School holidays are right around the corner, ushering in promises of pick up football games, hikes in the park, and hot summer nights cooled down with pastel coloured mouthfuls of ais kacang. But amidst the excitement and relaxation lies a challenge many parents dread – unstructured time for kids. Camps, sports teams, playdates, and clubs demand meticulous planning, coordination, and often hefty budgets.

What’s a parent to fall back on when Zoom calls are looming, dinner needs cooking, and kids start complaining of boredom in a tone that suggests it’s a fatal illness rather than a passing state of unrest? Most of the time the answer is the same – screen time. Screen time is easy, it’s free, and it’s effective. Kids of all ages are content for hours. But studies increasingly show that time on screens is hurting our kids development, socialisation, and mental health.

I’m not going to tell you that screen time is bad. Far from it. It’s essential to how each of us interact in today’s society. Rather, it’s how we approach screen time that makes the difference between families staying in control of their devices versus devices taking control of families.

Make Sure Devices Age Appropriate

Phones, iPads, and tablets were not designed for children. The internet was not designed for children. These are adult tools made to be used in an adult environment. Too often parents who wouldn’t dream of letting their child walk alone to the corner store, hand an adult device over to a child without a second thought.

As a first line of defence, you should set up the built-in parental controls on your devices. They can help you limit kids’ access to inappropriate content, help you manage screen time, and provide you with insights into your child’s online behaviour. While they can be tricky to set up and kids have a knack of breaking out of them, they’re free and provide a solid starting point. Later you can consider third-party parental control apps for added guidance.

Think about Screen Time like you Think about Dinner

Now that you’ve got a safe device, think about the content you want your kids to consume. A healthy dinner is balanced and nutritious, and that’s what you want to achieve with kids’ screen time. It can be a mix of fun games and videos along with higher cognition learning activities.

Just as you wouldn’t serve kids their dessert before their mains, encourage kids to engage with learning apps before diving into activities that trigger dopamine spikes. By prioritising learning apps and websites, kids are introduced to delayed gratification. This helps them develop resilience and avoids dopamine feedback loops.

So Many Apps, So Little Time

When selecting online learning activities, opt for interactive apps that adapt to your child’s skill level and have user friendly interfaces that aren’t overstimulating or offer instantaneous rewards. With more than 500,000 apps classified as “educational,” it’s impossible for a parent to vet them all. Websites like Common Sense Media and Carrots&Cake offer recommendations for kid-friendly apps and websites that help get those synapses firing!

Getting Started

Start the holidays on the right foot. Determine what your child’s screen time limits will be. For older kids, one to two hours is a good rule of thumb that most experts agree on. For kids six and under, try to keep it to one hour. Let your kids know those limits ahead of time so you’ve set their expectations. Create a pre-screen-time checklist of tasks, such as getting dressed, making the bed, and reading, to discourage kids from hopping on their tablet the moment they wake up.

Get familiar with the apps and websites you’d like your kids to visit. Kids might want to skip reading and math apps during the holidays, but learning doesn’t stop there! Start off by checking out sites like these that offer craft ideas, science projects, or get kids moving. And give kids time to flex their independence. Allow them to get on the games and apps they like most. Screen time doesn’t have to be a one-sided transaction. Making it a collaborative process builds a relationship of trust with your child.

If it all feels too daunting, there are apps that can make your life easier. Carrots&Cake can guide you through each of the steps that build healthy screen habits in kids, from setting boundaries, blocking inappropriate content, and curating a personalised list of learning activities.

After that, you can hand over a device guilt free knowing that you’ve elevated screen time to be intentional, interactive, and enriching for your child.

About the Author

Meredith DePaolo is a TV journalist, screenwriter, and co-founder of Carrots&Cake, a parental control app focused on fostering positive screen time habits in kids.