👨‍👧On Raising Kids in a World Full of Screens

I have spent my career in education and technology. I have built learning platforms, worked on kids' reading apps, and spent a lot of time thinking about how children learn. I also have a kid of my own.

You would think that combination would give me clear answers about screens. It does not. If anything, it has made me less certain. I know too much about how digital products are designed to capture attention to be relaxed about it, and I have seen too much good come out of technology to reject it outright.

So this is not a guide. It is an honest account of how I think about it, as someone who lives on both sides of the argument.

The word "screen" is doing too much work

Much of the public conversation treats screen time as a single thing, measured in hours. Two hours good, four hours bad. I understand why. It is simple, and parents need something to hold on to.

But a screen is a surface, not an activity. My child building something in a creative game, working through a tricky puzzle, or video-calling a grandparent is doing something very different from scrolling through an endless feed of short videos. Lumping these together is like treating a novel and a pamphlet of advertisements as the same thing because both are made of paper.

The distinction I keep coming back to is between creating and consuming, and between things that end and things that do not.

A puzzle has an end. You solve it, you feel good, you stop. A story has an end. A game level has an end. An infinite feed is designed so that it never ends, and so that stopping always feels like a small loss. As someone who has built products, I know that this is not an accident. Somebody in a meeting decided that the feed should keep going.

That, more than the number of hours, is what worries me. Not the screen, but the design behind what is on it.

What I try to do

I do not have a system, and I am wary of anyone who claims to have one that works for every child. But there are a few things we lean on at home.

Books, lots of them. This will not surprise anyone who knows me. I have spent years running reading programmes and a children's publishing house, and I genuinely believe reading is one of the best things a child can do. Not because books are morally superior, but because a book asks something of you. You build the world in your head. You set the pace. And a book ends. Comics count, by the way. I have always believed comics are literature, and I am not going to tell my child otherwise.

Board games. There is something about sitting around a table with a board game that no screen replicates. You have to take turns. You have to lose gracefully, which is harder than it sounds at any age. You have to read the faces of the people across from you. Some of our best conversations have happened in the middle of a game, when nobody was trying to have a conversation.

Cooking together. I love cooking, and it turns out to be one of the best things to do with a child. It is hands-on, it is a little bit dangerous in a good way, there is maths and chemistry hidden in it, and at the end you get to eat what you made. It is also slow. A screen gives you an answer instantly. A dough makes you wait.

Retro games, sometimes. I will admit to a soft spot here. Older games tend to be finite, a bit difficult, and blissfully free of the endless notifications and purchase prompts built into many modern ones. Playing them together feels closer to a board game than to a feed.

None of these is a replacement for screens. They are alternatives that give a child a different experience of time and attention. The goal is not zero screens. It is a balance where the screen is one option among many, not the default.

The uncomfortable part: modelling

Here is where it gets awkward for me.

I work in technology. A lot of my day happens on a laptop or a phone. Messages arrive at odd hours. There is always something to check. And children do not learn from what you tell them; they learn from what they see you do.

If I tell my child to put the tablet away while I am glued to my phone at the dinner table, the lesson they take is not "screens should be limited". It is "screens are for grown-ups, and rules are for children". That is not a lesson I want to teach.

So I have had to look at my own habits more honestly than I would like. Putting the phone in another room during meals. Not checking messages in the middle of a game. Reading a physical book where my child can see me doing it, rather than reading on a device where it looks the same as scrolling. Explaining, when I do need to work, that I am working, so that the screen has a reason attached to it.

I do not always manage it. But I have come to think that how I use screens matters more than any rule I set for my child.

Talking about it instead of just policing it

One thing my work in education has taught me is that rules without understanding rarely last. Children are very good at finding the edges of a rule. What lasts longer is helping them understand why.

So we talk about it. Why does this app keep showing you one more video? Who made it, and what do they want? How do you feel after an hour of this, compared to an hour of building something? These conversations do not always land. Sometimes they are met with a roll of the eyes. But I would rather my child grow up understanding how attention is captured than simply being told that screens are bad.

Eventually, my child will be making these choices without me. I would like them to have the instincts to notice when something is designed to keep them hooked, and the confidence to put it down.

No easy answers

I wish I could end this with a neat formula. I cannot. Every child is different, every family is different, and the technology changes faster than anyone's parenting philosophy can keep up with.

What I can say is this. I do not think the answer is fear, and I do not think it is surrender. It is attention: paying attention to what kind of screen time it is, to what it is replacing, to how my child seems afterwards, and to what I am modelling without meaning to.

The question is not how much time my child spends on a screen. It is what that time is doing to them, and what it is taking the place of.

Some days I get it right. Some days the tablet comes out because everyone is tired and it is the easiest option, and I have made my peace with that too. Parenting is not a product launch. There is no final version.

But I keep the books within reach, the board games on the shelf, and the kitchen open. And I keep trying to put my own phone down first.