When kids set their parents’ screen time rules: ‘I hit my limit before I even get out of bed’
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Would six-year-old Malakhi be strict? Could the grownups give up their phones? Three writers let their children set the rules. Zoe Williams. There is a glaring asymmetry in the way we talk about screen time: from the moment a child is born, there will be someone, somewhere, ready with research about what phone exposure does to their development.
![[Gynelle Leon with her six-year-old son Malakhi. He is standing on a bed holding a lot of tech devices next to his mum]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/97ee9015ae7d2246bb44e6ac35e58d0ba9b6a0e1/0_226_5374_6719/master/5374.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
More hours on a phone are linked to obesity, hyperactivity, depression; toddlers with more screen time have less back and forth with their parents, which affects their vocabulary; teenagers are the same but the stakes are higher, with studies finding more screen time associated with more suicidal ideation. An extremely dense parliamentary report on the impacts of screens, published last year, mentions parents mainly in the context of our bovine incomprehension, the children’s commissioner for England emphasising that “parental education on managing screen time must also be improved in order to see a tangible impact”.
![[Tim Dowling with his youngest son. They are both sat at a kitchen table, but Tim’s son has a laptop]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/11d297cb4600a719cc70a97cfb64d081af81d81b/0_228_5213_6518/master/5213.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Which is all mad, right? There must be two people, at least, in that room where the toddler is playing on their phone instead of learning new words. Whatever the family composition, that depressed teenager must have learned their phone habits from somewhere. Adults get off scot-free in the discourse, our screen use assumed to have settled at a mature and reasonable level, which in no way affects our family lives. Thurston, my 17-year-old son, thinks this is ridiculous. He thinks my screen use is worse than either his or his sister’s.
