Screen quality, not screen time

The question families ask most about screens is numerical: how many minutes a day? It is understandable but does not guide much on its own. Thirty minutes of a documentary watched and discussed with an adult is not the same as thirty minutes of autoplaying clips. Duration is a measure; quality is the variable.

Three questions

First: what? Does the content move slowly or fast, is the story followable, can the child track the narrative? Content that changes scene every second tires a young child's attention system and leaves little behind.

Second: with whom? A screen with an adult beside it becomes a conversation. “Look, why do you think he was sad?” lifts it out of passive viewing. A screen watched alone mostly just passes time.

Third: when? Screens before bed make the transition to sleep harder; screens at meals interfere with learning hunger and fullness cues. Where the screen sits in the day matters more than how long it lasts.

• Keep the hour before bed screen-free.
• No screens at the table — the child's or the adult's.
• Talk about it afterwards: “which part did you like best?”
• Turn off autoplay; let the child decide, not the feed.

And there is the adult screen, rarely discussed. A child talking to an adult who is looking at a phone eventually stops trying. The biggest competitor to conversational turns is not the child's screen but the parent's.

The aim is not to demonise screens but to move them out of the centre of life. If a child's day holds talk, movement and some boredom, a reasonable amount of screen time is not the problem.