Screen Time for Children: How to Set Healthy Boundaries

There's nothing more personal than how we raise our children. Our values inform an infinite number of daily decisions—such as how to manage screen time—that shape what kind of parents we are. The American Academy of Pediatrics offers baseline recommendations, but ultimately parents need to make their own choices around screen time. Cue the decision fatigue. 

Thankfully, there are additional experts to turn to when it comes to making a plan for screen time in your house — and one of them is Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager at PBS KIDS, who sat down with Munchkin for the second episode of the StrollerCoaster podcast.  

DeWitt gets why screen time can be such a loaded issue for parents, but research has found that there are educational benefits to screen time for kids that can be unlocked. “I get very frustrated at the idea of just screen time as this monolithic bad thing,” she says. “Really, it's about: How can we make screen time actually really great and meaningful for kids? There's so much that kids can learn from it but we kind of approach it with this sense of fear as opposed to what's the potential we can unlock here? What are the amazing things we can do with it?” 

Use screen time to model empathy and emotional recognition 

Teaching kids empathy is one answer, as one study concluded in 2016. “One of my favorite pieces of research came out of Texas Tech University,” DeWitt explains. “Professor Eric Rasmussen did a study where he was looking at empathy and whether television or games could help a child build empathy. He was studying the show, ‘Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood,’ which is a spinoff of ‘Mister Rogers' Neighborhood’ and based on that same curriculum. In that study, they determined that, yes, watching the episodes could help the child develop more empathy and think more about how someone else felt. 

Actively watch a show together  

Children’s capacity to learn empathy from watching TV is much greater though when they’re able to talk about and process what they’ve watched with their parents. “In the control group, they just had kids talking to a parent about situations and those kids also developed more empathy when they were in this guided conversation with the parents,” DeWitt continues. “But the biggest gains were when the child both watched it and talked to the parent. So it was like, if a child watched this show and then had a conversation with the parent about it, their gains were greater.” 

Talk about what your child saw  

Co-viewing, when parents are actively watching TV with their kids, may have the strongest impact — but there can still be educational benefits to screen time without it. (Say when you’re at the wheel on a road trip and your little one is set up with a show in the backseat, or when you’re on a mission to grab groceries and you hand your phone to your child in their grocery cart seat.) Having a conversation about what your child watched at a later time can yield similar benefits. “The co-viewing is hard to do,” DeWitt says. “If you work full time and your kids need something to distract them, you're in separate places. So, what I loved about that Texas Tech study is he wasn't saying that it had to happen at the same time, it could be asynchronous. So, you can have that conversation with your child at dinner and still get those same kinds of results.” 

Use screen time to show them the world  

The educational benefits of screen time also extend beyond emotional recognition. “If you think about that potential for a visual to introduce a kid to a new experience or to a new thing, to show them a part of the world that they might have never seen before, or to make them understand a concept that's really hard to explain or really hard to read in a book, but if you see it, you immediately get it,” DeWitt explains. “Those are the kinds of things that I think technology can do really well.” 

Keep screens in shared places  

When it comes to imposing boundaries around screen time, think about where screens are being used. “The American Academy of Pediatrics has some really specific things like no screens in the bedroom, that is a hard and fast rule in our house,” DeWitt says. “Screen time has to be in shared social spaces. It can't be something that goes into your bedroom. You can't ever do it late at night, like after dinner, no screens because that light can keep kids awake. So that's a really real physiological response. And no screens at the dinner table. That includes the adults because this is our time to talk and be together and to not be distracted by other things.” 

Boundaries around screen time should apply to parents too  

When we talk about creating boundaries around screen time, often it just applies to how children are using screens. But it’s helpful to think about how parents are using screens as well. “There are so many ideas about screens being bad for kids. We just feel guilty about it,” DeWitt says. “And so that's a concern, but it comes back to how the parent is the one modeling the behavior. Your child doesn't know when you're just looking at [your phone] and scrolling.” 

Be intentional about how you use screens  

When you’re spending prolonged periods of time on your phone, use it as a teaching moment to walk your child through what you’re doing. “Really think carefully about how and when you use your device and how you explain to your child what you're using it,” DeWitt suggests, giving the example: “‘So, I think we should go to a playground. I don't know if there's one around here because I don't know this neighborhood. So, I'm going to look at the map and this map is going to tell me where a playground is.’ Like you're modeling all kinds of really good things because they're going to learn about how to use screens from you.”