Context rules
Not how long — where, when, and never at the table.
No time limit at all. Instead, screens are excluded from places and moments: not at meals, not in bedrooms, not in the hour before bed, not in the car on short journeys. The claim is that the damage screens do is mostly displacement — of sleep, of conversation, of going outside — so protecting what they displace is more precise than rationing the screen itself.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- Rules that bind the whole household, visibly, including the adults
- Holding the bedroom rule when every other family has stopped
- Accepting that the total will sometimes look alarming, because you are not counting it
Where it stands
Every position with the source it was read from, and the pale band is how much internal variation the approach genuinely tolerates. A wide band is not vagueness — it means the texts in this family really do disagree with each other about that axis.
Source: The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: The Big Disconnect
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
Source: Family Media Plan
What to read
Family Media Plan — American Academy of Pediatrics
The place-and-time rules, in a form you can fill in.
Annual Research Review: Adolescent Mental Health in the Digital Age — Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen
Why displacement is the mechanism with the most support behind it.
Compared with
Sources for this row
The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use
Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, Nature Human Behaviour 3, 2019. The specification-curve analysis that found the association is real, negative, and about the same size as the association with wearing glasses.
American Academy of Pediatrics. The negotiated-household-contract row is read off this directly, including its insistence that adults are in the plan.
The Big Disconnect
Catherine Steiner-Adair, Harper, 2013. Primary text for the co-viewing and adults-included positions, and an early statement of the technoference argument.