The 5 screen time guidelines that have helped my (young) family
Today’s parents are the first in history to have to navigate the barrage of always available, internet-based screens.
It’s not like the TV or video games or computers didn’t exist before the iPhone was released in 2007 — I remember the Dateline specials about the dangers of violent video games of the 90s. When Neil Postman brilliantly penned “Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”, the year was 1984 and he was railing against the family television set.
But those TVs of the 80’s were nothing compared to always on, always ready, always in my pocket, always connected technology of the last 10 years. Especially for kids.
The Wild West
By 2019 as Jill and I were preparing for our first child, adults and kids alike were spending as much as half their day staring at these devices. Millennials are on track to spend a full decade of their life staring at our phones (and Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the so called “iPad kids,” even more). That’s a ton of time, the one resource we can’t generate any more of. It’s been recently described as a health epidemic akin to cigarette smoking.
And like millions of other parents, we looked at our own use of technology and wondered how we could possibly prepare our kids to master it, and not be mastered themselves.
How would we handle screens in our new family?
- Was some screen time ok? If so, how much?
- What age should we wait before we introduce screens?
- Are there meaningful differences between the kinds of screens?
- Does it matter if it’s educational content?
- How rigid (or flexible) should we be about our screen rules?
- Would we hand our toddler a screen in public environments?
- When would we allow them to have their own devices, and which ones?
We wanted to be as prepared as we could. We read a lot. We had lots of conversations with older, experienced parents. And before our son was born in 2019, Jill and I wrote out 5 guidelines we planned to use in our family around screens:
1. Screen time is entertainment
2. No personal screens
3. Our kids don’t watch anything that we don’t want to watch
4. Screen time is not a solution, it’s a bonus
5. Screen time always carries an opportunity cost
It’s been six years and we’ve actually stuck to those guidelines.
And for any new parents, I humbly recommend these guidelines to your family today.
Jill and I now parent three young children — ages 5, 3, and 1. It feels like we’re comically bad at parenting sometimes and I’ve had to apologize to our kids for my shortcomings as a dad many times already. Being a good dad is tough. We joke about what our kids are going to say about us to their therapists one day.
But these screen guidelines we jotted down in 2019 have actually been incredibly helpful, not as authoritarian rules, but as a strategy in a time when the average American toddler is consuming more than 3 hours of screens a day (which is on track for that 10 years on a screen estimate, FYI).
Jill and I are still in the thick of it and we have more challenges on the horizon (our son already wants to know when he’ll get a phone. Gonna be a long time, buddy). We just recently introduced some family video game times, too.
But these 5 guidelines have helped our young family so far and if you have a young family, I hope they might help yours, too.
Here are the 5 screen time guidelines we use as a young family in 2025:
Guideline 1: Screen time is entertainment
“The medium is the message.” — Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan
Watching videos or playing games or using apps —we always categorize these interactions as entertainment, not education.
Even if the videos and apps our kids are using are marketed as educational and the content is focused on learning, the very medium itself (the screens) drives an entertainment outcome in our kids. The gold standard of interface design is this happy sounding word, “engagement,” which means that the designers and programmers are measuring success by how many minutes they can hold your attention through what’s on screen and what you hear.
I want to clarify that I’m not saying a toddler watching an ABCs YouTube video is bad or harmful to them. What I am saying is that watching anything on a screen is always entertainment. It’s an incredibly passive type of interaction, even if it’s a learning app. This is simply the response the human brain has to watching bright, vibrant, glowing pixels move and dance on a screen to fun sounds.
Can you learn something by watching a movie or a show or a YouTube video? Absolutely! But anything a child learns by watching a video is merely side-effect, and a surprisingly rare one.
I’m not making this up — there’s a lot of data on this. Famously in the United States, PBS began daily broadcasts of their educational show Sesame Street in 1969, which was immediately put into use in the public school system, meaning child psychologists have had generations and millions of people to study on this very subject long before Baby Einsteins or Ms. Rachel entered the scene.
Most, if not all of the studies conducted, have found that the educational value from screens is essentially nonexistent, particularly for children under 5-years-old. Let me give you just three examples I find compelling:
- In 2010, the British Journal of Developmental Psychology published their 6 week study comparing vocabulary development in 12–18 month old toddlers. The toddlers were divided into 3 groups: a group that watched educational videos made for toddlers to help their vocabulary, a group that was read to, and a group that had neither books nor videos. This was a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard for studies to try and eliminate differences caused by gender, age, income, etc.. After 6 weeks, the “videos” group and the “none” group had the exact same vocabulary growth, while the reading group far exceeded both. The most significant predictor of both how many words the children spoke and how fast their vocabularies grew was whether their parents read to them or not. The educational TV made no difference whatsoever.
- In 1999, three groups of children (12, 15, and 18 months) were shown either a live person or a person on a TV demonstrating some actions with a puppet. The researchers evaluated whether the children could repeat the action they had seen right away or 24 hours later. In all three groups, when they watched the live person do the action, most of the children could repeat the action. When they watched the person on TV do it, almost none of the children could repeat the action.
- A study in the 2004 Media Phycology Journal measured brainwave activity while participants watched TV. What they found was that as you watch a video, your brain shifts primarily to alpha-waves, which are linked to relaxation and daydreaming. If you’ve ever tried to talk to your child while they are watching a screen and found they aren’t listening, almost as though they are switched to “sleep mode,” this is the effect you’re observing. This is why screens work so well to calm a screaming child. Their brain is set to a low-power, almost vacation mode. Which might be fine, it’s just not primed for learning in that moment. It’s in entertainment mode.
I’ve had a fair number of parents enthusiastically share that their child learned how to speak by watching Ms. Rachel. I’m sure their child has picked up some vocabulary from singing along to Ms. Rachel, and that’s great.
I also say all of this as a YouTuber myself who makes educational content. I make videos about space exploration and I hope it’s interesting and fun for my viewers, but if they really want to learn anything about space exploration, they should turn off my videos and grab a good book on the subject. The medium is the message. Videos are always entertainment, it’s just how human brains work.
And hear me out — I think entertainment is fine! Movies and shows and YouTube videos are fun! But in our family, we want to be honest about how we categorized content.
Screens are entertainment. Always.
Ok ok, enough pontificating. Why does this matter?
When Jill and I only think of screens as entertainment, we are way more intentional about how much we let our kids watch in a day.
Do you think of green Skittles as a vegetable or a candy? If you say vegetable, you’ll give yourself permission to eat as much as you want every single day. If you say candy, you’ll naturally set a few boundaries.
Frankly, it’s really convenient to have our wild kids just chill and quietly watch TV for a few minutes. So the temptation, as a parent, can be to rationalize a lot of screen time by convincing ourselves that the videos are helping our children, that it’s “actually helping their vocabulary” or their math skills or their Spanish.
Jill and I know ourselves well enough to know we could fall into that trap so easily. We’re tired. Toddler life is exhausting. Screens are tempting enough as it is. If we convince ourselves that screen time is not bad or even neutral but actually good for our kids, we’ll give them way too much of it.
So we’re honest about what it is. It’s entertainment.
And then, if we make a decision to still let them watch some TV, we accept the reality of the situation. Our kids are on pause mode, and eating Skittles is ok sometimes.
(Note: I actually think the “medium” is the software, not the hardware. In our family, we plan to treat painting on an iPad app very differently than watching YouTube videos on it. When they’re older, we’ll begin to distinguish between creative and consumeristic time on a device. That transition will happen later for our kids.)
Guideline 2: No personal screens
We have one TV in our house and it’s in the middle of the living room, right where all the action of our home is.
Again, keep in mind the ages of our children. Our kids do not have access to an iPad, or a phone, or any kind of personal screen. The only time they can borrow our phone is if they want to take a picture of something, and even then it’s only on occasion.
One practical implication of this guideline is going to get us into trouble — we don’t hand our kids a phone in public. Ever.
There is no iPad in the car (unless we’re on vacation) and no phone in the restaurant or the grocery store. This was something Jill and I felt very strongly about before we had kids and one of those convictions we were told by some experienced parents that we would inevitably capitulated on once we had screaming toddlers of our own.
What I can tell you is it’s actually not that big of a deal to have a toddler screaming and to not hand them a device. No phones are necessary in 2025, anymore than they were necessary in 1992.
We have had public meltdowns. We have had the screaming toddlers in the restaurant. Sometimes our son drags his body on the floor at Walmart because “his legs don’t work anymore.” It’s just a part of it and the moment passes.
My toddler’s emotional instability is there whether I hand my crying daughter a phone or not — the difference is whether my daughter ever learns how to manage her own emotions, a goal which would be thwarted if I handed her an iPad and hit “pause” on her brain. I am convinced, developmentally, that she needs those moments of meltdown.
On Monday nights, my 3-year-old daughter has a little ballet class and the families are allowed to come and watch every week. We bring our sons, who are 1 and 5 years old, to watch her practice. No devices. We are just present for our daughter and sister. My 5-year-old son cheers her on, he sometimes gets a little bored and restless, and he has to work through that. It is the only way he will ever develop focus, emotional regulation, and the gift of being truly present for someone you love. In a few weeks, he’ll go to soccer camp and my 3-year-old daughter will have the opportunity to learn how to support him and deal with boredom in the same way.
But an important note here is that we are asking our kids to do the same thing Jill and I are doing, which is a challenge in itself and a great topic for another day.
Guideline 3: Our kids don’t watch anything that we don’t want to watch
This one is probably the most unique guideline to Jill and me as I have never heard anyone else talk about it and admittedly, it only works because Jill and I both enjoy good family content.
If it’s not a video that Jill or myself would like to watch, our kids don’t watch it, either. We curate good content for them.
I can sing every song from Mulan or Encanto or The Lion King. I cry watching Up and Finding Nemo. I get goosebumps watching The Wild Robot or How to Train Your Dragon or Into the Spider-Verse. I can explain all the events between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. I have theories about who Bluey marries. In other words, I myself enjoy good family content.
In this day and age, the amount of “content” is egregious. Every minute, 500 hours of videos is uploaded to YouTube. Is most of good? No, most of it is terribly boring! (If you don’t believe me, for any YouTube search you do, sort by “most recent” and you’ll be shocked at the quality, especially now that so many channels are using AI to generate videos)
Have you sat down and watched Disney Junior or Nick Jr. shows? Most of them are absolutely terrible, clearly designed to merely babysit kids. Even the last few tentpole Disney and Pixar movies are C minus at best (we skipped Moana 2 and Wish, for example).
Good storytelling is out there, it just requires curation. Jill and I want to play that role for our kids. Good storytelling engages our minds and our emotions.
I believe storytelling is at the heart of human flourishing.
God designed us to resonate with stories — to process trauma, grief, triumph, bravery, justice, and romance through them. They are a medium through which we can learn about ourselves and reorient priorities in our lives. I mentioned earlier some of what movies/TV cannot do (like significant education), but the medium can be very good at engaging the emotional centers of our bodies. Like IAD’s in the military, a good story can help prepare us to emotionally handle situations we will encounter later on in life.
I want our kids to know good stories. If they’re going to watch TV, it should be good TV. As a dad, I’m not just monitoring what they watch for morality, (although that is an important element). I’m also monitoring it for quality.
The easiest way to say it is that if Jill and I wouldn’t watch it, we don’t let our kids watch it.
Paw Patrol? Great. Love it.
Dino Ranch? We gave it a shot and it didn’t make the cut.
And because any screen time is inherently communal in our family, it gives us a lot of opportunity to talk through what we’ve all watched.
We talk about what characters we love (yes, even our 3-year-old daughter regularly uses the word “character”), which character surprised us, if there was a redemption arc (which is usually simplified as “who started out as a bad guide and became a good guy?”). We talk about what we would have done in their situation, what the music made us feel at different scenes, and the motivations that lead characters to either good decisions or bad ones. We watch the credits and talk about the different jobs that had to be done to make the movie.
And when our son sees me crying at the end of “The Sign” episode of Bluey, I can tell him it’s because it reminds me of how much I love him, his siblings, and his mom, and how far I would go to take care of them. That’s good storytelling, especially for a kids’ show!
We get to share these moments together because screen time is family time. No YouTube Kids in this household.
We use our screen time to enjoy the best we can find and we talk about it together.
Bonus Guideline: If there’s a book, we have to read it first before we watch the movie.
Guideline 4: Screen time is not a solution, it’s a bonus
Our kids get no guaranteed screen time. For example, it’s not like they get a daily hour of TV or get to watch something every Saturday morning.
This is totally different than how we treat books in our home.
We read to our kids every single day. It’s like their daily fiber or protein. Reading is guaranteed and we never use it as an incentive or discipline.
But we treat screen time like a dessert.
Which means, in our case, there are expectations that have to be met before anyone can watch anything.
Our oldest knows that if his room is not clean, he can’t watch anything. Does he get mad about that? Sometimes. But we don’t budge on that rule. Last night, he wanted to watch Lego Masters (and honestly, I kind of wanted to watch it too), but he didn’t want to clean his room, so we didn’t watch anything. We’re all ok with that, not a big deal, but it’s a very clear requirement he has to meet and we do not capitulate if those expectations are not met.
Likewise, a few months ago I began to allow our oldest son to play age-appropriate video games with me (like Mario or Lego Star Wars). That’s not an every-day or even an every-week activity. But we set “video game nights” on the calendar as special occasions that he and I both look forward to. It’s a treat, never a solution.
Guideline 5: Screen time always carries an opportunity cost
This is the best way to summarize how Jill and I view screen time in our own family:
An hour watching TV is an hour our kids are not doing anything else.
It’s an hour not reading, not playing outside, not practicing a practical skill like cooking or laundry, not drawing, not building, not socializing, not singing, not napping, not running.
I don’t think screen time is inherently bad. It just carries an opportunity cost.
If my 5-year-old son watches Spidey and His Amazing Friends then he isn’t doing anything else during that time.
As I think about the intelligent, brave, kind, strong, social, well-adjusted adults I hope to raise one day, I have to weigh the cost of the time watching TV. Time is a limited resource.
For our family, that means our kids do watch some TV.
Thinking of screen time in terms of opportunity cost helps us not to be legalistic about screens and to know when to make allowances. In the winter, our kids probably watch an average of 30–60 minutes of TV most days. We’re ok with that. The outside weather is dreary, cold, and probably raining.
If our kids are all really sick, we have no problem giving them a TV day because there is essentially nothing else (other than sleeping) they could be doing with their day.
If everyone feels well and it’s a beautiful day outside, it’s likely we won’t let them watch anything that day. Most of our best days as a family have no screen time at all.
Because saying “yes” to one activity is saying “no” to a thousand others. When should the screens get the “yes”? We weigh the opportunity-cost of the moment.
Wrap-Up: They’re called “Guidelines”
As I end here, I want to note that I use the word “guideline” intentionally because these are all aspirational. There are days when we aren’t as strong as we wanted to be, and so we simply try again. There are also circumstances as I’ve already shared such as vacations or sickness (or Jill’s last pregnacy) when we deviate from our normal screen routine, and that’s ok, too.
But having this framework for how we regularly manage our family’s digital engagement has helped make many daily decisions for us. It gives us a standard to return to.
We’re early on in this journey. As I mentioned, we have a few ideas of how we’ll make some changes in the next stage (like differentiating between consumption and creation on a screen), and I can’t even imagine the coming complexity of the teen years. But for the younger years, these 5 guidelines have served us so well.
We have loved learning from other parents along the way and now, I’d love to hear from you. What’s worked well for your family? Do you have a family framework around digital devices?
