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.