Parents struggle to regulate screen time
Ed Baig: Future devices should include comprehensive time limit controls
“Get off the darn phone and do your homework!”
You may have — and perhaps more often than you’d like — found yourself yelling something similar to your kids.
You’re not trying to be a nag. Your only concern is the child’s well-being, especially with mounting evidence that suggests screen addiction is bad, and, in some instances, can lead to depression and other mental health repercussions.
Forty-eight percent of adults surveyed in August 2016 by Harris Poll for the American Psychology Association indicated that regulating their kid’s screen time is a “constant battle” and 58% said they feel like their child is attached to their phone or tablet.
I share their frustration. Each of my kids, ages 11 and 14, is frequently glued to their iPhones, and if not those handsets, then a laptop or tablet.
Parents may want to address screen addiction with technology, but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Apple, which can single-handedly have the most impact thanks to the more than 1 billion iPhones sold, could streamline this.
Apple’s built-in parental controls on the iPhone, found under the Restrictions inside the device settings, can restrict the kind of content your kid sees or engages in. But what’s missing are granular time limit controls a caregiver can use to restrict when and for how long your child is involved in such activities.
Such time limits and other controls are not universally available across other devices either, and even at that may only address part of the problem.
“The patchwork of parental and privacy controls makes it very confusing for parents,” says Shum Preston, national director for advocacy at Common Sense Media, which provides tips on how to deal with their kids and technology.
One imperfect solution my wife and I sometimes enforce in our house is to “pause” the kids’ Wi-Fi using a tool inside our eero network routers. You can set a profile for each family member and assign devices to that profile. You can then shut down the Internet for those devices at mealtime, bedtime or whenever.
But managing the kids’ iPhone usage, which can run off cellular, is trickier.
Since you can’t restrict by time your basic desire to get kids off the phone, it may come down to installing third-party apps, applying parental controls your router may have, locking your child’s phone in a safe or shifting to simple nagging.
What Apple will let you do: prevent youngsters from installing and deleting apps, making in-app purchases and visiting suspect websites. You can also restrict the type of movies, TV shows, books and other content the kids can consume, based on ageappropriate ratings or explicit material.
(To get started, go to Settings, tap General, tap Restrictions, tap Enable Restrictions and type a Restrictions passcode, which you’ll have to enter twice)
As a parent, I’d like to see Apple add comprehensive time limit controls, perhaps as soon as June at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Done right, limits would be baked into the next version of iOS and let caregivers not only select the hours in which a kid could use their phones — and make those determinations remotely and on the fly — but also let grown-ups restrict specific apps and phone functions during designated time periods.
At a given time you maybe let the kids keep the Safari browser open for their studies (not social media) but prevent them from playing games or texting until they’ve completed their homework. Come bedtime you can shut off the device altogether.
You might also reward good behavior and add time to their accounts.
There is some precedent. Amazon offers a version of time limits as part of its FreeTime solution for the company’s Fire tablets, as well as (through an app) Android phones. This week, Amazon also announced FreeTime for Alexa on some of its Echo smart speakers.
Google’s Family Link solution for compatible Android devices lets parents see how much time their kid spends on their favorite apps with weekly or monthly activity reports, and parents can set daily screen time limits for the devices themselves. (The child must be on an Android phone; the parent could be on an Android handset or iPhone.)
Alas, Family Link doesn’t offer the granular time limits I’d like to see Apple adopt.
I’m not naïve. Time limits are not a perfect solution for every kid or parent, and in some cases will only lead to more conflict. (“Just five more minutes, dad, please …”)
Michael Rich, associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, says, “I think we should start thinking about parental involvement instead of parental controls.”
Still, Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and author of iGen: Why Today’s SuperConnected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, says tools would be useful as a way for parents to limit use without taking the phone away entirely.
Twenge and Rich in January joined two large institutional investors, JANA Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System — the organizations collectively owned approximately $2 billion worth of Apple shares — in sending a letter urging Apple to do more.
Apple responded at the time, in part, by saying that “we are constantly looking for ways to make our experiences better. We have new features and enhancements planned for the future, to add functionality and make these tools even more robust.”
Now let’s see them do it.