Time budget
A fixed number of minutes a day. What they spend it on is theirs.
One number, applied daily, and inside it the child chooses. The trade is deliberate: you give up control of content in exchange for a limit that needs no judgement, no negotiation and no daily re-litigation. It is the easiest approach to run consistently and the one most likely to be undermined by the fact that twenty minutes of a maths game and twenty minutes of autoplay are not the same twenty minutes.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- Holding the number on the evening when an extra ten minutes would buy you peace
- Accepting that a timer cannot tell the difference between two very different hours
- A timer, a rule about who starts it, and an answer for what happens mid-episode
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: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Parenting for a Digital Future
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
What to read
Parenting for a Digital Future — Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross
Where this approach sits among the others, and why it is the commonest by a distance.
The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use — Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski
Read this if the number is the thing you are managing. It is the best evidence on whether the number matters.
Compared with
Sources for this row
Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
American Academy of Pediatrics policy statements, Pediatrics 138(5), 2016. The source of the age-based limits the guideline-led row follows — and, since the 2016 revision, notably less numeric than the version most parents remember.
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.
Parenting for a Digital Future
Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross, Oxford University Press, 2020. The ethnography behind the "what screens are for" axis: families sort into embracing, balancing and resisting, largely by what they hope the future looks like.