All parents gonna talk about it endlessly at all times anyway, so why not start a thread to gather all the data, angst, questions?
I’m a fan of Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, and she teamed up with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and they have a book coming out on choosing fun in the era of screentime:
It’s for tweens, but might be a cool project to follow and read about for all.
Lalala just glued to my screen setting the bad example
My evenings are playing Minecraft with my son. LOL.
Playing with him is great!
I got a book about screen time called “(Be smart about) Screen time! : stay grounded, set boundaries, and keep safe online” by Rachel Brian. We’ve also read her book about anxiety which is wonderful (shout out to @Bracken_Joy who originally recommended that author to me).
Does Kiddo still get too much screen time? Oh definitely. But we’re trying to moderate what he has access to. From what I’ve seen, his classmates’ parents don’t moderate as much and then they talk about it at school and I don’t like it but that’s outside of my control.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I just put in a request for it at our library so when they get it I’ll be first on the holds list.
Ugh, screen time!
We don’t do any screen time on weekdays but honestly I’m not sure if that helps or hurts? Beginning on about Wednesdays Pipsqueak starts saying “yay that means tomorrow is Thursday and then Friday and then I can watch TV on Saturday!!!” So she’s clearly obsessed. Would allowing it during the week change that? Who knows (but I do know it would make every week day harder in our specific family rather than easier so we’ll stick with it for now).
Sadly when Ravioli is awake at 4:30AM (which is often) he gets to watch a movie on the TV while one of his parents lies catatonic on the couch. I do not really see a way around this. But we try to keep screen confined to that morning chunk plus random facetimes with family. Oh and I guess I put on Ms Rachel when we have to cut his nails because he haaaaaaates that. Love to hear how parents of older kids navigate this. Trying to hold off on any regular tablet/phone usage for as long as possible because it feels very hard to stop once you’ve started.
I’m with you there. My 2 year old gets more screen time than our 5 year old because we can’t have her running around the house at 5 in the morning (she does not do quiet activities and our house has poor sound insulation). 5 year old is slow to wake and likes a little bit of tv in the morning before breakfast, but that is limited to 15 min due to schedules so I don’t have a problem with that.
We also do some tv for the 5 year old after pickup and while we’re making dinner (2 year old stays at daycare longer). We try to limit it to 20 min but sometimes it takes us longer to cook and it stretches, which I don’t love. I’d like to switch it over to audiobooks or something like that but so far he’s resistant.
I got a Yoto, but Ravioli is not quite ready for it yet.
Also my goal is not to keep Ravioli from screens forever as that is not possible or even wise considering I want to make sure he can be an educated consumer of media when he grows up. But yeah. He’s 2. So. lol
It me. I think the tipping points to phone as go-to were October 2017 and July 2020, so can I break a pattern older than my child before said child has a phone of her own? 
My worry about screen time is that if they are watching a screen they aren’t doing other things. They aren’t moving their bodies or being creative and those things are very important for our family. Screen time did increase recently when both girls finally stopped napping. Now they get their tablets during 1 hour of “quiet time” when they used to have naps, and the 1 hour we give them before dinner. Although the 1 hour before dinner has turned into 1hr 15 minutes because we are at our breaking point each day when we hit 4:15 and it feels impossible for the adults to make it to 4:30. So now they are getting over 2 hours per day of screen time.
We did this with Spore’s 4AM wakeups too. He grew out of it!
We tried to limit it to a handful of calm and educational shows, especially Daniel Tiger or Prodigies music. Cocomelon became an obsession later and, oh well. Starting age 3.5ish he got more fine motor control so he got much more interested in toys, Legos, drawing things himself, etc. We did do a bit of propaganda, saying that too much screen time hurts your eyes and makes you need glasses like mama (it’s true, and he believes it). Now he’s totally reasonable and watches videos (currently obsessed with Jared Owen’s technical explainers) 2-3x a week for 20-40 mins at a time and stops when it’s time to stop. It’s so EASY right now for the older one.
For us, 2-3 yos get especially fixated once they spot the screen, so TR gets as close to zero screen time as we can stand. I don’t even look at my phone from the moment they get home until bedtime. We do pull it out as a backstop, or when one parent is traveling for days or sick, etc. and there was a stretch of multiple weeks where he fell asleep to music but insisted on watching the Spotify album covers, which then escalated to falling asleep to videos.
Generally, giving them more TO do that’s off screen, or entire days or mornings spent outside, has been helpful. My 2yo likes to watch me draw, and play with little moving parts like the Guess Who? game board or a push-button LED thing we got from Etsy.
My actual concerns with screen time are myopia, tantrums/obsession, learning to be mean, or finding really bad stuff like CSAM. I’m mitigating the vision thing with more outside time. The 2nd seems to get easier around age 3. I’m really interested in learning more about parental controls, etc. so my older kid has a bit more independence – for example, I’ve read some families only allow screens in the living room or family areas.
I read someone’s tweet thread saying their family likes using a projector over tablets or phones. She said their kids are always wiggling, jumping, standing up, etc at the projector and they more easily walk away when they get bored. On the tablet they try to swipe and find something else.
There’s a whole black hole of peer and social media stuff waiting in a few years but I’m going to ignore that for now. All kindergartners get tablets around here so it’s definitely coming for us soon.
Oh, plus the screentime the 5 year old is getting at aftercare 
. Which is nebulous but he sometimes tells me that “I watched frozen today”. I guess for $270 a month I have to live with that.
Oh, after school. Larva’s after school director in January said “oh, we just do a couple shows like Bluey when we come in from outside” which I’m like sure I love Bluey, and then I picked her up yesterday and there were a handful of kids sitting on a table watching cat videos on YouTube of varying levels of appropriateness (least of which was the comments from one of the older kids watching). But both co-directors were out by then and the younger assistants were in charge, so perhaps the rigor of show choice depends on who is in the room.
Ah well, 8 days of that program left (including today) so that’s not a battle I’m going to fight when as far as she knows, YouTube doesn’t work on our TV.
Fortunately for TK (pre-K in California), and K, the aftercare is staffed by what seems like professionals, so at least the screentime is monitored. For grades 1 - 6, aftercare is outsourced to the YMCA and based on what I’ve seen, i doubt any of the staff is older than 22/23. At least they’re energetic.
This is one of our ongoing considerations with maybe keeping Pipsqueak in private school. We are definitely keeping her in the private TK class next year. Her friends going to public TK will be getting Chromebooks issued in Aug. The preschool she’s at now extends to elementary school and they explicitly have no screens in the classrooms or after school care until 4th grade and then they have curriculum on how to spot false information on the web and using technology appropriately. We are a pretty low techno household so giving my 5 to a laptop seems so far outside our family culture 
Yes! Bring back the family computer room! Lol
I like this phrase lol. Yikes yeah what 5yo needs a laptop. I don’t even have a laptop.
Joining in!
I have teens and am working on how to transition from explicitly limiting their screen time to making sure that they are doing other things and not getting addicted or red pilled or blackmailed or whatever. They are not on social media (AFAIK) but I’m concerned about my 7th grader’s Roblox use and I had to delete an AI character chat that I had accidentally approved.
And then there’s our almost-three-year-old, who is probably right around the 2 hour mark, which is great, except that it is not all little kid programming. She thinks dead people come back like in video games, for instance.
She is fighting nap real hard but fortunately she has gotten the hang of the Yoto and enjoys her time with it after lunch. Actually she figured out how to make it play some kind of radio station that is coming through the baby monitor and it’s actually pretty good music. (More disconcerting: When she plays the card that my mom lovingly recorded for her and then it’s my mom’s voice coming over the monitor!)
This is mostly my approach. I don’t think screentime is bad, it has utility, I just don’t want it to be everything that they do, don’t want it to limit their experiences of life.