Screen Time

It’s Sunday, and the negotiation has happened again. Twenty more minutes became forty. When the timer went off, she was furious, the way children are when something they’re absorbed in is taken away halfway through. You’d meant to stay calm, and you didn’t. By the time the screen is off, everyone in the house feels a bit worse, and nothing has been decided except that the same thing will happen on Wednesday.

This chapter is not about what your child is encountering online, the messages and the images and the people who are not who they say they are. That is a different and sometimes frightening conversation, and it has its own chapter; if that is the worry that brought you here, turn to Your Child’s Online World. This chapter is about the smaller, everyday problem: how much, when, and what it’s costing. That means the hours, the arguments about the hours, and the feeling that everything else in family life is being pulled towards the screen.

The clock is measuring the wrong thing

The instinct is to look for a number: how many hours is too many. Parents come to this expecting there to be a line somewhere, and that a good parent draws it.

Beyond the earliest years there isn’t an agreed line, and the better clinical guidance has stopped pretending there is one. In its 2020 report on technology use and the mental health of children and young people, the Royal College of Psychiatrists supports the World Health Organization’s limits for the very youngest: no screen time before the age of one, and no more than an hour a day from two to four. For older children it declines to set a single safe amount. It looks instead at what the screen use is doing: whether it’s pushing out the things a developing child needs. The American Academy of Pediatrics has moved the same way, away from counting minutes and towards balance. It asks parents to protect sleep, physical activity and time with family.

This chapter rests on that idea. A clock can tell you how long she spent on a screen. It can’t tell you what that time replaced. Two hours of something she loves, on a day that still has time for sleep, moving about and a meal at a table with other people, is a different thing from forty minutes that cost her the only hour she had to be bored, or to talk to you, or to fall asleep.

A better place to start is with four questions, drawn from the same guidance:

• Is the screen eating into sleep?
• Is it crowding out physical activity and time outdoors?
• Is it replacing face-to-face time, with friends and with the family?
• And can she stop, more or less, when it’s time to stop, or does stopping cost the whole house an argument every time?

If the answer to any one of these is yes, that’s worth attending to. If it’s yes to all four, that is what clinicians worry about, and it’s worth attending to whatever the number on the timer says.

What helps on a Wednesday

The first thing that helps is to stop negotiating it every day. A routine she can predict is easier to keep than a limit you argue over every evening, because once the routine is the rule, there’s nothing new to decide each night; you just keep to it. The Anna Freud Centre’s guidance for young people is built around the same idea: a set time to put devices down, kept to without being rigid about it.

Start with sleep, because that’s where the evidence is clearest and the cost is highest. The NHS guidance is to turn screens off about an hour before bed and to keep devices out of the bedroom overnight, because the light suppresses the melatonin that makes a child drowsy, and because the content itself is built to keep the mind switched on. Charging everyone’s devices in the kitchen, the adults’ included, settles more bedtime battles than any lecture. It also puts a stop to the scrolling at three in the morning that she’d never tell you about.

The second thing that helps is to share some of the time. Watch what she’s watching, play the game badly while she laughs at you, and ask what she likes about it because you want to know. It turns something she does on her own into something you do together, and it tells you more about what she’s doing than any monitoring app. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls this co-viewing and rates it among the more protective things a parent can do.

The third thing is to look at your own phone. Children copy what they see. If you ask for her phone at dinner while you’re answering work email under the table, you’ve lost the argument before it starts. You don’t have to be perfect. The aim is to be honest that the family is doing this together, and that the rule applies to the adults too.

The but everyone has it argument

At some point, usually around the move to secondary school, the argument moves on from minutes to belonging. Everyone has it. Everyone’s on it. You’re making me the only one.

It’s worth taking seriously, because it’s often partly true, and because being left out of the places where friendships now happen is a real cost. But it isn’t a reason to remove every boundary. What helps here is the tone this book keeps coming back to: warm, unhurried, and clear that the limit comes from caring about her. You can keep the limit and acknowledge what she’s missing in the same breath. “I can see this is hard, and I can see you’re not making it up, and the answer for now is still not yet.” She can usually live with the limit if she doesn’t also have to feel that you don’t understand it.

At different ages

In the primary years, this is mostly your job. You set the routine, you watch with her, you keep her bedroom free of screens, and you accept that the negotiating stays with you, because she hasn’t developed the self-control to do it herself yet.

In the early secondary years, start handing over a little of the control while the routine stays in place. This is the age to talk about how apps are designed to be hard to leave, so that stopping becomes a skill you’re teaching her. The Anna Freud material on stepping back from social media is well pitched for this age, and you can read it together.

In the later teenage years, your influence comes through conversation and your own example. A sixteen-year-old won’t accept a timer. She will often admit, though, when her guard is down, that scrolling late at night leaves her feeling worse, and that gives you a way in. The job then becomes helping her notice the cost for herself. That’s the only kind of control that will still work after she leaves home.

When the worry is bigger than the clock

Sometimes the real concern is what lies behind the hours. If she has stopped seeing friends in person, if her sleep has collapsed, if her mood drops hard when she doesn’t have the device, or if the screen has clearly become the place she goes to manage feelings she can’t otherwise manage, she is telling you something that a screen-time limit will not fix. Here, the screen use is often a symptom of something else. If that sounds like your child, the chapters on When Reassurance Stops Working and on low mood will be closer to the conversation you need to have, and a word with your GP or the school’s pastoral lead is the right next step.

NOTES

1. Royal College of Psychiatrists (2020). Technology use and the mental health of children and young people (College Report CR225). The report supports the World Health Organization’s limits for children under five (none under one; at most an hour a day from two to four) and, beyond that, declines to set a single safe quantity, framing the question instead as one of function and displacement.
2. American Academy of Pediatrics. Beyond Screen Time: A Parent’s Guide to Media Use and How to Make a Family Media Plan (HealthyChildren.org). The source of the balance-not-minutes framing, and of co-viewing as a protective practice.
3. Anna Freud Centre. Managing social media and Time away from technology. Guidance written for young people on managing social media and taking time away from screens; worth reading alongside your child.
4. NHS. Healthy sleep tips for children. Screens off about an hour before bed; devices kept out of the bedroom overnight.

Wider reading

The notes above come from clinical and public-health bodies: the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the NHS and the Anna Freud Centre. The two books below are a different kind of source. Each is by an individual author who has shaped how parents talk about this subject. They are perspectives and arguments, not clinical guidance, and we suggest them as wider reading without adopting either position in full.

• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024). The most widely discussed case that a phone-based childhood has reshaped adolescence, and an argument for delaying smartphones and social media. It’s influential and vigorously debated among researchers, so it’s best read with that debate in mind.
• Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers (2023). A clinical psychologist’s calmer account of how teenagers develop, and of where technology fits in. It’s a useful counterweight, less alarmed and more concerned with what is normal.

Read either one as an argument to weigh up. The four questions earlier in this chapter, about sleep, movement, time with other people and whether she can stop, will be more use to you on a school night than any single book’s verdict.