Experts advise parents to ditch screentime label and focus on what kid are doing on their devices

Parents overwhelmed by messages telling them they are doing “screentime” wrong should ditch the term and look at what their kids are doing on their screens — not how long they are on them.

Digital parenting experts, speaking in Perth on Thursday, said the term screentime was “unhelpfully vague” and ignored the different ways that digital devices can be used.

They said parents should think about the quality of screentime, which can be used for education, fitness or socialising, rather than just quantity.

Kate Mannell, a research fellow at Deakin University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, said many parents felt they were constantly being told what they were doing wrong — including from self-proclaimed experts online who blame screens for everything from autism to diabetes.

She said the anxiety was such that she had heard from some parents concerned their newborn might glance at their phone while they were sending a text.

“Parents are mostly being told that they’re doing things wrong and could do better,” she told a digital media symposium hosted by Edith Cowan University and Curtin University.

“The way screentime is talked about and the way parents receive that talk is shaped by that broader context.

“We want to encourage more conversations about nuance.”

Deakin University digital researcher Katrin Langton said the term screentime had been adopted by parents and families but not always in a helpful way.

“Not all screentime is equal,” she said.

“It’s about context and content. And the term screentime, I think, has been adopted by families to talk about their children’s screen use and it’s also been (adopted by kids).

“Maybe in those contexts when you’re trying to figure out how to balance your children’s screen use it might be more helpful to try to move away from using this term ‘screentime’ and trying to be more specific.

“To encourage your children not to ask if they can have more screentime . . . but to say ‘can I use my tablet to (Facetime) Aunty?’, ‘can I . . . watch my favourite show?’”

University of Wollongong’s Sumudu Mallawaarachichi said it was dangerous to think about screentime as “good or bad”.

“The way we talk about screentime, the way we see digital as this one thing where it can be a lot of things in the context of our children’s screen use,” she said.

“If I got a dollar for every time someone asked me in casual context if screentime is good or bad for children I’d be rich . . . we’ve been trained to think about it in a very binary way.

“It really needs to be thought of it in the context of so many other things. We need to go beyond the binary thinking.”