Earned access
Screens after homework, chores, and reasonable behaviour.
Screen time is the household currency: earned by the things that need doing, removed when things go wrong. It is easily the commonest approach in practice and the least often defended in print, which is a gap rather than a verdict. It works, in the sense that it reliably moves behaviour, and the thing it teaches about screens is that they are the most valuable thing in the house.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- A clear, stable list of what earns what, or it becomes a daily negotiation
- Willingness to follow through on removal when that will ruin the evening
- Accepting that contingency makes a thing more desirable, which is the mechanism working against you
How it gets misread
Rarely stated as a philosophy, so it is usually met as a default rather than chosen. It is a coherent position and it has a cost, and naming it is the point of putting it in this list.
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: Digital Media and Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
What to read
Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes — Ofcom
How common this actually is, against how rarely it is written about.
Punished by Rewards — Alfie Kohn
Not about screens, and the best argument against this approach.
Compared with
Sources for this row
Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes
Ofcom, annual. Used only for how common each practice actually is — which feeds the question-selection prior and nothing a parent sees.
Digital Media and Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Jenny Radesky et al. Used for the finding that what is on the screen and who is beside it predict more than how many minutes it ran, which is the empirical case for the content-curated and co-viewing rows.