Better questions than the 1 about 'screen time'

A simple exercise for (digital) parenting

This is no time for parental guilt around children's "screen time." Especially during this pandemic – when our devices are helping us stay connected with one another – but I think from now on, realistically, there are better questions for us to be asking ourselves, and for us to be discussing as families.

This post is inspired by all the families in the new book Parenting for a Digital Future, which I reviewed earlier this week. In addition to conducting a nationwide survey of more than 2,000 sets of parents in the UK, the authors – Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross – also interviewed 73 families representing diverse cultures, sizes, income brackets, ethnicities, religions, parenting styles and family makeups in the families' own homes. The No. 1 take-away for me from reading about all their experiences was what I led my review with: “family context eclipses screen time.” To explain and expand on what I mean by that, I came up with this little exercise, or reflection, parents might consider trying. Please customize to make it meaningful to your family.

Instead of watching the clock to measure screen time, take a family environmental scan – just you or together as a family. Questions you might consider:

• What do we value as a family? or What’s important to us?
• What’s going on in our family these days?
• What’s happening in our household right now?
• What’s happening out in the world that’s affecting our family and each one of us individually?
• What’s going on in our heads (parent’s and child’s)?

Only after thinking about some of those, ask...

• “How can our devices and the apps on them serve what we value, what’s going on with each one of us right now and how we’re doing as a family?

You're consciously putting tech and media in service to what you value most as a family. If not an exercise, you could think of this as a wonderful tool for parent and child self-knowledge development. Questions like these help develop a strong family narrative and self-knowledge, which in turn grow children's resilience, confidence and inner guidance system – the things that protect and guide them the rest of their lives, long after they leave home.

There are certainly many other questions parents can ask themselves which point to children’s basic needs, which of course need to be addressed first and foremost. Here are some the authors offered parents back in 2017 in their essay, “The trouble with ‘screen time rules’”: Is my child “eating and sleeping enough? physically healthy? connecting socially with friends and family – through technology or otherwise? engaged in school? enjoying and pursuing hobbies and interests – through technology or beyond?” They continue, “If the answer to these questions is more or less ‘yes’, then perhaps the problem of ‘screen time’ is less dramatic than many parents have been led to believe. The notion of ‘addiction’ to the screen requires particular care, and certainly cannot be determined by simple measures of time.” For more take-aways from their book, click here.