I didn’t know what chocolate ganache was before watching reruns of an old Food Network pre-teen baking championship with my kids. But I did spot an opportunity to talk with them about how one contestant kept building her cake after it crumbled. We talked about the word perseverance.
That’s the thing about “screen time” as a modern parenting panic: the same rectangle can either be a sedative or a springboard.
But my wife and I are still fairly new at this — our kids are under 5 — so we talk with other parents about evolving opinions on the use of phones, tablets, computers, and TVs.
From those conversations and our own parenting experience, we’re slowly realizing that it’s not about screen time, but more about what type of content we’re letting our kids watch.
We try to keep screen time to a minimum in our house
My wife, kids, and I live in a Philadelphia rowhome. We’ve kept TV out of our bedrooms and devices out of our daily routine. On trips in the car, bus, and subway, we rely on music and games (I’ve come to loathe “I spy”).
In good weather, we enjoy long walks and frequent visits to our neighborhood rec center. Forced into boredom at home, our kids have developed their own imagined worlds: singing karaoke on the couch, lava-ringed obstacle courses, and preparing elaborate meals in a play kitchen.
But especially on freezing days, when you’re stuck indoors, and everyone’s energy is somehow both too high and already spent, screens help. What’s become clear to me is that a screen’s value depends on what we watch.
Governments are cracking down on youth screen time
In recent years, the global discourse has turned aggressively anti-screen.
Governments are now intervening not just in social media but in screens more broadly. France, for example, has prohibited screen exposure for kids under 3 in childcare settings, and Virginia has moved to make schools “cell phone-free.”
Meanwhile, the American Academy of Pediatrics has long advocated against the simplistic yardstick of screen time, noting there isn’t enough evidence for a single universal time limit, emphasizing family context and habits instead.
It’s more important to me to monitor what my kids are watching than how much
It seems to me that no one can agree on what the maximum screen time should be for children, so that’s why I’m focusing less on time and more on the content.
Watching a kids’ baking show as a family, especially when we can connect the events to our own lives, can be healthy. I’ve seen the positive effects of a great show on my own kids.
For parents of young kids, the difference between cartoons like “Bluey” and “Cocomelon” is obvious: In one, characters develop over seven to 10 minutes, and in the other, brightly colored, computer-animated characters sing hypnotically rhythmic songs in short bursts.
This holds true for older kids, too. With the right guardrails, I think that screens can be genuinely social and developmental, like collaborating with friends in a shared Minecraft world, building a Roblox obstacle course over a week, or editing a goofy video together that takes planning and patience.
I see “good” screen time often involves characters, cause-and-effect, enough plot for us to talk about it together, and a bonus for when it’s social. I don’t see why there should be a time limit on any of that.
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