Are you a parent with a child or adolescent who spends more time on screens than you think is healthy? Do you worry about the potential harms of too much time spent online? Would you like your child to be on their phone or other devices less often but you aren’t sure how to set limits without causing too much resistance?

With the recently-implemented social media ban in Australia – which prevents users under 16 from accessing several major social media sites – many children and young teens are likely spending less time online and/or their online habits have changed. However, all forms of excessive screentime can be detrimental to children’s development.

Children can miss out on valuable opportunities, learn unhealthy habits, and potentially develop mental health conditions like anxiety and depression if they spend too much time on screens. High levels of screentime are correlated with and cause many negative outcomes for people of all ages, but with their developing brains and emerging sense of self, children and adolescents are especially vulnerable and the impacts are greater.

Most parents instinctively understand that too much time spent on screens isn’t healthy, yet they can struggle with setting boundaries for how much their children are allowed to use devices and/or be online. Getting your child to spend less time using devices can be challenging while letting them have screentime is easy. You may even feel powerless to intervene and/or wonder if trying is worth the effort.

But by understanding what makes high levels of screentime potentially harmful, you can feel more capable of setting healthy limits, encouraging meaningful alternatives, and enabling your child to have a rich and rewarding life.

The consequences of too much screentime

What are the costs of too much screentime? Are there healthy ways that children and adolescents can use devices? What is the best approach to devices in the lives of your children?

Terms like screens and devices, especially in the context of childhood development, typically refers to smartphones, tablets, computers, gaming consoles, and television.

Children have had access to television for generations and computers with internet access have been found in most Australian homes for several decades as well, and there have always been concerns about children spending too much time on them. Yet they have rarely been considered as problematic as present-day smartphone usage often is.

The average Australian teenager spends over 50 hours per week on screens. This has come at a cost to their mental health, capabilities, and hope for the future: since the widespread adoption of smartphones, mental health conditions have risen exponentially in adolescents while feelings of satisfaction and hope have fallen.

Social media users are even more likely to experience adverse effects. Social media encourages unhealthy behaviour and damaging ways of thinking about yourself and others. Speaking in black and white, being shallow, judging, and showing off are all commonplace and rewarded while being presented on platforms that are designed to be highly addictive.

But screentime and being online isn’t inherently harmful; you can relax, learn, develop skills, discover new ideas, explore interests, meet people and more. Digital spaces and devices are very relevant to contemporary life and society.

Letting children and teens use screens excessively and without limitations is likely to be harmful, but banning screens altogether would be impractical for many families while denying children the opportunity to explore interests and develop their own ability to regulate screen-usage. This is why it’s important for parents to discover the best balance to strike between controlling their children’s screentime and giving them freedom to make their own decisions.

By understanding how screentime can harm children and what makes certain types of online platforms so problematic, you can feel more prepared to make informed decisions, encourage behaviours that are aimed to offset the costs, set appropriate restrictions, and encourage your child to spend their time wisely.

The most common and impactful outcomes of excessive and unhealthy device use include the following:

Being exposed to information they aren’t ready for

Almost all parents understand there is a great deal of content online that is inappropriate for children, but they can still be unable to protect their children from information that has the potential to harm them.

This type of information doesn’t only include adult content: anxious children can become fearful by reading too much about climate change for example, so material that is technically age-appropriate could still have adverse outcomes.

Even platforms that are marketed as being designed to be child-friendly can contain content that isn’t age-appropriate – such as YouTube Kids, which is exempt from Australia’s ban – so parents can never be certain that they’re protecting their children from sites that could be distressing for them.

It’s very difficult for parents to fully monitor what content their children take in online, and especially for adolescents, the level of surveillance that would be required could easily be considered overstepping. But if children and teens’ time online is limited and they’re taught to develop skills that can help offset the dangers, they can be less likely to be negatively impacted by their screentime.

Much online content promotes a negative mentality

Humans are naturally drawn to negative and upsetting information. Almost anyone will look more closely at a car crash than a group of buskers; if shown a picture of a crowd, people will spend more time looking at angry expressions than happy or neutral faces.

Many of the most popular online platforms, especially social media, exploit this innate tendency by promoting upsetting and/or extremist content that is likely to make users feel angry, inadequate, sad, and/or scared as this is more likely to keep users on the website and engage through commenting, which makes the platforms more profitable.

The more negative, extremist, and polarised content you take in, the more likely you are to have an outlook that reflects the nature of the content you consume. Spending a great deal of time online can even make you believe that the world is more dangerous, angry, shallow, judgemental, etc. than it actually is. People, especially children, are happier and healthier when they feel safe enough to explore and discover the world around them, so believing the world is frightening can be very limiting.  

Unhealthy social comparison is encouraged

Social comparison refers to comparing yourself to others and determining if you measure up. Social comparison is found throughout the internet – and offline as well – but it features the most heavily in social media since these platforms are based on sharing your life and/or inner thoughts for the world to judge.

Comparison isn’t inherently harmful and can even be positive if it’s inspirational. But very little of the comparison that takes place via social media is healthy. Few people share anything other than curated insights into the highlights of their lives, while many of the most popular accounts belong to influencers who have the budget and technological resources to make themselves appear flawless, both in appearance and their lifestyle.

Even if you logically understand the heavy editing that most social media involves, it’s largely impossible not to compare yourself to what you see online, which often leaves people feeling unsuccessful, inadequate, ugly, and disappointed with themselves. You also become less capable of measuring your happiness by your standards and values and can instead feel that you should have a life more like the ones you see online.

Comparison is inevitable, but when it’s done offline, it’s more likely to be with your peers and you can see beyond what is considered worthy of posting, unlike what is shared online.

Screens interfere with the ability to focus

Always having a way to entertain yourself interferes with developing a long attention span and the ability to focus.

Attention spans are naturally short in young children and, ideally, they grow as the child gets older. Having a longer attention span is skill that is built through pushing yourself to stay engaged when your attention begins to wander.

But so much of online entertainment undermines the development of attention spans. Most platforms feature fast and flashy content designed to grab your attention while always providing you with the option to switch to something else the moment you start to feel uninterested. And because few people are ever without their phones, these distractions are always available.

Adults who are heavy smartphone users also report having decreased attention-spans, but children are more vulnerable. The ability to focus can be acquired later in life, but this is usually more challenging than doing so as a child.

Devices are designed to be addictive

Many online platforms, especially social media, aps, and video games, are purposefully designed to be as engaging and addictive as possible through triggering frequent releases of the reward hormone dopamine which the brain innately craves.

This makes addictive platforms difficult to break away from, especially for children whose brains are developing; the neural pathways for rewards become reliant on the quick and easy dopamine hits devices provide and they lack the internal tools like self-control and long-term thinking that adults could use to moderate their use.

Furthermore, dopamine receptors become more resistant to the same amount over time so heavy device users require more and more to dopamine have the same effects while being numbed to joy from real-life experiences that otherwise could have been rewarding.

Children and adolescents who spend a great deal of their times on screens are likely to experience opportunity costs as well.

Opportunity costs are what you miss out on whenever you make a decision to do something – meeting up with a friend comes at the cost of having time to relax; choosing to study after graduating means missing out on working, etc.

Experiencing opportunity costs is unavoidable because no matter what you’re doing, there’s always the possibility that there is something more rewarding and enriching you could do instead. But some ways of spending your time, especially in high quantities, are unquestionably lost opportunities for something better. Because there are so many developmental opportunities for children and adolescents, their opportunity costs are typically higher than those experienced by adults.

The most common and impactful opportunity costs include:

Missing out on learning social skills and building relationships

High levels of screentime limits children’s opportunities and ability to develop meaningful friendships.

When children are using their phones, they aren’t interacting with each other. Even if they’re chatting with friends online, they aren’t building social skills such as the ability to read and respond to body language and tone, recognising non-verbal cues, or reacting to each other in real-time.

People can find peers with similar, sometimes niche, interests online, which can be valuable, but these relationships rarely become meaningful without any real-time interactions such as facetime calls.

Communicating through messaging can be appealing because it makes conversations feel easier by giving you distance from potentially uncomfortable emotions and not requiring you to respond right away. Instead of needing to scramble for a potentially difficult answer, you can carefully curate the best possible reply. But these types of interactions don’t have the shared vulnerability and emotional investment of in-person conversations. Without them, relationships can lack the significance that makes them meaningful and prevents friends from fully trusting each other.

Digital interactions also prevent children and adolescents from developing conflict resolution skills. Because online communication doesn’t take place in person and very little of it occurs in real-time, the potentially difficult process of resolving conflicts can be avoided much more easily.

But the ability to resolve conflicts is central to healthy relationships. Having conflict resolution skills can give people the confidence to disagree, speak up when they feel mistreated, bargain for better conditions, and much more, in a way that’s less likely to cause fights and friction. Without these skills, they can feel that advocating for themselves isn’t worth the risk, and/or even minor disagreements can escalate into damaging fights.  

Because of the missed opportunities to communicate and develop social skills, children can feel uncomfortable interacting with their peers and further isolate themselves. This can have many adverse outcomes because without friends to help them grow and discover while providing insulation from many of the challenges children inevitably face, they can feel alone, unsafe, and unable to explore the world, which makes growing up much more difficult.

Online experiences don’t build self-worth

Self-worth means believing you have valuable skills and personality traits that make you pleasant to be around for at least some people. You know what you’re good at – as well as acknowledging your weaknesses – and take pride in these. When you have an experience that doesn’t go well, you will likely be upset, but because you’re aware of your positive qualities you can return to thinking kindly of yourself relatively quickly.

Some people derive their worth from their accomplishments and/or receiving validation from others. But this isn’t self-worth or a secure way to regulate how you feel about yourself because you can’t always be successful or rely on others to make you feel accomplished so you don’t have control over your ability to feel valuable and lovable.

But If children spend the majority of their time online away from the challenges of the real world, they can’t have the types of experiences that enable growth. Mistakes made online either have no consequences or few opportunities to learn from the experience. And many platforms, especially social media, reduce your value to the number of likes and followers you have.

In order to develop secure self-worth and confidence, you must take risks and challenge yourself to try things you aren’t certain you can do; you make mistakes, try again, and eventually succeed and feel proud for having grown. You can then feel capable of taking on greater challenges and more comfortable with the possibility of failing so your level of confidence and comfort zone expands.

Not building a sense of self

Spending too much time online can cause people to have a weakly-formed sense of self.

A sense of self means that you know who you are, what you like, your aspirations, your values, which experiences have shaped you, your opinions, and much more. Developing a sense of self requires the opportunity to reflect on experiences and the information you take in to determine how it impacted you, the lessons to learn, if you agree, etc.

Because the online world is so fast-paced and there are always plenty of people sharing their opinion, you can easily accept other people’s views rather than taking the time to reflect and investigate different positions to form your own.

This is a risk for children and adolescents because their sense of self is still being formed. Without opportunities to make their own opinions, they can fail to develop their sense of self because there are so many people online speaking with conviction about how they should think and feel. They can believe it’s normal to get their perspectives online and not appreciate the importance of weighing up the value and applicability of the information they take in. And if their peers also echo what they find online, coming to their own conclusions can seem unnecessary.

Opportunity costs in childhood are higher than those experienced by adults because this is the best time to learn many important skills and develop personalities. Children are often much freer than adults to experiment to discover who they are, the best ways of treating others, what’s important to them, and how they want to navigate the world because there are typically much lower expectations and fewer consequences for mistakes than they will experience at any other time in their lives.

But if the majority of their free time is spent on screens, they aren’t learning or practicing social skills and practical abilities while they, ideally, have supportive adults nearby to guide them.

This is why childhood should be protected from the multitude of ways that too much screentime – and especially being an active social media user – can harm children.

Parents of children who are already heavy screen-users can feel that it’s too late to break their children’s habits, which could even be addictions. And those with children too young to be online already can worry that the pull of devices is too strong and there isn’t a way for their child to have a ‘normal’ life without the majority of it being spent online.

But habits can be broken and replaced with better ones, and there are alternatives to childhoods characterised by screentime.

Enforcing the rules and creating the conditions to enable this healthier childhood is possible, especially if you appreciate what you’re protecting your child from and what you can offer them instead.

Healthy approaches to screentime for your child

How can parents get their children to reduce their screentime without too much struggling? What are the best alternatives? Are there healthy ways for children to be online?

The idea of getting your child to reduce their time online could seem intimidating. Depending on your child and how habitual their use is, getting them to change could be very difficult. Because they’re rewarding by design, devices will remain appealing, but your whole family – adults and children – can discover how much more enriching real-world experiences are.

Before beginning to make any changes, it’s best to consider what you want to achieve and make a plan for how you can do this.

• How much or how little screen time do you think is healthy and acceptable for your child?
• Which devices, if any, will you allow them to use?
• When and where should devices not be allowed?
• What circumstances, if any, will permit different screen times – will school holidays have different rules, for example?
• Is there anything online that you don’t want your child to be exposed to?
• What beliefs and values do you want to pass on?
• How could your family spend time, both alone and together, in ways you would be proud of?

The answers to these questions and others will depend on your child’s personality and your family’s priorities. You might not have a problem with your child watching quite a bit of TV, especially if they prefer educational content and there are favourite shows everyone watches together. You could have a child whose mental health is being impacted by video games so you ban them entirely.

Once you’ve made your plan, share it with your children and explain why you feel these limitations are necessary. Although your child likely won’t be convinced, it can help to have explanations prepared. No amount of fact-based justifications will likely be enough, but being able to explain, especially to older children, why the rules are changing can help them accept the new conditions.

It’s often helpful and reduces friction if you can negotiate. Know what you’re unwilling to compromise on, but if you can make concessions and allow your child to have some input in the rules, they could be more willing to follow them.

For the vast majority of families, it’s important that you lead by example. Asking your child to reduce their screentime to a healthy amount if you’re not doing the same can create a great deal of resistance. And adults can enjoy the same benefits as children by spending less time on devices.

Getting your child to spend less time on devices can be easier if you’re able to provide readily-available and appealing alternatives. This doesn’t mean taking responsibility for filling all of your child’s free time with sports, clubs, crafts, and other organised activities so they rely on you instead of a device for entertainment as this would also prevent them from developing many of the skills that high amounts screentime interferes with.

Think about – as well as ask your child to discover – what they’re interested in, their favourite ways to spend their time, what they’re curious about, and anything new they would like to try. You could even create a dedicated space for these activities, such as their own desk where devices aren’t allowed.

However, it isn’t necessary – or even advisable – for children to exchange much of their time on devices for personal development and education. With their developing brains and emerging sense of self, almost any time spent on activities that aren’t passive is beneficial.

It’s also valuable to give your child responsibilities. Almost everyone innately wants to feel useful and that they matter. Giving your child chores meets these needs while also teaching them consideration for others, duty, and doing something even though they dislike it because it’s important.

The tasks you give your child responsibility for should be important – not ‘busywork’ that doesn’t matter as this would defeat the purpose. You might not think that your child is capable of doing their own laundry, making a family meal, caring for a younger sibling, etc. Your child also might not think that they’re capable of this. But if you give them the opportunity to challenge themselves – and assistance if they need it – you can both learn that they can accomplish much more than either of you thought. This is one of the best ways to build confidence and make children crave similar rewarding and pride-inducing experiences that can’t be replicated online.

However, it’s also crucial for healthy growth and development that children are given the opportunity for ‘free play’. This refers to unstructured time with other children where there aren’t adults to guide or moderate their games.

Free play enables children to develop and practice many highly useful social skills: negotiating their games, compromising so everyone wants to participate, gauging whether others are interested in their ideas, figuring out how to keep everyone interested, speaking up when they don’t like something, resolving conflicts when they arise, and more.

When children play independently they learn a great deal about themselves as well: if they prefer to lead or follow, what they’re unwilling to make compromises on, how they expect to be treated in disagreements, and other important insights they wouldn’t have gained in guided play, and especially online.

To encourage free play and growth, it may be necessary to give your child more freedom than they currently have. Not much is as appealing to a child as more freedom and independence.

Although granting more freedoms might make you uncomfortable, if you always wait until you’re sure your child is ready, you’ll likely miss opportunities to let them do new activities during the period when they’re interested. For example, if a nine-year-old asks to be able to play alone outside but their parents say no until the child is thirteen, once the child is given permission to go and play, they’re likely not interested anymore and prefer to stay inside.

Additionally, it’s inevitable that your child will spend time online and be exposed to false information and extremist beliefs, so it’s valuable for you to teach your child critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves analysing, questioning, evaluating, and judging information from a fact-based perspective.

Ask your child about what they learn – on and offline – and how it makes them feel, if they agree with or believe all of it, if there could be different explanations or perspectives, how they would feel if they were being described that way, how common they think these beliefs are, etc.

Building the habit of questioning what they take in online, as well as in real life, and the ability to do this effectively is very valuable. Questioning content can also help make their time online less passive while giving them confidence in their ability to think for themselves.

When you give your child the opportunity to have real-world experiences that build their confidence and help them realise how much they’re capable of, you’re enabling them to live life curious and wanting to discover instead of being afraid.

Children who are fearful are less capable of taking in new information, they’re subconsciously hyper-vigilant for threats (which makes it difficult for them to focus or lose themselves in tasks), and they feel that they must be protected to be safe. While these sentiments can be useful for some ages in certain situations, in a growing number of children they never fully disappear and are almost always present, leading to young adults who don’t feel capable of taking care of themselves without help.

But if your child feels that they can go out and explore, even though they’ll have challenges and setbacks, they can grow up to feel increasingly capable, curious, resilient, and confident. This is a much more fulfilling way to live, but it’s a mentality that’s difficult to cultivate with excessive screentime and few meaningful real-world experiences.

While screentime will likely always remain alluring for your child – and yourself as well – when you know the best ways for children and adolescents to spend their time you can help your child become a capable adult with a healthy and moderated approach to the role of devices in their lives.

Time online only offers the illusion of fulfilment. To truly develop and flourish, children need real world relationships and experiences.

When children and adolescents spend an excessive amount of time on screens, particularly social media, they can become oblivious to the world around them while developing unhealthy beliefs and behaviour patterns.

Devices themselves aren’t harmful, so by creating an environment where your family uses them sparingly and spends time offline in meaningful ways, you can prevent and undo much of the damage that high levels of screentime can cause.

If you work with your child to help them develop a healthy relationship with screens and being online, you can create the conditions that give them the best chance of growing up into happy healthy adults.

It’s very unlikely that any child will grow up and when they reflect on their childhood wish that they had spent more time scrolling.