A growing number of parents are pushing back against too much technology use in schools. But as the advocacy for less screen time in the classroom has ramped up, expert recommendations on screen-time limits have become more nuanced.
Case in point: The American Academy of Pediatrics has moved away from recommending strict time limits on students’ technology use in favor of a new framework, released in February, that focuses on the quality of the TV, video, and online content kids are consuming. One main reason for the change: Policing screen time is a task that is simply too big for parents to take on alone without schools and policies working to support them.
Education Week spoke with Cori Cross, a Los Angeles-based pediatrician who helped develop the new screen-time guidelines, about what educators need to know about the recommendations.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why move away from strict screen-time recommendations?
I don’t know how you use your screen, but I use my screen for almost everything, and as kids get older, it’s the same thing. You have a question, that’s where you go. If you want to know the weather, that’s what you’re using. If you want to talk to grandma, you’re probably not even just calling her anymore, you’re FaceTiming her. You are [taking] your notes for school on screens, you are communicating with your teacher on screens.
The two-hour limit [from previous AAP guidelines] doesn’t take into account that really almost every action that an adult and a teenager does involves screens at this point.
It would be impossible to have a parent figure out which part of screens is entertainment and which part of screens is communication or normal daily living.
So, what most parents end up doing is throwing their hands up and just saying, “well, I’m never going to be able to do this right, so I’m not even going to try.”
What is a ‘digital ecosystem,’ and why use that term in your new recommendations?
This is just saying, things in an ecosystem work together: some for good, some for bad. There’s opportunity costs in an ecosystem.
We used to have apps that were just for viewing. And then we had apps that were for interacting. And then you’re not just watching a YouTube video. Now, you can be on Discord and can watch somebody doing something and communicate with other people in real time about what you’re watching. The lines are blurred, right?
That’s what that term connotates, that there’s this interconnectedness and everything’s not staying in its box anymore.
Is there such a thing as good or bad media?
I was thinking about this and talking to my own daughter about it because she was writing a paper on it. What I was telling her was, think of screens or social media almost as a swimming pool. Swimming pools are great. You can have a lot of fun in swimming pools. You can also die.
We don’t put kids into a swimming pool without first giving them some guidelines, like teaching them how to swim. They have to be a certain age to be in the deep section. We understand the risks there, and I think that we have to understand the same risks when we talk about media and devices that aren’t inherently bad, it’s just that they need to be used in a way that’s appropriate for the person using them.
If you want to continue with the pool analogy [for] society or app developers: We make sure the kids can get to the edge, we make sure we have places for them to stand, ways for them to get out. We build that in because we know [swimming] is an inherently risky thing, so we make sure that we’re addressing that in the development, in the building of a pool.
What we’ve done now is apps [are] not developed for children.
How should schools approach screen time?
I don’t mind schools using videos. I think that they’re actually a nice adjunct to teaching. Kids learn in different ways.
To that extent, though, schools need to understand, particularly in the elementary school ages, when they send stuff home that has to be done on a screen, that a lot of these kids don’t have the type of monitoring that they have in school. Somebody’s not standing there while they’re doing their homework.
I feel like it’s been normalized that [educators] expect kids to be accessible 24/7.
What is the role of schools in supporting healthy screen habits at home?
There are a lot of things that schools can do. Personally, and this is not an AAP policy, I like the no-personal-devices-in-schools [policies]. It helps kids to look up when they’re in the hallway during their free time, during their lunch, to communicate face-to-face, to work on the nonverbal cues that they seem to not necessarily be developing, and to help them get outside of their heads. Because even when they’re sitting with their friends, if they’re all looking at their screens, they’re not communicating in the same way.
Schools [should understand] that parents need to have some agency in how they allow screen use in their own homes. So, thinking about homework and what they’re assigning at home, that’s important for schools to do.
A lot of schools have a digital education curriculum, and that helps kids. That can be something that can be extended to parents as well. Common Sense media has some. The AAP has a family media plan that parents can go on and work through what they want to do in their own homes.
