Ask the expert: It’s time to rethink screen time

Concerns surrounding young people’s screen time are widespread. Countries around the world are starting to ban social media for users under the age of 16 — Australia being the first in December 2025. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 states have passed laws banning or restricting cellphones in K-12 classrooms; in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued a formal advisory on social media and children’s and adolescents’ mental health.

These concerns and policies are part of a national and international conversation around how young people spend time on screens and the relationship between screen time and their overall health and development.

Gabriel E. Hales is a recent doctoral graduate and research fellow in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences. He works closely with faculty in the MSU Quello Center, which focuses on helping people better understand how technology, media and public policies affect individuals, communities and society. Hales’ studies focus specifically on the relationships between students’ academic achievement/social networks and their access, use and skill sets related to digital technologies.

Here, Hales provides insight into adolescent digital media use and its influence on social, emotional and academic outcomes.

As technology and screen usage became more widespread, what were the initial professional recommendations for screen time?

Wide adoption of digital media and the internet broadened the range of experiences young people could have online. At the same time, the digital age introduced newfound uncertainties. As with the advent of radio, comic books and arcades, adults now worry about how children might interact with or be affected by internet use.

In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended in 1999 that parents and caregivers keep children under 2 away from screens. In the decades since, professional guidance has largely treated children’s media use as a behavior to be mitigated.

Policies introduced by the academy in 2013 and 2016 continued to advise that school-age kids and adolescents — those ages 5 to 18 — be restricted to no more than two hours of “entertainment” screen time a day. The goal was to curb risks associated with heavy media use, among them disrupted sleep, online safety, cyberbullying and physical inactivity.

What do current guidelines recommend for children and adolescents’ media use?

In January 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics retired its decade-old framework that had largely organized its advice around hourly screen limits. The new policy statement on children, adolescents and digital media diverges from this blanket approach. Instead, it suggests parents consider the larger picture in which this media use exists rather than lumping all screen use together.

The academy still advises that parents avoid screen media for children younger than 18 months. This recommendation is largely because extended use by children by themselves can be problematic for many young children, crowding out important developmental milestones.

Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend that when children under 24 months use screens, they should be limited to content and devices that encourage children and caregivers to interact. For ages 2 to 5, screen time — including TV and interactive apps on devices — may be extended to more solo use, provided its high-quality digital media designed around learning goals in mathematics and reading. But recreational use should be limited to roughly an hour per day.

For school-age children and teens, the newest guidance has begun to step away from fixed screen time limits and asks families to weigh online activity in the context of everyday life.

Doing so recognizes that a child’s digital experiences are shaped by diverse factors rather than the hours spent online. Current guidelines call on caregivers to distinguish among types of media, from television and social media to video games and interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots. They also call for considering a child’s individual characteristics, such as their interests and personality, family members’ own use of screens, and the type of content children are spending time on.

How can different types of screen use affect children’s development?

Moving beyond strict screen time limits includes questioning the kind of digital activities kids and adolescents participate in. Do the activities encourage time spent interacting with others online, which can help young people develop important skills and competencies?

Scrolling an algorithm-based, auto-playing video feed likely does not equate to the same opportunities as videochatting with friends, creating digital art or working with teammates in a multiplayer game. Research suggests these different uses relate to development in different ways and can help kids develop varying skill sets pertaining to everyday life and schooling.

Indeed, a large review of current research found that young people who take part in a range of digital activities, such as browsing the web, online gaming or interacting on social media, show positive associations with social connection, face-to-face interactions, identity exploration, civic participation and learning. Further, time spent among these same “online leisure” activities relates to the development of key digital skills. These online skills both aid in navigating and utilizing digital technologies, and predict improved academic performance, for example, on standardized reading, writing, and math tests.

Why do you believe strict screen time limits are no longer effective for children and adolescents?

Originally created for young people’s engagement with stationary media that tend to be confined to one room or context — for example, watching television — these hourly limits became outdated with the integration of smartphones and other digital devices into everyday life. Compared with watching television, online media was far more difficult to track and define and more nuanced in its use.

Developmentally beneficial activities such as education, socializing and leisure have come to rely on the internet to extend and maintain face-to-face connections. Remote schooling and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this digitization of daily life.

In my view, adopting strict time limits and restrictions could pose risks to children’s well-being, autonomy and development, for example, by harming adolescent self-esteem.

As concerns about youth screen time continue to grow, what is the most effective approach to helping children use technology in healthy ways?

The current evidence suggests parents and caregivers are best positioned to be digital instructors. Cutting children off altogether can carry its own risks for social and emotional development. Caregiver mediation of children’s screen time can produce widely different outcomes and effects, depending on whether the guidance is supportive or controlling.

Considering your own digital media use is the first step: Are family members engaging in problematic or heavy media use that children in the household might emulate? What applications and uses are most common in the family, and what positive or negative effects might they have, depending on the child’s age? How could these digital activities be safely integrated with other everyday experiences to increase their benefits for children? Conversely, what online time might be better spent on face-to-face experiences?

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Plan tool turns these ideas into concrete questions. For example, it recommends working out what each child needs from digital technology, what activities screens might be crowding out, and where their family or household can build in screen-free time. The recommendation is to talk with each child about why they are drawn to apps or online activities, what they encounter while browsing and what might be lost when kids bring phones to gatherings such as mealtimes.

As digital media continues to evolve, what should parents focus on instead of simply counting minutes of screen time?

The debate over young people’s screen time is not going away. But the most up-to-date guidelines, and the growing body of research behind them, make a strong case for a more holistic approach. The guidelines treat digital media as a complex, diverse and evolving environment that children need to learn to navigate. The risks and rewards depend, as with any developmental setting, on the child, the content and what online time might be crowding out.

Answers are excerpts from an article originally published in The Conversation.