One approach to kids’ screentime

This isn’t a fully-formed philosophy of screentime, but our approach based on trial and error. Our kids are currently 11, 9, and 4.

Some basics of our approach

• Lean toward less frantic content; real life doesn’t have fast cuts, and you don’t want so much superstimulus that real life is boring by contrast.
• Try audio before video, as it’s less all-absorbing
• Set clear expectations for when screentime is available
  • Avoid intermittent reinforcement. If the child might get screentime if they ask, they ask all the time.
• Use the parent controls.
• Adjust as needed. See how your specific children are responding to the current setup.

Try audio first

The good

Audio can provide something to do, without being as grabby as video. At its best, it’s similar to an adult reading you a story.

Our first child wanted a lot of stories told to her, in a way we couldn’t keep up with. When she was about two, we realized that recorded stories were really helpful with this. Later she transitioned to children’s podcasts. She’d walk around absorbing words all day long. Then she transitioned to listening to novels from our library app. I think listening to a lot of audio contributed to her having a strong vocabulary at a young age (if archaic: “The minx! How dare she?”) although it’s correlated with being a kid who wanted to hear words all the time.

The bad

• Our kids have probably gotten less sleep during periods when we let them listen to audio while falling asleep. 
• If the kids don’t use headphones, it adds background noise to the household. If multiple kids do this at once, it’s cacophony.
• I think our kids were somewhat less motivated to learn to read written words because they could access stories through audio, but both older kids became strong readers after an initial delay. 
• Despite our assumption that unlimited audio would be fine, for our second child it didn’t work well (more in “notice how things affect your kids.”)

Avoid intermittent reinforcement

This is true with lots of things children pester for, but I see it most with screentime and sweets.
Child: Can I watch Cocomelon?
Adult: No.
Child: I want Cocomelon, I really want Colomelon. Please please I want Cocomelon, can I watch Cocomelon, can I, can I!!
Adult: Oh, all right.

The child has learned to ask seven times for Cocomelon in order to get it.

Some options I favor:

• Some hard and fast rules. “My phone doesn’t play Baby Shark.” 
• Allow some time for junk screentime, just as you surely spend some junk screentime. But make it predictable, not based on whining.
• Set expectations for when it will happen. After many such episodes, our housemate set the rule: “I’ll show you one video after dinner.” Any requests for videos would be met with “Is it after dinner? Then no” or “Ok, it’s after dinner.”
• With our nannies, I asked them to choose one day they’d show the kids a movie and stick to it. “We’ll do a movie on Friday. Today is Wednesday.”

I’ll choose to offer my kids extra screentime at times: when I’m sick or they’re sick, when I’m the only adult available and I need to focus on something. But I offer it when they’re not pestering, and I don’t want the reason to be “Because you wore me down.”

Get a device you can fully control

It’s appealing to get a made-for-kids tablet like the Amazon Fire for kids. They’re cheap and durable. But they exist to get you to buy more Amazon content. You can put it in kids mode, in which case it displays a bunch of apps you can’t remove from the homescreen. Or you can put it in adult mode, in which case there are no parental controls and you can’t install normal apps you could get on an Android or Apple device. We gave up on these tablets after a few years.

Now we get a cheap Android tablet with a thick foam case, and install the Google Family Link app for parent controls. Other parent control options we haven’t tried: Bark, Qustodio, etc.

For preschoolers who are only using audio, we’ve started with an adult’s old smartphone on wifi. When our older kids were in late elementary school, we got a Chromebook laptop that the kids use for writing and video.

You can set up some settings via the parent controls app, and control different things via bedtime settings: for example so that only certain apps work at night.

If you enable any kind of messaging app, limit the hours so it’s not pinging when your kid should be sleeping. (Learned after our kids’ cousins messaged them many times while on a trip in a different time zone.)

Follow through on using the parent controls

Sometimes I see parents arguing verbally with a child about tablet usage or physically struggling over the device. I’m happy with our method:

• If the child is misusing the tablet (glued to it when they’re supposed to be coming to dinner, etc), we can disable the tablet via our phones.
• We keep it off however long we said we would.

I hear parents say “if you keep this up you’re going to lose a privilege, you’re going to lose tablet time, oh now you’re listening? Okay” and nothing happens. Jeff and I try hard not to make empty threats, and if we say something like “no tablet time tomorrow” we truly switch it off and leave it off for the time we said. This means you must be able to tolerate your own grumpy children without screentime. In our experience, this was well worth it. But we don’t make threats like “no screentime on this 6-hour car trip” because we don’t want to follow through with that.

I try to use something like natural consequences or logical consequences when possible, but tablet time is so valuable to the kids that I do occasionally use it as a bargaining chip when there’s nothing more relevant to use. 

Notice how things affect your particular kids

With our first kid, we didn’t feel we needed to limit audio time. Our second kid wasn’t that into audio early on, but the summer she was eight she got hooked on an audiobook series. She would spend six or seven hours a day alone in her room listening to audiobooks and maybe drawing, but mostly just sitting on her bed listening.

It became clear this wasn’t good for her. When she did emerge from her room, she was really grumpy. With the sheer hours she was spending on one activity, she didn’t spend as much time interacting with other kids or doing other kinds of play. 

So we limited all tablet time for her, including audio, but her sister only had a limit on visual tablet time. Having different rules for the different kids went basically fine. We tell them we’ll change the rules as needed to see that they’re both getting a variety of things in their life (outdoor play, reading, time with other kids, learning, eating, sleep), and if any one thing starts to eat their life we’ll step in accordingly.

Consider video of real life

The real world is interesting enough to young kids without needing a lot of video production.

• Demolition machines and other construction/demolition vehicles
• Trains
• Farm channels where people do farm chores and, like, talk about their geese
• Slow paced animal videos, like kittens growing up or eggs hatching
• Children’s music concerts: we watched this Raffi concert a lot, and concert videos from the older kids’ school.

Babies and toddlers

We didn’t use much screentime at this age. It meant that screentime was more novel when we wanted to use it occasionally:

• Distraction during long trips. 
• Distraction during nail trimming and such
• When there’s no childcare, and the adult on duty is sick or needs to take a work call

Educational apps

I really liked using an app for teaching letters to my third child; it was way better than when I taught the older two with paper materials. We used DuoABC but there are other good ones. 

Many of the educational apps try to get you to practice math facts or whatever by creating a character and earning points to spend on decorations or something. My kids didn’t seem to learn much per minute of these, because they spent so much time navigating and picking out items in the store rather than playing the educational components.

So we’ve mostly given up on apps that combine learning and play. Instead, there’s some required drilling on math facts and touch typing. Then they have some video time and game time each day to use as they like, typically on vapid games. 

Technical problems I wish someone would solve

• There’s not a good way for a parent to limit how much time is spent on an audio program. The screentime limits apply when the screen is actually on. So a kid can turn on an audio app, turn the screen off, and play the audio for an hour and the tablet only counts the 1 minute the screen was on. Sleep timers are a way to get around this in theory, but it requires someone to manually turn them on every time (and the child to not turn it off). 
• There’s not a good way to allow some apps only after other apps, e.g. other apps unlock after you’ve been on the math facts app for 5 minutes.
• There’s not a good way to lock a screen to one app, and prevent a toddler who’s all thumbs from accidentally navigating away.

Specific recommendations

Audio

Preschool age

Arnold Lobel reading his books like Frog and Toad Are Friends—simple, short stories read slowly. 

Podcasts: Little Stories for Tiny People, Circle Round, Sparkle Stories. Or search for “gentle podcasts for preschoolers.”

Youtube videos of people reading children’s books aloud (we typically put the device out of reach on a shelf so the video isn’t visible and the child isn’t tapping on other random videos.)

Elementary school age

Children’s comedy podcasts like Wow in the World, Story Pirates, and Pinna.

Serial narrative podcasts like The Alien Adventures of Finn Caspian.

• Tinkercast podcasts like Wow in the World
• Go Kid Go podcasts like Bobby Wonder
• PBS Kids podcasts like Molly of Denali and Circle Round
• Many classic books have been read out loud as a podcast, if you search for “Heidi by Johanna Spyri” or whatever on any podcast app or Librivox.
  • Two out-of-copyright series loved by my animal-interested kid:
    • Clara Dillingham Pierson’s Among the Forest People and other books, animal stories with very accurate details about e.g. how a bee colony works.
    • Thornton W. Burgess’ books about forest animals. If they really get into taxonomy, one of them is basically all the North American mammals by clade.

Audiobooks from library apps like Libby. You can filter to juvenile fiction, etc.

Video

Preschool age

• Daniel Tiger (26 min). It’s a reboot of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, also focused on social / emotional skills. Topics like “what’s it like to go to the dentist”, “using words to say how you feel,” “when it’s someone else’s birthday,” etc.
• Puffin Rock (26 min). Slow-paced problem-solving by animals on an island. The narrator’s parody of nature documentaries makes it lightly amusing for adults.
• Ms. Rachel (3 min segments) Extremely chipper lady. Initially focused on speech/communication skills, there’s also a spinoff with more preschool-esque content.
• Truck Tunes (3 minute songs with videos). Songs for vehicle lovers, from obvious ones like “fire truck” through to “delimber” and  “traffic cone truck.” The right length for brushing teeth or trimming nails.
• Things I’ve heard good things about but that haven’t caught on in my family: Numberblocks (3 min), Sarah & Duck (5 min), Tumble Leaf (25 min).

Wider age range

• Bluey (7 min episodes). Two siblings and their parents do imaginative play. Funny, touches on big life topics without being too intense.
• My Neighbor Totoro (90 min). The most loved of any movie we’ve watched.

Games

Preschool

For trips, we liked games from Toca Boca and Sago Mini. Open-ended play (rather than aimed at winning). Themes like cooking, taking care of pets, and giving characters wild hairstyles. Operating a virtual blender is a real thrill at this age.

Khan Academy Kids is well-made, free, and the music is not annoying. Only some bits can be downloaded to work offline, so prepare in advance if you want to use it for trips.

Teach your monster and Endless learning apps are good early literacy/numeracy. 

Elementary age

DuoLingo has languages obviously, but also a music/piano module that my middle schooler likes, and a math module that she tolerates.

One of our kids likes Prodigy, a math game they also use in school.

I haven’t figured out how to steer my older kids toward games that are not junk.

Parts I’m less sure about: middle school and beyond

Social connection vs. “Social Media”

We’re open to our kids using the internet to connect with real people they know. Our 11-year-old exchanges short voice messages with a friend from school, which seems basically like the phone calls we had as kids. She also has email and will email back and forth with our former nanny. 

I want to avoid “social” media that’s algorithm-driven and mostly stuff from influencers. We’ll probably hold off a long time on allowing those.

Monitoring

I haven’t figured out how much I’ll try to monitor their correspondence regarding their mental health or safety. Various apps like Bark try to do this with AI.

I spot-check their YouTube history occasionally, and have taken away YouTube at times (for an 8-year-old who was allowed to watch videos of audiobooks, but had been browsing other random stuff.) 

We ended up with unusually rule-following types, and we’d probably need a different plan with a kid who tried significantly to evade rules.

Phones

We’ve opted for a smart watch so our older kids can reach us if needed, but they can’t do most things phones can do. I’m not sure at what point we’ll let our kids get phones. Wait until 8th (the end of 8th grade) is one attempt at creating a shared commitment across families.