much control you should have over those limits—shifts again once your children have their own devices and particularly their own phones or networked tablets, which aren’t even limited by their ability to access a wireless network. The age at which that happens differs widely from family to family. In ours, children are required to purchase their own devices (using savings and their allowance) and, if the device is a phone or a networked tablet, pay their share of the family data plan. My oldest did this at thirteen, my next oldest at twelve, and as I write, I’m allowing my eleven-year-old a much freer hand with spending her allowance in silly ways (in-app purchases, nail polish kits) to ensure that she’s not able to afford a phone before I think she can handle one.
Just because the kids purchase the devices (which includes laptops) doesn’t mean the devices don’t still have to adhere to our rules, but it’s around the point when a phone is acquired and homework begins to be done online that many families find limits need to evolve. What worked when you controlled access points loses its power once a child can do more for herself—witness the jump from two to three hours of screen time for younger kids up to six hours and more for eight- to twelve-year-olds, who are more likely to have their own devices or at least more able to work the remote. Older children need to respect the limits you’ve set, which means they need to believe in the importance of the rules and in your ability and willingness to enforce them.
MAKE SCREEN BALANCE A FAMILY GOAL
If you’re lucky, you’ve been having conversations about why you limit screen time all along, but if you haven’t, start. If you yourself struggle to set limits, own the challenge. Show your teenagers the apps you use to help resist the siren song of social media while working, and describe the temptation to answer emails (easy!) instead of drafting notes for a major project (hard!). Describe your own goals around screen time, and then ask them to talk about theirs. They might remember a vacation when you spent too much time working (which, while not screen time, can feel like it to a kid), and those memories can fuel a conversation about why it’s important to establish times when you’re in the online world and times when you’re not.
The following questions can help you start that conversation, but remember the decision about what rules and limits your family should follow belongs with the adults, not the teenagers. Sometimes, you’ll need to tighten things up, and rein back in use that’s become too much. Other times, you may listen to a well-reasoned proposal for a loosening of the rules. Do listen to your children on the topic of screen time, but don’t give up your authority. Our kids need our honesty and our guidance. You may still be evolving in your own tech use, but you know a lot that they don’t about balance, relationships, and what’s truly important in life. Screen time is just another area in which all of the usual challenges play out.
What is the screen for? It’s a good question—what do you want to do with your phone? What do you want it to help you do? What do you want from the computer or the television? Distraction, entertainment, background noise? Connection? Information? Is what you’re doing with the screen consistent with what you hoped you’d do? Is it helping you to be happier or better or to reach a goal? Or is it getting in your way?
By the time they’re in their tweens and teens, most of our children have thoughts of their own about how they want to interact with screens. Many of their schools have digital manners and media literacy discussions, as do pediatricians and physical education or health classes. As well, they’re part of the same ongoing cultural conversation that we are. They know we’re all, as a society, working to balance life online and off, and they probably have stories about kids who spend too much time on their phones or gaming. What they actually do with their phones and devices may not appear at first glance to fit in with their feelings about kids who do nothing but text and Snapchat all day, but then, aren’t we the parents who spend seven-plus hours a day on personal screen time? This stuff is hard, and there’s no point in pretending it isn’t. Talking about the things we want our devices to help us do and feel in the real world helps us keep our daily small choices about when and if we pick them up in line with our larger goals.
Even once you’ve agreed on the family values that are reflected in the ways you use technology, the devil is in the details. Homework certainly isn’t “screen time,” but is texting? How about watching a YouTube video your friend sent as a link? What about watching the video your friend made or making one yourself? Here are some questions you can use to start a discussion with your older child, whether it’s a dinner-table sit-down or a few assorted car talks. Their answers can help you work together to set a formal family media policy, or just talk about what is and isn’t working at your house.
How much television or video or any form of screen watching or playing would you consider reasonable on a school night?
Do you want to consume, or do you want to create?
When is the latest you think you should be sending or receiving a text?
Is it hard for you not to look at your phone while you do homework? What would help?
What are some things you like to do on the weekend? How much of that time do you want to spend on watching things and video games?
Should that be different if you have a friend over?
What will you do if you get a text that’s scary or sexy or otherwise worries you?
When your friends are angry with one another, how do you see them using their online connection? How will you use yours?
It’s also fine to share your worst-case scenario concerns. If there’s media coverage of a particularly outrageous example of poor online behavior, talk about it. Say, directly, how you’d hope your child would behave, even as they’re shrieking, “My friends would never share nude pictures/live-post a rape/create a Facebook group for misogynist content about a women’s sports team.” Of course they wouldn’t. But when they do, you want your children to hear your words echoing in their ears as they refuse to join in.
Where do the devices go at night? There’s a conventional right answer on this. Late-night device usage can interfere with sleep, both because of the light and because as we become more and more tired, it can become more and more difficult to turn off temptation. We also make bad choices at night. We’re our worst selves, saying the things we least want to have said, to the people we least want to hear them—not a good time to be on social media.
All of this is prevented if the devices, whatever they are, don’t go to bed with us. Holly Buffington Stevens, a mother of a seventh grader and a ninth grader in Atlanta, requires her kids to leave their school laptops and phones in the charging cabinet in the kitchen when the family heads (admirably, all at about the same time) upstairs for reading and bedtime. “Same goes with friends when they sleep over—we take their phones before bedtime. I’m always amazed by the number of texts my kids receive from their friends relatively late at night.”
I think that’s an excellent requirement, and I even went so far as to create a big public charging area for our many and varied family gadgetry—but at least as of this writing, we don’t require our kids to use it. Some do, some don’t, some vary. I use my phone as an alarm, and so does my husband. My daughter reads on an iPad at night (new settings allow you to adjust the light emitted so that it should not interfere as much with sleep). Sometimes my kids use a device as an alarm clock, too. We talk about late-night texting and surfing, and we periodically check to see if there’s a problem.
I recognize, though, that it’s a heavy temptation, sitting there, all night. I’m not wholly convinced that ours is the right choice on this one. It’s just what works for us now, which is sometimes the best you can do.
Should you keep tabs—and how? After all these conversations and choices, you’re still far from done. You and your child have to live with the plans you’ve made, and if you’ve imposed any limits, you have to consider whether and how you’ll check on your child’s compliance. These decisions are all about building trust, but sometimes you need to trust—and verify.
How we do that monitoring, though, varies greatly and isn’t necessarily what you’d expect. Relatively few parents rely on outside tools such as parental software controls or tracking programs to oversee their children’s lives online. I’ve explored many options for either limiting or monitoring various screens, only to reject them for two reasons: first, I haven’t found any that wouldn’t be fairly easy for a child to thwart, and second, I want my children to rely on their own self-control instead of mine. It’s tempting to imagine I could outsource this whole digital media thing in favor of yet another device or app that would enforce the limits I set, or fool myself into thinking I had an all-seeing eye on what my children were doing online, but there are no shortcuts for doing the hard work of teaching, talking, and, sometimes, enforcing.
Instead, we must focus on our own ability to talk to and guide our children in what might seem like a new world but is in so many respects just an extension of the same culture we’ve always inhabited. That’s good for children (many experts, like Catherine Steiner-Adair and Devorah Heitner, advise against depending on external monitoring) and it’s good for parents. Parents who are actively involved in talking with their children about usage, content, and sharing describe themselves as more confident in their parenting abilities, which is generally correlated with overall life satisfaction. In this case, a sense of interaction and involvement—asking questions, offering opinions, and talking about what we all watch and play—makes us happier.
How that looks in practice varies enormously. Considerations include a child’s age, his personality, and the social arena in which he moves. For most parents, the mentoring and monitoring process is an evolution, inevitably in the direction of less oversight (you won’t be checking up on them when they’re in college), but often with blips of more intense supervision, especially when mistakes are made. That evolution from parent monitoring to self-monitoring is an important one, and if you help them do it while they’re still under your roof, that will be one less transition to manage as they move into adulthood.
ADDING SOCIAL MEDIA INTO THE MIX
There are entire books dedicated to the topic of tweens, teens, and social media. (I recommend Screenwise, The Big Disconnect, and Social Media Wellness.) For many families, it’s a challenge, as kids experience an extension of their social lives with which we can’t directly relate but which many are finding is, ultimately, just another piece of the familiar puzzle that is growing up.
Families make dramatically different decisions around children and social media, from four-year-olds who are “Instafamous” to fourteen-year-olds who have themselves decided to give the whole thing a miss. Whatever your choices, every time your child joins a new form of social media, that new platform should include a discussion of how your child plans to use it and a demonstration of the perils: “Look! Viral embarrassing YouTube video.” “Look! That disappearing Snapchat, captured forever with a screen shot! I can do that with that text you sent about your secret crush on Emma, too, you know.” “Hey, wanna hear about the time my friend Wendi’s kid posted his brother’s phone number on Instagram and said it belonged to Justin Bieber?” Discuss with your child if you’re going to check in on her use of the new network, how, and when.
You can talk, too, about the things we can all feel when we’re watching other people’s carefully cultivated lives scroll by. We miss parties, we’re not invited to things, we aren’t taking a cool vacation, we don’t look like that in a swimsuit. Be blunt about how people’s shared images don’t always match their lives. It may not feel kind to use an example from among your friends and acquaintances, but kids need exactly that kind of dose of reality. “You know Finn’s mom almost never looks like that.” “Remember, you were at that birthday party, and the birthday girl had a temper tantrum and left crying right after the cake.” Remind them that you can look around and snap a beautiful Instagram image at any moment, no matter how much reality bites.
TEACH TECH MANAGEMENT
As your kids learn to self-monitor, they also need to learn to use their technology, but not to depend on it. That means understanding all the ways games and apps are set up to keep you coming back with notifications and alerts designed to pull a quick click (and that includes news, email, and messaging apps). Teenagers hate to be manipulated or told what to do—so make sure they know that’s exactly what the grown-ups at their favorite apps and games are attempting. As cool and edgy as things online may appear, they’re designed to make money and spread advertising. The real rebellion is in resisting the bait and making your own choices about what you want to do online and how. Help teenagers and older children decide which few things they actually need to flicker across the screen of their phone, and teach them to work and socialize with the phone facedown (and ideally silent) when that’s appropriate. Show them how to set up their own “do not disturb” preferences as well.
RELAX
Finally, whenever you find yourself caught up in all the stress and worry that our new connected world has brought, remember: this Internet thing is fun. Cat videos. Instant access to that Simpsons scene where they’re all in family therapy. That one friend you text with off and on all day long.
We can binge watch an old or new favorite TV show with kids on a miserable wet weekend, download movies instantly, order up a favorite song to spark dinner cleanup, send a kid a picture of an elephant wearing colorful Indian pajamas when he emerges from his algebra final. We can make a family video holiday card, turn a toddler shouting “Yo Mama!” into a ringtone, and find a used copy of Anne of Green Gables with exactly the cover ours had as a kid.
It’s not “digital life.” It’s just life. Let your kids waste time. Waste some with them. Find a screen to share. Dare to believe that it will be okay.