We've been asking the wrong questions about kids and screen time

Forty years ago, screen time wasn’t hard to define. Most families had one television with three channels, and if you were lucky enough to own an Atari, you couldn’t play it when the news was on.

In a world of mobile devices, immersive digital spaces, and interactive social media, Michigan Medicine’s Jenny Radesky, M.D., says it’s time to move the conversation beyond screen time.

“The nature of technology has changed. Now, you have devices that move from room to room, devices that themselves are pinging for kids’ attention, devices that are psychologically interacting with you based on your own mental shortcuts about what you’re attracted to and what makes you upset and what you’re likely to click on and pay attention to,” says Radesky, who is the David G. Dickinson Collegiate Professor of Pediatrics. “That’s a reason why the way we talk about it and parent around it hasn’t fully caught up.”

Radesky and her colleagues at Michigan Medicine and across the university study how technology use affects young children, teens, and their relationships with their parents and caregivers. As the digital world evolves faster and faster, caregivers feel faced with endless decisions to make and often a pile of judgment to go with them. Radesky advocates for a nuanced approach that reframes how Americans think about families’ choices, focuses on reforming underlying systems, and reimagines the way we talk about kids and technology —and what we expect the technology industry to do for kids.

Jump to:
9 tips for helping kids manage digital media
Advice from young people
How do kids understand digital privacy?

Who should be responsible for kids’ media use?

Guilt is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about families and tech, Radesky says. When caregivers hear about research linking tech use to negative outcomes for kids or see new media guidelines, they tend to put the burden of change on themselves.

But the goal of her research isn’t finding someone to blame: It’s understanding how technology affects children’s and parents’ minds and behaviors, giving everyone — not just parents — more tools to make decisions. 

Radesky and Alison Miller, Ph.D., professor of health behavior and health education at the U-M School of Public Health, recently worked together on a National Institutes of Health–funded study that mapped young children’s media use and emotional regulation over six months. Any parent will tell you the two are interconnected, Miller says, but the study allowed researchers a unique opportunity to peel apart cause and effect.

Their results found that kids whose parents reported giving them mobile devices to soothe them more often had worse emotional regulation skills at later ages — suggesting the technology was replacing opportunities for kids to learn those critical skills. At the same time, kids with more emotional reactivity were more likely to be given mobile devices to calm down, which suggests a self-reinforcing cycle.

Radesky wants caregivers to feel empowered, not blamed, by results like these. As a pediatrician, she can encourage parents to use their knowledge of their child’s temperament to feel competent choosing when and where to use technology.

However, she and Miller emphasize that parental responsibility is far from the only factor influencing how kids use technology.

Miller also studies parent stress and the ways social determinants of health — such as poverty, racism, unemployment, and community violence — overlay individual family decisions.

“Big social, contextual factors, like poverty, really place a huge burden on parents who are trying to do their best,” Miller says. “And so what I don’t want to do is come along and say, ‘You should never give your child media.’”

Some families have less power to make choices about technology or have more pressing problems that shape their choices, Miller says.

“Caregivers living in historically disadvantaged or marginalized communities are often working inconsistent, late, unpredictable hours that are not optimal for child development. There is really poor child care availability. Media is one of the best options that a lot of families have,” she says. “Depending on what they’re doing online, I would argue it’s better to have your child watch media for eight hours than be outside in a dangerous neighborhood and face gun violence.”

The pandemic exacerbated such stressors for many families, while upending kids’ routines, limiting their social contact with peers, and intensifying their relationships with media. Yet overall, our culture tends to send the message that parents are solely responsible for kids’ media use, no matter what other situations they face, Radesky says.

“In the U.S. and other Western societies, we often have this individualistic culture that assumes that behaviors are primarily shaped by individual-level decision making, or autonomy, or responsibility,” Radesky says. “We don’t pay as much attention to the community-level and structural forces that line up whether we even have the opportunity to make a decision, or whether it’s easy to make that decision, or whether we’re even given a framework and a language to think in a logical way, rather than an emotional way, about making a decision.”

She believes a shift in culture is possible. For example, Americans now tend to think of smoking cigarettes as a structural issue, recognizing the addictive chemicals in tobacco and the tobacco industry’s role in making them even more addictive.

The first step to reframing the conversation around technology use is for caregivers and the people who give them advice to resist the individualistic view, Radesky says.

As co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, Radesky is helping to develop a messaging framework to help pediatricians have productive and reflective conversations with parents and other caregivers about media use.

The framework that the Center of Excellence is currently using to train pediatric and mental health clinicians acknowledges how addressing media use is intertwined with addressing factors like child care access, parent mental health, and school resources.

The AAP’s 2020 Digital Advertising to Children policy statement seeks to encourage a similar change in how parents view their role in managing children’s digital literacy. Radesky, who is chair of the AAP Council on Communications and Media that writes those guidelines, says the group intentionally spread out the responsibility.

“We really shifted to saying, ‘Yes, there are some things we want parents to do. But the responsibility here is primarily in policymakers and tech companies, and industry changing the system so it works better,” she says.

How can tech companies do more to help kids?

Imagine a preschooler watching a kid influencer zooming through his mansion in his cool new toy car. At the end of the video, of course, there’s a link to buy that car.

“It might be funny and entertaining at times, but it’s so filled with marketing and commercialization and persuasion that it’s not really a fair fight against a 3-year-old who’s watching it and can’t identify any of those things,” Radesky says.

Parents and the public don’t often think about the multitude of deliberate design decisions companies make to keep kids watching, clicking, sharing, and buying, she says. Features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and in-app purchases aren’t accidents.

Some researchers call features intended to prolong kids’ engagement “addictive design” or “dark patterns,” but Radesky prefers to keep the language focused on the tech companies, not the users. She leans toward phrases like “manipulative design” or terms kids might understand, like “tricky” or “sticky” design.

Radesky’s research has identified common “sticky” elements, such as using pressure from favorite characters, digital candy and money, or other virtual rewards to suck kids in. She and Miller have also examined the content of popular children’s apps, discovering that many apps marketed as educational are instead packed with ads or intended to collect data.

“We can say to parents, ‘You can give yourself a break, because we know that it’s really hard to tell what’s a good app and what’s not. It’s not your fault,’” Miller says. “This is a confusing space that is designed to be confusing.”

This knowledge leads to another critical step in changing the kids-and-tech conversation: Consumers and policymakers should advocate for technology that’s designed in children’s best interest, instead of designed to maximize profit, Radesky says.

As with shifting to a less-individualistic cultural view, it’s not an impossible thing to imagine.

“If you look at any of the media producers, like PBS KIDS or Sesame Street, who’ve been doing this for decades, they tell a great story, they try to teach something, they have positive role models, they don’t collect data,” she says. “That’s child-centered design.”

Radesky says she believes that companies can still make money by designing products that create good experiences for kids without manipulating them or collecting data from them. The same applies to advertising.

“I don’t think we should get rid of advertisements,” she says. “I think it’s the way an advertisement is delivered. If it’s delivered kind of surreptitiously, disguised as a present, when actually it’s an ad — as in some of the kids’ apps we’ve analyzed — then that’s one thing where it’s crossing the line.”

A shift toward human-centered design in general would benefit adults, too, Radesky says. She’s interviewed parents about their phone use for a forthcoming study, and many subjects have expressed frustration with benefitting from and enjoying using some apps, but feeling stuck in a loop, sucked in, or constantly exposed to sales pitches and toxic information in others.

Some tech companies are moving in the human-centered direction, Radesky says, in large part due to pressure from European regulators who have passed laws about privacy and age-appropriate design. There is also consumer pressure as users develop awareness of how apps and algorithms manipulate them. Policymakers could still address data privacy in more depth, she says. And tech companies could use research like hers and Miller’s to make their products better for kids.

“There could be more focused work on how children in different developmental stages use their products and what they would want out of it,” she says. “And if tech companies are already doing this research about how kids and teens are using their products, we need more transparency about what they are finding.”

What can kids tell us about digital media?

Teens’ average daily time on screens increased during the pandemic, including their time on social media. A group of researchers led by Jane Harness, D.O., assistant professor of psychiatry, set out to learn more about how teens and young adults think about social media by asking them directly.

Through U-M’s text message-based MyVoice survey in 2021, the team asked youth ages 14 to 24 about the advice they’d give to other young people and actions they’ve taken to change their social media use (see “Advice from young people”).

“From a physician or provider standpoint, we don’t even know as much as they do about these apps,” says Harness. “It’s important to understand their perspective, and I’m glad that we were able to ask anonymously so that they could be really candid.”

Teens may fear having their devices taken away if they talk about their media use with their doctor and parents, she says. The MyVoice results can help physicians better understand teens’ concerns and the benefits they get from social media, giving them a starting point for helping caregivers and kids establish shared goals around media use.

Radesky encourages families to focus on kids’ specific experiences using technology, rather than using blanket terms like “social media” and “screen time.”

“It’s an important first step for families to have a language about their tech use at home that’s more descriptive,” Radesky says. “It’s less full of value judgments or morality, and more just about, ‘What do you do online? What were you messing around with? What were you creating? What did you see that was toxic or wrong? What did you see that was inspirational or really funny?’”

Such language can foster open-minded, pragmatic conversations in which kids feel better sharing their concerns, parents can better understand their kids’ perspectives, and both parties can reflect on the stickiness and trickiness embedded in tech. 

But the conversation has to be bigger and broader than individual families, too. 

In addition to providing conversation starters for children and parents, experts from the Center of Excellence will be collaborating with schools and offering training to pediatricians, therapists, educators, and others to help them understand the science and find ways to more effectively support kids and families. They’re also reviewing the existing research, looking for gaps and new questions that need to be answered.

Through this many-layered approach, Radesky and her fellow researchers hope to shift the narrative away from the old model of “screen time” — and toward positive solutions that embrace everyone’s shared responsibility for creating a better digital world for kids.

9 tips for helping kids manage digital media

Parents, grandparents, teachers, pediatricians — any adult who cares for kids — can help guide their technology use. Here’s some expert advice:

• Have open, non-judgmental conversations about technology.
• Use language that acknowledges their perspective: Rather than, “You binge-watched that show,” try “You watched longer than you planned to.”
• Encourage them to recognize the ways technology is designed to suck them in.
• Recognize the positives of technology and social media, especially for kids who may not have safe spaces in the non-digital world to express themselves.
• Let kids know you are available to talk to them about negative experiences online, no matter how embarrassing or frustrating.
• When possible, co-view or preview media. Ask questions and check in when kids are using something new.
• It’s OK not to jump into things like getting a phone or social media account, but explain your thinking and let kids share their perspective, so they feel heard and understood.
• Model the actions you’d like to see. For example, say aloud, “I don’t even know why I picked this up — I’m going to put my phone down now.”
• Give yourself a break. You don’t have to do this all on your own. The Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Common Sense Media all have online resources to help.

Advice from young people

U-M experts asked youth ages 14-24 for their perspectives on social media through the MyVoice text message survey. Below are some of the respondents' advice for young people who are new to social media. Note:  The responses have been lightly edited for spelling and grammar.

“Don’t believe everything you read, and remember you are looking only at people’s highlights, not real life.”

“A lot of things on social media are fake, and sometimes it’s the things you want to believe are true, so never take its information as fact.”

“Don’t place your self-worth on it or assume that others’ posts are accurate to their lives.”

“Social media is a fantastic tool to keep in touch with people and learn about and participate in communities of your interest. Make sure it’s not a substitute for being with people, or actually participating in your interests.”

“Think before posting. Don’t post something future you would regret.”

“Don’t feel pressured to post like everyone else, it’s YOUR page, so post what you feel.”

“Just do not use social media. It does not make you happier; it does not make you closer to your friends; it just distracts you from your friendships.”