Life Kit - How parents can be screentime role models

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

There's a lot of talk about how to monitor screentime for kids. But for kids to have healthy relationships with technology and smartphones, parents need to model good habits. Life Kit reporter Andee Tagle talks with experts and offers practical tips so parents can set the tone for positive technology use that benefits the whole family.Take our survey at npr.org/lifekitsurveyFollow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekitLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Mariel. Before we start the episode, I want to thank you for listening to Life Kit. And to ask you a favor. We'd love to know what you think about the podcast. Help us out. Tell us what you like and how we can improve by completing a short anonymous survey at npr.org slash LifeKit Survey.

We'll also have a link in our episode description. And thank you. When I was a kid, we had one of those big, chunky Macintosh computers in my parents' room. I was drawn to it, like a moth to a flame. I remember printing this picture of a black and white clip art-style panda on that white printer paper with the hole punches in the side and thinking, what sorcery is this? Now, the tech kept changing. We eventually got a newer computer and dial-up internet. I'd spend hours on AOL instant messenger cultivating my away messages and gabbing with classmates. In high school, I got a cell phone, and then we got the Wi-Fi so my parents could actually use their landline at the same time as we were surfing the web.

Then came Facebook and eventually smartphones, though by that point I was like 22. All this new technology, it sucked me in, completely captured my attention. And my parents and other parents at the time had to figure out what that meant and how to keep us safe. from child predators in chat rooms and from our own budding addictions to the stuff. These days, take that experience and crank up the dial by a million. Kids are growing up with smartphones in hand.

Even if they don't have one themselves, their friends will. And at the age I was marveling at that clip art panda, they're scrolling on TikTok, eyes glued to a constantly refreshing stream of content that is designed to keep them hooked. Parents have always been trying to keep their kids safe around new technology. but it feels harder now. And recent data shows there is reason for concern here.

Gene Twenge is a researcher and author of the book 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech world. There's all the toxicity online. Body image issues, the competition for likes and followers. We know that the more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely it is he or she will be depressed. There's so many mechanisms where these devices just steal our time steal our kids' time, and our blockers.

They're experienced blockers of so many other things that they should be doing, whether that's sleep or getting together with friends in person or exercise or reading. The thing is, keeping your kids safe and mentally healthy around screens is not as simple as setting rules and expecting them to follow. Your kids are emotionally affected by how you use your phone. Like when they're talking to you and you get a notification, or you want to check something. So you say, oh, hang on a sec. When you're talking to someone and you take that phone out,

the message the other person is getting is you're not as important as what's on this phone. And that's not the message you want to send. And it's usually not even what you're thinking. But that's the message that comes across. Also, if you've got bad screen time habits, your kid is probably going to pick them up. Life Kit reporter Andy Tagle has been covering this topic.

and the experts she talked to agree that we need more regulation and we need changes from social media companies more safely built systems that don't constantly bait us and our kids into coming back for likes but until that happens it's on us as the adults in our households

to set rules and to set the tone on this episode of Life Kit I talk with Andy about how parents can model good screen time habits for their kids so the whole family can have a safer, healthier relationship with screens. You'll need consider as a family how your devices are impacting you all, your sleep, your life, the way you

relate to each other, and you as the parent will need to make changes too. That's coming up after the break. So, Andy, I feel like there are lots of things that adults do that kids are not allowed to do, you know, driving, drinking alcohol, etc. And when it comes to tech, you can imagine an adult saying, well, you're a kid, so you have to follow these rules. and I don't. But that said, what impact does a parent's tech use have on their kids? Parents tech use is the biggest indicator of a child's relationship with their tech. More than setting rules, more than, you know, how much a kid uses a laptop at school, what a parent does with their own devices, a parent's attitudes towards their own tech is going to indicate how a kid is going to use their technology, whether or not they're going to have a positive relationship. with their devices. Another thing that's really important is how you treat your kids when you're using your tech. So if the parent is always looking at their phone while their kid is talking

to them, for instance, or looking at their phone while they're also watching TV, then the kid is going to start doing that too. Right. Just like with anything else, with a lot of other things in parenting, it's monkeys see monkey do. If you're screen obsessed, if you're social media obsessed, it makes it a lot more likely that your kid is going to do the same thing. And then another really common thing is how you treat your kids when you're using your tech. So there's this thing called fubbing you might have heard of. It's phone snubbing, which is ignoring someone in a social setting, paying attention to your phone instead. Yeah, I mean, what does it do to young kids when they're looking for their parents' attention or affection and what they see is their parents' face

glued to the phone? Yeah, there's been a lot of interesting research on this for young kids, for school age children and also for teens and tweens. So specifically for preschool age kids like five and under, research found that the technology used in a child's presence was associated with poor cognition, reduced pro-social behavior, lower levels of attachment, and higher levels of screen time. Although I should note, the effects for this meta study were small. For kids a little bit older, so that five to 12 range, there's something called the stillface phenomenon. Have you heard of this? That's when the parent goes like dead-eyed when they're looking at their phone and so their kid doesn't know if anybody's home. It's like the lights are

on, but nobody's home. Exactly. So what this one study found was that more parental phone time has been associated with less emotional intelligence in kids. And it's because when parents are doing that endless scroll, kids will be reaching out. They'll be like, hey, mom, watch me do this thing. Dad, let me show you this trick. And parents just have that like dead eye expressionless face. You know, they're not responding to their kid. And frequent exposure to that can impact a child's development of emotional skills. And then when we're talking about teens and tweens, there was a study from this year that showed that the more parents use their phones around their kids, the more likely those

kids are to experience anger and sadness and give up on seeking a parent's attention. So lower levels of emotional regulation in those tweens and teens. So put all together, it doesn't paint a very pretty picture, but that said, you don't have to be alarmed. I talked to a professor from the University of Michigan, her name is Sarita Schoenbeck, and she said that all of this panic can be a bit overblown. Like, yes, you want to be a conscious user and consumer of your technology, but also don't forget about all the good and helpful uses technology has in our day-to-day lives.

You know, it brings families closer together through FaceTime. It allows parents the opportunity to work remotely. It provides access to education, to follow new interests, and find community. So the big takeaway here, tech in the home, not all good, not all bad. Parents just need to practice discernment, set limits for themselves, model healthy uses of technology if they want their kids to do the same. Okay, so keeping in mind that the way parents use their phones is going to impact their kids, what rules do experts recommend that parents set for themselves?

To give us a good general baseline, I have five questions created by the London School of Economics, and they were created to redefine screen time guidance. They can help you determine whether your young child has a healthy relationship with screen time. This is how you know that they are okay. Are they eating well? Are they sleeping well? Are they getting good grades in school? Are they interacting well with you and your partner, your spouse, the family?

And the last one, how are they interacting with their devices? Like, are they throwing them around? Do they have tantrums, etc.? That was Elizabeth Milovov. She's a law professor based in Europe. She also has a PhD in children's online rights. She says these guidelines were created for kids, but you can see they're really basic. So before you look at your kids, you want to ask you,

yourself these questions too. You know, are you eating well? Are you sleeping right? Have you been throwing any tantrums because your iPad isn't working? You know, so it's not about setting strict limits necessarily. It's just about being mindful of screen context and content, seeing how your technology has been getting in the way of your relationships. And then if you find that it is, that's an indication that you need to step back. Yeah. So step one is to take an honest assessment of your relationship with your technology. Being mindful, of course, that for adults, sometimes technopherence is just going to be inevitable. A lot of us have jobs that are online, that are on computers. So if you have to fub, one helpful thing that you can do is

narrate. So for example, my job is primarily based on the East Coast. I'm West Coast based. And what that means is I often have to take a Zoom call while I'm feeding my son breakfast. So one of the things that I can do, the expert said, is I can let him know what I'm doing. So I can say, you know, mommy's going to be on this call. I'm going to be talking about X, Y, Z thing. You'll see me on the screen, and then as soon as I'm done, we're going to go back to eating breakfast together. Or just explaining, like, I'm not ignoring you on purpose. You know, there's a set goal with a set end time, and then I'll be back to our conversation just as soon as I can. You can also do this when you're talking to your kid or anyone else for that matter. And you want to look something

up that you're having a conversation about. You know, like, when is your next softball game again? Okay, hang on. I'm going to look that up. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And then a final idea is just counterbalance, you know. We're not always going to be able to give our full attention to our kids. You know, if you have to fub, if you have to be a little more change to your tech than you want to be at certain times, try to make it up to them when you can. Let them know, hey, I got to be on this call. I have to be in this meeting. When you get home from school today, I'm going to take you out for a snack.

Let's go to the playground and spend an extra 30 minutes, whatever it is. So we have some guidelines for parents in their own tech use. And then I imagine there are going to be rules or boundaries that are set for the entire family, things that we do as a household with our tech. What did the experts have to say about that? I'd round up there in Bison into two main buckets. The first generally is just less is more. And so an idea here is to have no phone zones or no device zones. There's a couple of different ways you can do that.

A lot of people generally, I think, are on board with the idea of no phones, no devices during meal times, you know, putting a everything away for family dinner. But there's another big one that all of my experts agree on. So here's Jean Twangy again. She's the author of 10 rules for raising kids in a high-tech world. What I say in the book is you can follow only one of the rules that should be this one. No electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. And that's for people of all ages. So a ton of research shows that people do not sleep as well or as long if that those devices are in their bedrooms overnight. So even if it's off, that seems to disrupt sleep. The technology is just too tempting.

Common Sense Media did a study where they actually tracked kids' phones. Six out of 10, 11 to 17-year-olds used their phone between midnight and 5 a.m. on school nights. Isn't that alarming? Six out of 10. Why aren't you sleeping? Because they have their phones in their rooms. I was like, Jean, but like my alarm clock. You know, everybody's alarm clock. And this is actually a pushback that she writes about in her book. And she was like, nope, traditional alarm clock. You can pick out a cute one. There are a lot of different options. You know, get one of those ones that rises with the sun, hard stop, no electronic devices in the bedroom overnight. Okay, but what if there's an emergency and I need to be called in the middle of the night? You can have it to the emergency setting. Have it, you know, put your phone on loud for that emergency setting. Put it right outside your door, but you don't need it right next to your head.

There's a very wide range that she talks about in her book as well. You know, families have timed lockboxes where it will not let you into the thing until a certain hour of the morning. Or, you know, on the lesser side, you can just have a family charging station that's in the living room and everybody charges their devices at night. And in the morning, you can come and collect them. So no laptops, no devices, no iPads, nothing at all overnight. You need your sleep. Absolutely crucial. So that's a good place to start for everybody.

Okay, any other advice that experts had on rules for the whole household? So another idea that I really liked was the idea of anchor points or anchor devices. So both Elizabeth and Jean talked about this. Jean's philosophy for tech use in her home was just using your technology for what it's good for. So, you know, your laptop is your work device. Your phone is your communication device. Maybe your iPad is for research or for art. So just having one set place and one set use for.

each of your devices versus having every single device being for anything and everything all the time. You know, those boundaries can maybe just help you from getting carried away. You should be answering your work emails at your desk during work hours, not in like the wee hours of the morning from your bed. Or when you go to watch a movie in the living room on the TV instead of your phone, for example, hopefully that means the rest of your family wants to join in. And that can maybe bring everybody together just a little bit more. Coming up, we talk about how to set rules for your kids screen time. All right. So we've got rules for the parents. We've got rules for the whole household.

What about rules that would just apply to kids? So the first one is parental controls. You'll want to have them and you want to have them sooner than you think you need them. You want to have parental controls for anything that can connect to the open internet. So that includes like the Wi-Fi router and your Alexa, like any of your assistance and things like that. kids will find workarounds. They can change, say, the time on their phones or the times on the laptops to get around screen limits or they can download calculator vault apps. So it just looks like a calculator on their phone, but actually it's hiding a bunch of social media apps. So the more parental controls you have, the better off you'll be. A lot of the guides online

say that parents should prepare for kids to be exposed to pornography, starting at a really young age, you should talk to your kids early about the things that they might find on the internet. You hope that they won't. You can hope that the parental controls will work, but it's something that might happen. So use the parental controls, but know that they aren't everything, that your kids can still get around them at times. It's not an airtight seal. Exactly. And then when it comes to media viewing, depending on age, you want to make sure to have an open conversation, have an open dialogue. A few quick tips there for different age ranges. Kids six and under, try to limit screen time as much as possible. I know this is tough, but that means

avoiding that digital pacifier as much as you can. Research shows constantly giving your kid a tablet or phone to sue them when they're acting up can lead to difficulty later on with emotional regulation, attention, social skills. When it comes to what to watch, what kind of media to engage with, there's a research back guide that I think could be really helpful for parents and younger kids. It's the E-Ames model. So content is engaging. Kids are actively involved. It feels meaningful, like it includes a learning goal or challenges them to something. And it's social. So ideally you or another family member is watching it with them. One prime example we love at our house, Sesame Street. Shout out to you, Elmo. And then for school age kids, try to still tune

into what your kids are watching. So take an interest not just in their shows, but also their video games, their YouTube videos. Gene said, you can try to encourage longer form content to help their attention spans. And this also is the time to really start to ask questions while watching things. So make your kids aware of things like cyberbullying, targeted ads, and unrealistic body images. Okay, what about setting limits on the amount of time kids spend on their devices? You have to figure out what works for you. There's some research that says parental limits can be positive for kids. Again, less is more. Or if you're more ambitious, You can try to go for entire phone-free periods.

Gene talks about long car rides, entire family vacations. They go without their phones, and they play, you know, 20 questions. They just talk about their lives. That one will probably get a little more pushback from people, but it was closer to the standard when, like, you and I were in high school. Yeah, but my brother had his game boy. Yeah, like I had like a tomogogy. Just trying so hard to keep that thing alive. And never, I'm so sorry to all my little tomogical.

What about smartphones? Like, when do experts recommend that kids get a smartphone? So smartphones in social media, this is where Jean and Elizabeth's opinions diverge. So at the tweens and teens level, parents will start to hear. Everyone in my class has a phone. You know, everyone's on Instagram. I need it. I have to fit in. I have to know what's going on. A smartphone is absolutely necessary in the social status. It's just absolutely necessary. In Elizabeth's opinion, it's important to be involved and open with your kids about these things and to find a comfortable middle ground. She thinks it's important to not put a strict ban or a strict timeline on smartphones and social media because when you do that, it can create a bit of a forbidden fruit effect. Do you make it even more enticing if you talk to the young people themselves who do have some rights, let's not forget about children's rights these days,

And if you are banning them from internet, then, you know, they lose those rights to connection as well because so much of their socialization, they're connecting, they're playing. It's online, whether we like it or not. There's a study that came out last year of 10,000, 12, and 13-year-olds that showed when parents used screen time as a reward or a punishment, it actually led to more problematic screen time use. So I think that it does kind of lend to Elizabeth's opinion, that forbidden fruit idea. And Elizabeth says that rather than have your kid sneak around and potentially get exposed to harmful parts of the internet, things that you don't want them to see, it's better to have an open conversation, have an open relationship with them, give them the tools they need to handle that social media directly and be a good, responsible digital citizen. On the other side of this is Jean, who takes a much harder line. And she says she is all for those conversations. Absolutely, you need responsible digital media use.

But when it comes to smartphones and social media, she says, just talking about it doesn't cut it. How can I expect a 10-year-old or a 14-year-old to be able to put down that phone or close that app? These companies have poured billions into these algorithms to make them as addictive as possible. And even adults who are going to find it very hard to resist the platforms under those circumstances, much less a child or an adolescent. So words don't do a whole lot up against those billions of dollars. That's the problem. So she says no smartphones until you drive a car until you get your license, which is, and you know, it's an interesting opinion and a pretty hard line, according to some other experts. Her thought process there is that you don't really

need one before then. So her kids, they still had phones, but they were like basic call and text, no internet, no social media. And that decision was based on a lot of Gene's own research, as well as research around the globe, that showed a strong link between the rise of social media and smartphone use and rising rates of depression and anxiety in children and teens. Now, if you're thinking about implementing age limits in your own home, one thing that might make this easier is joining together with other parents in your community and agreeing to the same age or grade level limits. That might even look like rallying your school district for something like a no phone policy from bell to bell because they're strength in numbers. And your kid

can't claim social isolation if the whole neighborhood is on board. Right. Now, getting that kind of buy-in is, of course, no small task, but might be worth trying. It sounds like, as with many issues, ultimately, you can get advice from experts, but you have to make the decisions for your own family based on your own values and knowing your kid. Right. Exactly. That's exactly what it comes down to. You know, what's your own personal comfort level? What's the temperament, the disposition of your kid? What can they handle? Whatever happens, Elizabeth says it's important not to give in to panic and anxiety. She says the important thing is to bring it back to the basics of your family and your values. And genes in the same line. She says, you know, all of this stuff is

really tough for parents. That's important to acknowledge. There are a lot of heart. decisions that you have to make and it's hard that it all falls to you but it's important to try not to get overwhelmed you're going to make mistakes your kid might see some things you wish that they wouldn't but if they don't have it on their own phone then you've still done a lot of good they don't have that phone in their bedroom overnight even if they're using it during the day you've done some good if you screwed up and didn't put parental controls in their laptop but then you did it later that's still beneficial i always push back against those arguments of like oh we might as just give up. There's nothing we can do. Jeannie's out of the bottle. No, there's still a lot that

you can do. There's always something you can do. Try your best. Andy Tagle, thank you so much. Thanks, Mariel. All right, time for a recap. Parents, be mindful of how you use your phones and other screens around your kids. Try to avoid fubbing them consistently being on your phone when they're trying to engage with you. And I know this is hard, especially when they're going, mom, mom, mom, Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, every five minutes. But seeing your eyes glued to that phone all the time can have a big impact on them. If you do have to use your phone or your laptop around them, try explaining what you're doing. I have to take this work call, but I'll be done soon, and then I am all yours.

You can also spend phone-free time with them, one-on-one, you know, go to the park, play make-believe, something that brings y'all back to the tactile world. One helpful rule for the whole family is no phones overnight in the bedroom. You can put your phone right outside so you'll hear it in case of an emergency. When it comes to rules specifically for your kids, set parental controls on anything that has access to the internet. But also keep in mind that your kid can find ways around them. For kids under six, do your best to limit screens as much as possible. If they do watch TV or play games, keep the content meaningful and engaging and try to share in the experience with them.

For school-aged kids, remember, they can be exposed to adult content. around this time, and they are probably going to be asking you for a smartphone and for social media access. You don't have to say yes. Also, know that it can help to coordinate with other parents. There are campaigns like Wait Until Eighth, where parents pledged to wait until at least eighth grade before giving their kids a smartphone. And remember, it's hard to be perfect at this, but doing something is better than doing nothing. All right, that's our show. Have you subscribed to the LifeKit newsletter yet? Every Friday, you will get even more expert advice on health, money, and more, all curated by the LifeKit team.

Think of this as a weekly check-in from your friends at LifeKit. Subscribe at npr.org slash LifeKit newsletter. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Garib. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Claire Marie Schneider and Margaret Serrino. Engineering support comes from Stacey Abbott. I'm Mariel Segarra.

Thanks for listening.