> Most kids don't know how to self-regulate screen time.

I think that's the center of the problem. In the current times online media and mobile apps are designed to maximize the participant's screen time by being as addictive as possible.

Even grown-ups face problems self-regulating with regards to an "adversary" that invests huge resources in getting our eye-balls (and data and ad views).

Restricting screen-time becomes more and more difficult the more kids grow up, I do not think that this is a very scalable solution.

I think it's more important that kids are made aware and learn how to deal with this "adversary". Make them aware how the TV (or smartphone) "catches" them when they actually had planned to do other things. Make it a game to find out, together with your kid, how a device can have this kind of control over a person. Kids are curious, they will want to know about mechanisms and incentitives of the system and I think this can be explained even with the vocabulary of a 6 year-old.

Humans are very adaptable, maybe kids growing up in our current environment will just acquire skills that the older generation does not have and has difficulties to imagine.

The most sophisticated adtech in the world doesn't hold a candle to the engagement/addictive power of user-curated sites like HN and Reddit.

Or 4chan

The problem with this "no more than N hours a day" is that

- For parents it is hard to implement N hours/day on long term basis ( parents may be able to do for a week or month)

- The parental control tools are too narrow in scope, good ones cost $10/month

- on top of all this, you do not know what they are doing in those N hours/day , using 50% time for FB/Snap etc..

- It is ironic in this day and age of ML/Deeplearning software and open source github thousands of projects, we do not have a open source Parental control that really works.

- The solution is to build an Open source Parental control on Iphone/Android/Mac/PC in an integrated way to enforce N hours/week screen time and smart enough to account all non-school work related screen time across devices.

- To have a small regulation( to force device manufacturers ) stating above mentioned kind of "high quality" open source Integrated Parental control software pre-installed on all devices .

> Most kids don't know how to self-regulate screen time. Saying "no screen time" for an arbitrarily large amount of time seems anathema to growing up today, but saying "no more than N hours a day" (where N depends on age and kid and what the kid does for the time) seems quite reasonable.

I've got kids in upper primary school now, and trying to think through all this carefully.

Our current rule is that you can have an hour of screen time for every hour of reading, music practice, etc, and after certain chores are done. Plus the screen time has to be at an appropriate time - for instance first thing in the morning and last thing at night are no-gos. They're currently on a ban until the end of the week because they went significantly over, but that's only happened twice in the year we've been doing this.

I'm thinking through what our approach to phones will be... at this stage I'm going with them getting phones for the start of high school and pondering what guidelines we'll use.

Here's my anecdote. My parents tried to limit video games (but not tv, they weren't very rational) to some amount of hours a day. Only result was that I hated it, it made me resent them at the time, and I'd do what I could to get around it. I don't think I'm an iota better off for it. They'd try to pull the same nonsense with the computer too which ended up being what got me a successful career. It was detrimental if anything and made me not respect them because I could tell all along it was unsubstantiated BS that somehow video games and computers were "bad" for you. I highly recommend just letting them sort out what they want to do with their time. A restriction of a half hour before bed maybe, to not disrupt sleep, fine, but what does the morning have to do with anything?

We have a morning restriction on school days because it's nigh on impossible to get the kids to school if they start playing games! (We also have an evening restriction so doesn't interfere with bedtime or disrupt sleep but are otherwise easy-going. Still not sure if we are doing the right thing or not)

As a kid I hated chores and rewards that were focused on time because it didn't encourage me to use my time well - it was all about manipulating the clock ("if I actually master the piano piece in 30 minutes I won't get my hour of TV so better not master it").

I think your thinking is right, but I'd instead focus on goals and rewards that are tied to discrete actions in the activity rather than just time. E.g. master the piece => one WoW raid or something. That worked marvelously on me as a kid and is actually something I still do for myself (although not with WoW thankfully).

I'm not a parent, so I'm sure this is quite hard to do in practice. But I'm sure your kids themselves may have good ideas! (I loved making my own rewards as a kid lol.) Food for thought.

Good points. But personally, I wouldn't use software to enforce any rules. (I would have felt extremely patronized by such software at any age.)

But I may add some tech to see if the rules are being followed. I think that problem may be more tractable tech-wise. And (at least if I were the kid) it would be a lot less insufferable since it would give the kid the freedom to "break" the rule when he/she legitimately wanted/needed to and enables a conversation rather than serving as a dictator of policy.

I'm not a parent so I can't really comment on how easy it is, but I think if you're automating it you may be losing out on a key parenting moment and that's enforcement and inviting conversation about the rule and why it matters.

(Personally I remember many of the occasions where I broke a rule and then got "the talk" about why the rule was important - quite valuable in retrospect. If there had just been a software-enforcer I likely would have rebelled and/or tried to find a workaround.)

Max n hours a day is significantly easier then unlimited time. Mostly because they can't regulate themselves which basically means that they act out when playing you much. It is not just that parent would dislike abstract idea of kid playing etc too mu ch, it is largely behavior the kid displays when it is playing too much.

You don't need high quality expensive software either. There are sufficient free ones.

I don't like to generalize it into the term "screen-time". There are so many things you could do there. It's like if you would limit "desk time", no matter if they are doing homework, crafting or fixing something, doing some puzzle,...

In my view there are four main categories, of screentime.

* Research

* Passive entertainment (watching videos, playing "pointless" games)

* Active entertainment (playing "real" games where you need to make decisions and other skills)

* Socializing (Messengers, Facebook, ...)

Point 2 is probably the most toxic for people. Since you waste lots of time, lose other hobbies and probably get deeply influenced by the things you watch.

Point 3 might be the next on the list, since you might get stressed from constantly socializing... All that matters is raising your "social" status, and you start neglecting other things in your life.