MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

Limiting screen time for your kid? It’s harder than it looks

CHICAGO >> It is Saturday morning, and 10-year-old Henry Hailey is up at the crack of dawn. Still in PJs, his microphone-equipped headphones glowing blue in the dim basement, he fixates on the popular online game “Fortnite” on a large screen.

“What?! Right as I was about to finish it, I died,” he calls out disappointedly to his friend Gus, a fellow fifth-grader playing the game from his home just a few blocks away. “Dude, I should NOT have died.”

The digital battles resume, and Henry’s enthusiasm never wanes. Would he play all day if his parents let him? “Probably,” he concedes with a slight grin.

But they do not. Like many other parents, the Haileys are on a reinvigorated mission to limit screen time for Henry and his 15-year-old brother, Everett. For some parents, it feels like an exercise in futility. They are busy, overwhelmed and tired of the fight against increasingly omnipresent screens.

Getting Henry off screens has been a constant battle, his parents say. “Then once he’s off, there’s a lot of complaining and grumpiness for a while as we try to coax him to do something else,” says his mom, Barb Hailey. “He’s upset. Mom is a crank. What is it all for?”

The goal, experts say, should be to help kids learn to manage their own time as they get older and to stay physically active and socially connected as much offline as on. But parents in many American households are finding the power struggles — tantrums, withdrawal and, in some cases, even school and discipline problems — difficult,

AP PHOTO/MARTHA IRVINE Barb Hailey, left, checks her phone while her husband, Allen Hailey watches TV in their Chicago home. Like a lot of parents, they use their phones for work and fun, something their boys like to point out when they try to limit the boys’ screen time.

AP PHOTO/MARTHA IRVINE Henry Hailey, 10, plays the online Fortnite game in the early morning hours in the basement of his Chicago home. His parents are on a quest to limit screen time for him and his brother. The boys say they understand sometimes, but also complain that they get less screen time than their friends.