Practices

The studies tying childhood screen hours to later attention problems are correlational. They cannot tell you which way the arrow points, and there is a very ordinary reading where it points the other way.

The child who cannot settle is the child most likely to be put in front of a screen so that dinner gets cooked. A parent who is scattered themselves…

If the screen limit in your house is only your preference, every evening turns into a negotiation about your preference. Borrowing a published figure, roughly two hours a day of leisure screen time for a child over two, moves the argument off you.

The carve-outs matter as much as the number. A video call with a grandparent is a conversation, and a laptop open for homework is schoolwork, so…

Fast cuts, saturated colour, constant motion, a level that ticks over just as you were about to stop. Screens are not accidentally gripping for a distractible brain, and preferring them says something about how you are wired rather than about what has gone wrong with you.

There is a second use for knowing this. If those features are what holds attention, they are also the features worth stealing for the things that…

For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.

Talking through a headset takes out most of what makes conversation hard: no eye contact to hold, no faces to read in real time, no silence to fill.…