I was chatting with another mum a few weeks ago, and a topic came up that made me wince.
“How much screen time do your kids get?”, she asked.
We’re generally a low screen time family. We typically limit TV to 30 minutes on the days we do watch (which may only be once or twice a week), and then a family movie on Saturday. We don’t even have devices available for gaming. This works great for us, but given that 85% of kids aged 5-17 blow past the recommended screen time limit of no more than 2 hours recreational screen time daily (which far exceeds our own family limits), I don’t want to come across as self-righteous or judgemental when explaining what our screen usage looks like.
Still, they say honesty is the best policy, so I explained how we handle the screen issue in our family.
Then a follow up question came up that left me perplexed.
“That’s great!”, she said. “But what do your kids do when they’re not on screens?”
I thought the answer to that would be obvious. PLAY! Don’t all kids still do that?
Unfortunately, the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood is well-documented (see the work of Peter Gray and Jon Haidt, this article here is a good place to start), and more and more kids now struggle to know what to do when not on their screens. Just within the last few weeks, I’ve seen pre-teens on the swings at the playground, smartphone consuming all of their attention even as they swung. I’ve seen a neighbour’s daughter just watch on as my kids played outside, unable to join in because she didn’t know how to just play. I’ve asked an 8-year-old what they most like to do when they’re not playing Roblox on their phone, and they couldn’t think of anything else they like to do.
Yet here's what we know is occurring globally, across cultures and varying levels of industrial development:
- Mothers consistently rate that their children are happiest when playing outdoors, even though they spend more time per week on screens.
- 73% of mothers say that, given the choice, their child would rather play outside than inside.
So if kids prefer playing outdoors, and are happier when they do, why are they so drawn to screens?
There are many, many, many factors that have been identified in the research literature. In short it comes down to this:
There’s no one to play with when they go outside.
To expand on that, I want to highlight that the many factors are highly interconnected. For example, a meta-analysis seeking to identify the primary determinants of outdoor free play in children identified these factors (among others):
- Concerns about safety
- Surveillance
- Few neighbourhood kids
- Reduced sense of community
- Attempting to meet the good parent ideal
Here’s a snippet of how those factors interconnect. Parents today are more concerned about safety than in previous generations. In part, this is due to a reduced sense of community; when parents don’t know the people who live in their street, they experience more reluctance in allowing their children outdoors. To mitigate this concern, they might only allow their children out when they can directly supervise them. This, along with reduced family sizes, results in there being fewer kids on the street to play with. When there are fewer children around, the feeling of safety in numbers is reduced, causing parents to feel even more concerned about safety. Additionally, parents want to meet the ideal of the good parent, and they are concerned that they will be labelled a bad parent if they allow their child to roam around unsupervised. Furthermore, the reduced sense of community may even result in well-intentioned neighbours calling Child Protective Services, simply because they don’t know the family well enough to understand that the child is able to competently handle that level of independence. All this results in fewer and fewer kids available for outdoor play. It’s ultimately unsurprising that kids turn to screens, one of the few safe havens where they can still play in an unsupervised and unstructured way.
This is why I never judge a parent for allowing more screen time than I do, or even for allowing more screen time than is generally recommended. Our parents or grandparents may have allowed their children to play outside until the streetlights came on, but that’s largely not an option nowadays. The situation is widespread, systemic, and one parent alone can’t do much to change the situation. You could throw the TV out entirely, but that won’t bring a single other child out on to the street for your child to play with.
So should we just give up? Allow our children unfettered access to screens?
Not quite. Here's two other things we know to be true:
- When allowed in excess, screen time can have negative health and developmental consequences (mostly due to displacing opportunities for sleep, physical activity, and in-person social activities).
- Unstructured play in nature is associated with a range of positive health and developmental outcomes, with these effects above and beyond spending time outdoors in structured environments.
Clearly, we want to get our kids off screens and into nature as much as possible. Below, I’m going to outline three things that don’t work in helping us meet that goal (even though common sense suggests they would help), and five other things that do work.
Things that don’t work
Screen time limits
If you have once thought that the answer to limiting screen time is applying a limit to screen time, you’ve thought wrong. It only appears logical that a limit should limit whatever it is you’re trying to limit. Yet our minds rarely work as logically as we believe they should.
What happens when we set a screen time limit is that we begin by asking ourselves, ‘what’s the maximum amount of time I want to allow my child on screens each day?’. Ideally, we see this limit as the maximum amount of time. However, our brains, and those of our children, see this time as the total time budgeted for this activity. Instead of switching off before the limit hits, our kids now feel as though they need to use up every single minute before their screen time limit hits. Paradoxically, introducing a screen time limit causes us to spend more time on screens than if we had set no limit at all.[1]
Banning screens
If we can’t limit screen use, maybe the answer is just to eliminate screen use entirely, right?
Wrong again.
While our young children could probably do just as well with no screens available at all, our adolescents actually have better mental wellbeing when they are able to engage in a moderate amount of screen time. While overuse of screens displaces sleep, opportunities for in-person socialisation, homework, and physical activity, the negative effects of screen time don’t occur in a linear relationship. In fact, “underuse” of digital technologies may also have negative consequences, such as by limiting their ability to obtain important social information (through social media) or engage in activities with their peers (through gaming).
A large study found evidence for this ‘Goldilocks effect’, suggesting that, in moderation, screen use is not inherently harmful, and is even beneficial in supporting our children to be optimally connected in a digital world.
Excessive structured activities
Again, it makes sense intuitively that if we want to get our kids off screens and playing outside, a solution would be signing them up to a heap of structured, extracurricular activities. They’re outside, running around, spending time with friends… it seems to be a winning combination.
While there is certainly a place for structured extra-curricular activities, I believe that many kids are engaging in these activities in excess. While the research does show that structured forms of physical activity show positive benefits in terms of physical and mental health indicators, these effects are of similar magnitude to those found when engaging in unstructured activities of the same physical intensity level. Additionally, unstructured play offers the opportunity to develop important social skills such as conflict resolution, negotiating, and equality. (For more about how adult-directed sports are no substitute for free play, read this excellent article by Dr Peter Gray).
Finally, when all the neighbourhood children are spending their time in structured extra-curricular activities, we find ourselves reinforcing the root problem – there’s no one for our kids to play with when they go outside.
Things that do work
So screen time limits increase screen use. Banning screens entirely may have negative impacts on our kids’ mental wellbeing. And signing our kids up for all the extra-curricular activities perpetuates the problem that causes our kids to turn to screens in the first place.
What am I suggesting we do instead?
Provide enticing alternatives to screens
Every Monday I take the kids to my mum’s house. In general, I accept that Nanna’s rules are different to my rules, so the kids might have more screen time than they normally would. However, one week things went a bit too far. They’d watched TV for 90 minutes. Later in the day, they spent some time with their great grandma watching YouTube videos on the tablet. Near the end of the day, I heard them asking if they could play games on Nanna’s phone. Hours were spent that day on screens of every size.
The next week things were completely different. On the way to Nanna’s, we had brainstormed things we wanted to do while there. We had a list of activities prepared: make slime, play Catan, spray the hose, decorate Christmas cards. We didn’t even make it through the list, and they didn’t once ask to watch something.
Screens aren’t our kids first choice of activity when there are better things to do. Sometimes, they just need a little help to jumpstart their creativity and get them going on other activities.
At home, we have an activity jar. It is filled with literally hundreds of ideas of things we can do together as a family, and we pull a couple of ideas out of the jar any day we don’t have much planned. Most of these activities get us outside, but at the very least they get us off screens and spending time together as a family.
I’ll be sending paid subscribers 54 ideas from our activity jar later this week, so make sure to upgrade your subscription if you’d like some help in forming your own collection of activity ideas.
Encourage better screen usage
In the same study that found support for the Goldilocks effect for optimal screen time, the researchers also found that the ‘pivot point’ for optimal screen time (the point at which use shifts from benign to harmful) varied depending on the type of technology use. Video games and smartphone use had a lower pivot point (less time before negative effects occurred) and watching TV and using a computer for general internet use had a higher pivot point (more time could be spent on these activities before negative effects occurred).
This study, and others like it, indicate that we can mitigate some of the negative impacts of screen time by encouraging better screen usage. Simple swaps include watching a movie or TV show together rather than individually (make it even better by having discussions about what you’ve watched), having a video call rather than scrolling social media, and using a computer rather than a smartphone for general internet use.
Model healthy behaviours
While most parents think that it is appropriate to limit their children’s recreational screen usage to under 2 hours daily, 66% don’t adhere to these limits themselves. Another 36% of parents are concerned about their own smartphone usage. Additionally, the average North American spends only 6-8% of their time outdoors, and in Australia, one third of adults spend less than 2 hours per week outdoors.
Clearly, we could all do a little better at modelling the type of behaviour we’d like to see in our children. If we want to support our kids to get off their screens and go outside, we should probably do the same.
Simple things you can do to reduce your own screen time include declaring dedicated phone free times (like at mealtimes), introducing friction (by putting your phone in another room when you’re not using it), or using apps like OneSec to reduce mindless pick-ups of your phone.
As for getting outside, try Michael Easter’s 20-5-3 rule; 20 minutes outdoors three times per week (think walks through your neighbourhood park), 5 hours in semi-wild nature per month (think hiking in a state or national park), and 3 days in the backcountry per year (think camping in places with limited phone reception).
Build a community
Remember how most of the issue with screens stems from the fact that there are no other kids to play with outside? Unless you plan on reproducing a lot, you’re going to need help to repopulate and reinvigorate the neighbourhood.
Fortunately, there are things you can do. For example, I’m in the process of making and sending out invites to the neighbourhood parents this week, inviting all the local kids to the park on a set date and time. Hopefully we can make it a weekly activity, and as the kids get to know each other, and parents learn to trust their kids, they can start riding or walking to each other’s houses and asking each other out for a play.
If you’re in Australia, you can also contact your local government area for support in organising a Play Street, which provides an opportunity for local residents to connect and play. Play Australia has the goal of achieving 1000 Play Streets by 2025, and if your local government area doesn’t yet know about Play Streets, you can use Play Australia’s email template to advocate for the support you need. They also have templates you can use to invite your neighbours together to discuss the formation of a Play Street.
This is not an easy step, but it is likely to have the biggest impact towards reversing the societal trends and pulling our kids away from their devices and back into the outdoors.
Join a movement
There are so many inspiring change makers who are working towards giving our kids a play-based childhood rather than the phone-based childhood they are currently facing. Joining some of these movements can give you the motivation and community you need to implement changes in your family that allow you to live fuller, more engaged lives.
1000 Hours Outside aims to match screen time with green time. They have trackers you can print or an app you can download to help you in the goal of spending 1000 hours outside every year. It seems daunting, but it comes down to about 20 hours per week (which is less time than the average American child spends in front of screens each week). We’ve completed this challenge twice now, and it has helped us to be so much more intentional about getting outside every single day.
Let Grow is an organisation that attempts to push back against the over-supervision and hypervigilance of children and give them back their independence. On the website, you can find the Let Grow kid license (a card your child can pull out if they are ever questioned about why they are outside without parental supervision), and the “10 weeks to a Let Grow kid” email series (which include independence actions each week, one of which is encouragement to let your kid play outside unsupervised).
Wait until 8th encourages parents to pledge to delay giving their children smartphones until 8th grade. The American organisation works in contact with schools and notifies you when at least 10 other families from your child’s school also pledge to wait until 8th. They also support you to contact the other families who have taken the pledge, so that you are able to support one another. This helps avoid the “but everyone else has a smartphone” cries from your child, as well as connecting them with other children who are avoiding a phone-based childhood. While this pledge only takes effect in American schools at the moment, you can always campaign for a phone-free school wherever you live. Here is a great article you could share with your child’s school principal to help you make the case for a phone-free school. Finally, remember that a smartphone is not the only option, and shouldn’t be the default when it comes to purchasing a phone for your child. There are plenty of smartphone alternatives, which offer your child everything they need (text, calls, some even have calendars and music streaming), and nothing they don’t need (access to social media, internet browsing, or games).
Conclusion
It’s easy to oversimplify the screens issue. Screen time is bad. Nature time is good.
I hope this article has helped you see that the amount of time your child spends on screens (or begs to be allowed to have time on screens) is more a function of the societal environment than whether or not you’re a ‘good parent’. I also hope that it has helped you see that, while we can’t control the fact that we now live in a phone-based world, that that there are still plenty of things that you can do to help your child live a play-based childhood.
Start small. Make one step to reclaim childhood.
And then another.
You can’t change the world alone.
But together, we can. One step at a time.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! How do you handle the screen issue in your family? Anything you might do differently moving forward?
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[1] The exception is for very low limits – certainly lower than whatever the current level of use is. Thank you Techno Sapiens for making me aware of this research – and make sure to subscribe to Jacqueline’s work if you’re interested in the intersection between parenting, psychology, and technology.