We Tried to Fix Our Kids' Screen Time Problems. Did It Work?

Our five-year-old was developing a bad relationship with her iPad. Was it a phase? Because of her injury? Either way, when school started, it was time for a reboot.

Photo by Alireza Attari on Unsplash

July was hell, friends.

My five-year-old had broken her arm as summer kicked off. A summer where she was finally going to be swim on her own. Healing, even breathlessly young, still hurts. You feel off for weeks—and that’s while trying to pretend your arm doesn’t endlessly itch.

This prompted a spike in demands for screen time. If I can’t swim, can I watch a video? If I can’t jump on the trampoline, can I watch a video? On one hand, these were reasonable requests for an anxious and pained child. On the other, the requests weren’t in good faith, as they were often accompanied by loud tantrums and whining.

“I want to watch my iPaaaaaaaad.” “Daddy, I want to watch your phooooone.”

In my restless dreams, I hear that phrase: “Daddy, I want your phone.”

Over the summer, I wondered if we had screwed up screen time. It was possible to handwave the emotional spikes to injury, but it coincided with a decision to abandon strict screen time limits. In short, I got tired of approving screen time requests while the kids were being watched by my mom, so I disabled them and never looked back.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“I so thoroughly enjoyed the lack of notifications so much that I—and it kinda pains me to admit this in a newsletter about parenting—never turned them back on. We shifted to a mode where we politely asked the children to turn off their devices and turned those into teaching moments when they didn’t listen. It felt like a better system—and honestly, worked as a better system—than all of the arbitrary time limits.”

(One solution to this issue is that we just don’t send the devices with our children when they’re staying overnight at Grandma’s house anymore. But they do watch YouTube on the TV there, something we don’t allow at home. It’s a compromise.)

Partially at issue was the emotional maturity of my two children. My oldest can handle pseudo-unlimited screen time and wind things down appropriately. (Mostly.) My five-year-old cannot. She’s a harder kid in general, more prone to emotional and physical outbursts. It’s better to project anger at an iPad locking than getting mad at parents.

My wife and I figured a good time to mix up our approach to screen time was school starting. We could have woken up one day and chose violence, but it’s easier to explain an upcoming change. A surprise trip to Disney is fun, a change to screen time less so.

Plus, the five-year-old was starting kindergarten. It was a time of change for everyone.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

There were two important shifts we wanted to make and study the results:

1. Reintroduce screen time limits

You’re granted one hour per day, before you need to ask with Mom and Dad. Are chores done? Is your backpack ready for the next day? Do you need to put away laundry? It’s a negotiation. Extra time is not taken for granted and requested verbally.

2. No more devices in the morning

We’d fallen into a bad habit where the kids would watch their iPads while eating breakfast. My oldest already eats food at a glacial pace and the iPad was making it worse. Now, we’d allow something on the TV after you were dressed and ready for the day, but no more devices and no more headphones. Everyone is chatting as we prep.

3. On weekends, the devices are locked until 7:00 a.m

This only happens on rare occasions, but sometimes, one of the kids would wake up early because they went to the bathroom, figured it was time to get up and wind up on a device too early. Now, if you wander over to the iPad on a Saturday or Sunday, it won’t work, which means you need to either A) go back to bed or B) do something else.

(Hilariously, my five-year-old came in one morning while it was still pitch black out, and when told she needed to go back to sleep, she slept next to me clutching the iPad.)

All changes were implemented on the first day of school without any complaints. Some of that might have to do with, of all things, my kids getting into The Simpsons?

(The adult-ish jokes seem to be going over their head.)

Granted, my oldest still eats slow enough that sometimes I have to pause the TV and bark, but broadly, we’re left with two children who are more attentive in the morning. We are getting more done in the evening and screen time is dished out as a reward.

There’s still a back-and-forth with the five-year-old over screen time, but that has more to do with her general disposition than anything else. If she’s on a device, she’ll complain when asked to put it away. If she’s in the bath, she’ll complain about being asked to wash her hair and get out. If she’s playing with dolls while we’re trying to leave the house, she’ll complain about that. Phase? Indication of the future? Sigh.

Truth be told, the biggest problem is one I’ve harped on a few times with Apple: the inability to grant more reasonable blocks of time to my children’s devices. 15 minutes is not long enough. One hour is too much. An entire day is…who is that for?

It makes me want to scream when my wife and I are watching a TV show, the children are being entirely pleasant on their devices after doing everything we asked, and we’re having to give approvals for two 15-minute chunks on various apps because I’m convinced nobody at Apple actually uses their screen time controls with children.

Ahem. Anyway.

We’re in a healthier place with screen time, all told. Have you made any changes?

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

---

Also:

• My oldest’s new thing is to request Roblox and YouTube simultaneously. She’ll poke at a Roblox game while there’s a YouTube video running picture-in-picture.

• My youngest has realized she has YouTube Kids and her sister has normal (but restricted) YouTube. Anyone else dealt with a similar sibling jealousity issue?

• Also, my youngest is trying to move up the clock on her getting an Apple Watch. We had talked about doing so in 6th grade. She’s trying to make it sooner, because an increasing number of her friends had them during a recent sleepover.