I thought I had a pretty good handle on my kids' screen time. An hour here, maybe an hour and a half there. Nothing extreme. We had rules. Screens off at dinner. No phones in bedrooms at night. All good, right?
Then I actually tracked it.
For two weeks, I kept a simple note on my phone. Every time one of my kids picked up a screen — tablet, TV, my phone, the school laptop — I logged the time. Start and end. Nothing fancy. Just a running tally.
The results were uncomfortable. My son, aged nine, averaged four hours and twenty minutes of screen time per day. My daughter, seven, averaged three hours ten. Both were using screens more on weekends, occasionally hitting six or even seven hours on a Sunday when I'd been less attentive.
The World Health Organisation recommends no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for children aged three to four, and suggests that school-age children should have "limits" without specifying exact hours — though most paediatric bodies in the UK and US recommend no more than two hours of recreational screen time daily.
My kids were roughly double that on average days.
What struck me most wasn't the total number — it was where the time came from. I'd assumed TV was the biggest culprit. It wasn't. It was the incidental stuff: five minutes here watching a YouTube clip, fifteen minutes on a drawing app while I made dinner, half an hour on the tablet in the car on the school run. All the times I'd handed over a device for convenience rather than intention.
I don't say this with guilt, exactly. Parenting is hard and screens are useful and sometimes you just need five minutes to think. But I say it because I'd been operating on a completely inaccurate picture of our family's actual habits. And you can't change what you haven't honestly measured.
After the tracking exercise, we made one rule change: no screens as a default filler. If a screen comes out, it has to be for something chosen and time-limited, not just because there's nothing else happening in that moment. It sounds small, but it cut our average by about 40% within a week.
The other thing I started doing — particularly in the evenings — was thinking more carefully about what type of screen use was happening and when. Blue light exposure close to bedtime was something I'd read about but not really acted on. That's changed now too.
Try the two-week tracking exercise. You might surprise yourself.