How can you manage your kids’ screen time in a way that’s good for them — but still gives you the time and focus you need for your own work and sanity?
I’ve spent years wrestling with this question, which has a renewed sense of urgency now that so many of us are working from home at least part of the time. I’ve spoken with many working parents about this juggling act in the past year, since publishing Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are.
And I’ve seen many parents make the same discovery we did, when we first started working from home (and homeschooling at the same time): Kids’ screen time can be an extraordinarily useful resource in carving out a little more freedom in your day, as well as a great asset to learning and creativity. It’s also a crucial part of kids learning to work with the very tools that they’ll need to know if they eventually want to join the hybrid workforce, too.
How do screen time struggles affect our experience of hybrid work? That’s the subject of the latest Thrive at Work newsletter. Read (and subscribe) here.
But screen time can also be your greatest adversary as a remote-working parent — if screen struggles lead to meltdowns, behavioral issues and conflicts that are exhausting and destabilizing for the whole household.
That’s the struggle we’ve had in our own household, and it’s led me to reconsider, revise and update a lot of the tech parenting strategies and parental controls I have written about over the years. In the past year, this shift has produced great results: Where we used to have constant conflicts over screen time, and an autistic kid who was gaming 70 or 80 hours each week, our home has entered a period of unprecedented calm — and our son now spends something like 60 or 70 hours a week reading (yes, still on screen), and only 5 or 10 hours a week gaming.
That shift is only partly the result of a change in how we manage devices and screen rules — but our revised approach to screen time was a foundational element of the behavior plan that has led to a year of breakthroughs, a dramatically happier and healthier kid, and a much calmer family life. So I want to distill what we figured out through this process, in order to offer other families some principles, parenting tactics, screen rules and parental control tips that could transform the way screen time affects your kids, too.
If you’re just looking for the nuts and bolts of implementing parental controls — including a whole bunch of tech tricks I’ve figured out over the years — then feel free to skip ahead to the parental controls section, which is the longest part of this post. But I must note that if I could do it all over again, I’d spend less time figuring out all this parental controls stuff, and more time asserting (and backing up) my parental authority. This brings me to first principles.
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