‘No Screen Time’ Is a Parenting Fantasy. 4 Exceptions We Make

There are few people more well intentioned, yet delusional, than the parents-to-be who vow not to let their kids have any screen time. I know because I was (and occasionally still am) that parent. 

It’s easy to get sucked into an idealistic fantasy of what raising kids is like when you’re lounging on the couch stroking your pregnant belly and thinking about your perfect little angel baby who’s about to make his appearance. But sticking with it while carrying your screaming toddler in a football hold across a crowded restaurant as you glance back longingly at your half-eaten dinner takes an entirely different level of commitment.

As delusional as I was about kids and screen time, I wasn’t entirely to blame. There’s some serious parent shaming happening on both sides of the debate — and a lot of conflicting information about the “right” approach. When our first son was born, the recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics was to hold off on all screen time (TV, tablets or phones) until the child turned 2. It has since lowered the age to 18 months in its latest guidelines, as long as the screen time is “high quality content” and that an adult is “standing by to co-view,” which somewhat defeats the purpose. What consists of high quality content, anyways? 

The World Health Organization isn’t much clearer, suggesting that kids under 2 should avoid screens altogether and have “as little screen time as possible” until they turn 5, which again is highly subjective. What may be “possible” for one family may be completely different from another. Parents are then left to interpret all the gray areas on their own and navigate screen time as it fits their individual circumstances, which is exactly what we did.

Seven years, three kids and one pandemic into this whole parenting journey, we’re much less naive (and extreme) about screen time use. We still err on the stricter side when it comes to setting limits, but we’ve built in some wiggle room as our family grows. Here are four instances where we make an exception.

For our two older ones (7 and 4), we use Kinzoo’s Together, a family video calling app that lets you read books, play games or do activities with the other person while you’re on the call. The $7 monthly subscription gives you unlimited call time and access to its entire library of content. 

This is the one app they have free rein to use whenever grandparents are available (and for as long as the grandparents will tolerate losing yet another game of Battleship to a 4-year-old). The one caveat is that the success of the session is highly dependent on the tech savviness of the grandparent and has on occasion been known to cause more frustration than connection in our household if someone’s forgotten to update the app. 

Mattel-owned Caribu is another app with a similar concept that we used a lot when the kids were younger. Its $10 monthly subscription includes content from Sesame Street, Thomas the Train, Hot Wheels and Barbie.

A free pass on flights 

Everyone talks about crying babies on planes, but it’s traveling with toddlers that’s the real nightmare. No amount of training can prepare you for the energy and patience required to entertain two very active boys inside of a packed airplane for 5 hours while also dealing with your own fear of flying. 

They’d go through my entire bag of activities and snacks within the first hour, and I’d spend the remainder of the flight desperately trying to keep them from crawling on other passengers or bolting down the aisle. As soon as my kids were old enough to sit through a movie, my travel experience was completely transformed. For a brief moment in time, I got a taste of what it was like to travel in complete silence again: Just me staring at my children stare at a screen for the entire duration of the flight. Zero remorse. 

I now have a 1-year-old who won’t sit still again, but at least this time I’m only dealing with one child instead of two. As a rule of thumb, I always pack a set of audio splitters so they can both listen simultaneously on our one iPad and double check that I can view the content on airplane mode before I leave the house. I had to learn the hard way that just because the movie looks like it’s finished downloading doesn’t mean it’s ready to play outside of your Wi-Fi network. 

Road trips don’t fall under this exception, as our whining tolerance is exponentially higher when we don’t have to worry about other passengers. 

Relaxing the rules on weekends

Once our middle son turned 3, we also began to relax the rules during weekends. He and his older brother get to watch about 2 hours of TV time, or one movie per day. 

This is meant to be a shared experience with at least one parent watching beside them, but if we’ve had a particularly miserable night of being up with their baby sister, we reserve the right to use the allotted 2 hours to sneak in a nap in the middle of the day.

Our streaming app of choice at the moment is Disney Plus, mostly because of Bluey, but also because they’re finally old enough to watch a lot of the classics that I loved when I was a kid. Side note, Disney movies hit differently as an adult; what’s the deal with them killing off the parents in all of their films?

Before Disney, our go-to streaming service was PBS kids, which has great content for younger kids including some of our favorites like Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger and Wild Kratz. 

Haircuts

In case you haven’t noticed from the bowl cuts in the photo, I cut my kids’ hair myself. It’s a little tradition we kept going from COVID-19 times that’ll make for fantastic yearbook photos (or bribing material) when they’re older. I’m still debating whether my daughter will get the matching bowl cut as well once it comes time to cut her hair too. After four years of doing this, you’d think I would have gotten better and faster at cutting their hair, but it still takes me about an hour per kid. They have A LOT of hair, and I’m scared to use clippers. 

The only way I can get them to sit still for that long while hacking away at their hair is with a screen in front of them. This is the one time they get free rein of the iPad without having to share it with their brother, so they end up either playing with the Marvel Lego app or watching the National Geographic Kids Channel on YouTube. 

My biggest takeaway about setting screen time rules is that they have to be adaptable. This year, I’ve had to add school-related screen time to the mix, as my second grader now has a Chromebook that he uses in class for math and reading programs. He’s gotten hooked on one of the math games and has been asking to continue playing it at home. Whether this type of screen time will become another one of our exceptions remains to be seen.

Rather than trying to navigate yet another gray area on my own, I’ve decided to include him in the decision process. At 7, he’s becoming old enough to understand that screen time, while fun, can be hard to stop and that too much of it can take him away from doing other things he loves. He may end up with more screen time than I bargained for, but he may also learn a bit about setting his own boundaries, something his tech-loving mom is still struggling with herself.