Money & life admin
Screens: rules you can actually keep
Less about hours, more about what and when. A position you can hold without becoming a hypocrite.
Most advice here is either a panic or a shrug. The useful version sits in between and focuses on what and when rather than a number of minutes.
What matters more than the total
- What it is. Watching something together and talking about it is a different activity from an algorithmic feed designed to prevent stopping. Treating them as the same thing is the main mistake.
- What it replaces. A screen instead of a walk, a book, or sleep is the cost. A screen while you cook dinner is not a moral failure.
- How it ends. Most screen conflict is about the transition, not the screen. Warn before the end, use an episode or a level as the boundary rather than a clock, and make the next thing appealing.
A workable set of rules
- No screens in bedrooms. The single highest-value rule, and it gets much harder to introduce later, so start early.
- Not in the hour before bed.
- Not at the table. Applies to you too, which is the point.
- Content chosen deliberately for younger children, rather than autoplay. Turn autoplay off. It is designed to defeat you.
- One properly screen-free stretch a week that everyone does, including the adults.
Under two
Guidance broadly discourages screens beyond video calls at this age, because language comes from back-and-forth with a human and a screen cannot do that. Not a catastrophe if it happens. Just not a substitute for you.
The hypocrisy problem
Children calibrate on what you do, not what you say. A father on his phone at dinner while enforcing a no-screens rule teaches that rules are about power rather than reasons. Uncomfortable, and worth sitting with.
Do not make it the enemy
Games are where a lot of children's friendships now live, and banning the thing everyone else does isolates them. Play the game with them once. You will understand far more about their world in forty minutes than in a year of asking how school was.
Where the real risk sits
Not hours. It is contact from strangers, content they are not ready for, and the effect of social comparison on older children. That is a separate conversation and it needs to start earlier than feels comfortable. UK Safer Internet Centre and Internet Matters both have age-by-age guidance that is genuinely practical.