What we decided about screens, and how long it held
We made a rule in January that lasted until the second week of February. The rule that replaced it is worse on paper, has no numbers in it, and has now been running for a year.
In January we sat down, like people who have read something, and agreed on forty minutes a day.
It lasted five weeks, and those five weeks were worse than what came before. Not because forty minutes is the wrong number — I have no idea what the right number is — but because a number turns every single afternoon into a negotiation with a clock in it.
What a timer actually does
It ends in the middle of things.
That’s the whole problem and it took me until about the third week to see it. Forty minutes lands halfway through an episode, or two thirds of the way through whatever she is building, and I was standing in a doorway asking a six-year-old to abandon a story at the interesting part, and then treating her objection as defiance.
It isn’t defiance. I would object. I have objected, out loud, when Tom has turned something off at the wrong moment.
What we do instead
It goes off at the end of a thing. One episode. One level. Whatever the natural break is, and we agree which one before it starts: “two episodes, then we’re doing tea.”
The total is probably about the same. Might be more on a Sunday. But there is no clock, so there is nothing to argue about, and the argument was always the thing I actually minded.
The drawer
The tablet lives in a drawer in the kitchen.
I would put this above every rule we have written down, and it was an accident — the drawer was where it happened to end up during a tidy. A device on the worktop is a device being asked for, roughly every eleven minutes. A device in a drawer is not really in the room.
The two we don’t move
Not in the hour before bed. Not in a bedroom, ever, at any age, and nothing charges upstairs.
These are the only two that have never bent, and they’re the two I’d defend if somebody argued with me about it. Everything else here is a preference. Those two are structural.
The two mistakes
We used it as a reward. “If you’re good this afternoon” — for about two months. All that did was tell a six-year-old that of everything in this house, this is the valuable thing, and she believed us, because it was a completely reasonable inference from the evidence we gave her.
And we took it away for something unrelated. Shouting at her brother, and I said no tablet tomorrow, and what happened next was a Tuesday that cost far more than the original shouting did. The punishment has to have something to do with the thing, or you’re just holding a hostage.
The bit I didn’t expect
We watch things together now, and considerably more than we did when there was a limit.
When it was rationed, screen time was a thing she did on her own, because the minutes were hers and she wasn’t going to spend them being supervised. Now that it’s not rationed it’s often the four of us on the sofa on a Friday, and that has turned out to be the best thing on this list, and it was not on the list when we started.
Things people email to ask
- How much screen time should a six-year-old have?
- We stopped answering this with a number, because the number was where all our trouble came from. What matters more here is when and where: not in the hour before bed, not in a bedroom, and off at the end of a programme rather than the end of a timer. On a wet Sunday that means more than a guideline would allow, and on a normal weekday it means less.
- Why do screen time limits cause so many arguments?
- Because a timer ends in the middle of something. Stopping a child halfway through an episode or a level is asking them to abandon a story, and the argument you get is a reasonable response to that rather than defiance. Ending at a natural break removed almost all of our conflict without changing the total by very much.
- Should screens be used as a reward or taken away as a punishment?
- It backfired badly for us on both sides. Using it as a reward made the tablet the most valuable object in the house, which is the opposite of what we wanted, and confiscating it for something unrelated turned every small incident into a large one. Screens are now just a thing we do sometimes, which is deliberately boring.
- Where should tablets and devices be kept?
- Out of sight. Ours live in a drawer in the kitchen, and moving them off the worktop did more than any rule we wrote down — a device on a surface is a device being asked for. Nothing charges in a bedroom, at any age, which is the one decision we made early that I would not revisit.
Where we checked
We are not experts in any of this. Where an entry touches something that has a proper answer, here is where the proper answer is.
- 01Guidance on screen use for children aged 5 to 16 — GOV.UK
- 02Screen time guidance for parents of under-5s — Best Start in Life, GOV.UK
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Bedtime, in the order we do it
Not a routine we designed. A routine that assembled itself over about four years, and which I only wrote down because my sister asked and I discovered I couldn’t say it out loud in the right order.
The reading book that comes home every night
Ten minutes a night, says the school. What we had by half term was ten minutes of misery a night, four nights a week, and a child who had worked out that books were something that happened to her.
Pocket money, and the three systems we tried
A pound a week, paid on a Saturday, not linked to anything. We got there after two more complicated systems, one of which taught our six-year-old that kindness has a price of twenty pence.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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