Policymakers and school districts are rushing to ban student cellphone use in schools and even curtail the time kids spend on school-issued devices in the classroom to improve academic performance and social skills.
But one glaring hole remains: the home.
What kids do on screens at home—whether staying up too late and losing sleep or bullying one another on social media—affects how prepared they are to learn when they show up for school the next day.
Educators have little control over what goes on after school hours. But they can help support parents to rein in unhealthy screen time on the evenings and weekends.
Educators must understand that families are trying their best to navigate a digital world that was not built with children and teenagers in mind, said Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union.
“So much of the burden often falls on the shoulders of parents,” she said. “There’s a lot of indictment [of] parents around, ‘How much is your child on a screen?’ Parents actually have a lot of questions about how much screen time our kids are getting in schools.”
Indeed, more parents are turning questions about screen time back to schools. Pushback from some parents against overreliance on laptops, tablets, and other technology in the classroom has many school and district leaders reevaluating their tech policies.
Increasingly, experts say that managing screen time should not solely be the job of parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics has moved toward more flexible guidelines for families, in part, because strict recommendations on screen-time limits put too much onus on families to solve a society-wide problem.
Many parents acknowledge they could do a better job limiting screen time
But what does that actually mean for schools?
Students need to learn healthy digital skills in the classroom, parents need vetted and high-quality resources to help manage screens at home, and school and district leaders need to be mindful of how much they’re requiring kids to use technology after school hours.
Many parents acknowledge they could do a better job managing their kids’ screen time, but they have a lot of competing priorities, said Colleen McClain, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. McClain spoke with Education Week when Pew released a major survey of parents about their kids’ technology use last fall.
“Most parents are prioritizing, on a daily basis, making sure their kids’ screen time is reasonable,” she said. “But far fewer say it’s one of their biggest priorities compared with all the other things they have to juggle. And when it comes down to it, about 4 in 10 parents say they could do better at managing their kids’ screen time.”
Nearly 6 in 10 say they are doing the best they can, the Pew survey of 3,054 parents found.
Making sure kids get enough sleep, show good manners, stay active, and are read to regularly are higher priorities for parents overall. About three-quarters of parents say that ensuring their kids get adequate sleep and show good manners are among their biggest priorities, compared with 42 percent who say the same about screen time.
Parents are also weighing competing priorities when it comes to purchasing smartphones for their children. Overall, Pew found that about a quarter of parents who reported having a child 12 or younger said their child has their own smartphone. Of the parents with an 11- or 12-year-old, 57% say their kid has their own smartphone. For parents who purchased smartphones for their children, nearly all of them list ease of communication as a factor in their decision.
Most parents who don’t allow their children to have smartphones cited concerns over exposure to inappropriate content. Parents with less income were more likely to say their child had their own smartphone compared with middle- and upper-income parents.
Schools can set smart policies on when students take devices home
Curbing screen time and device use is a shared responsibility between educators and parents, said Dan Beck, the principal of Fort Couch Middle School, in Upper St. Clair, Pa.
“We’re all swimming in the same direction,” he said. “The responsibility of administrators is to not have adversarial moments around this topic, but getting people in the same room and actually talking about it.”
To help cultivate that attitude in Upper St. Clair’s high school community, where Beck was the assistant principal up until the end of this past school year, the parent teacher council hosted a book study series on The Anxious Generation, a popular book that puts the blame on social media and overuse of technology for the rising mental health challenges of K-12 students and young adults. The school held sessions during the day and in evenings with students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The exercise provided a neutral entry point into a topic that can be touchy for some people, Beck said.
It was important to get parents and educators together to discuss this problem, he said.
“Parents shared, with vulnerability, the pressure they feel over managing screen time and introducing cellphones to their kids,” Beck said. “I think sometimes that teachers need to hear that. They need to know that parents are trying to figure it out.”
Schools can also help support screen- time limits in their students’ homes by being thoughtful about when they allow students to take home school-issued devices, Beck said. In his district, students in grades K-2 do not take their Chromebooks home, he said.
Managing screen time can become much trickier for families when kids come home with school-issued devices or are required to watch YouTube videos or do homework online.
Lindsay Meisel, a parent of a kindergartner and 3rd grader in San Francisco, appreciates that her kids’ school hasn’t required her oldest child to take home a school-issued device, yet, or use the internet at home to complete homework, which helps her family manage screens as they feel is best in their household. Meisel is pretty strict with screen time, allowing her kids to sometimes watch a TV show on the weekends.
What Meisel wishes her kids’ school would do is help set norms around tech use for their school community. She remembers when the school pushed for parents to pack healthier lunches—and it worked.
“Our principal made an announcement […] we want to try and promote healthy eating at school and it’s a lot harder if one kid gets an apple for snack and someone else gets a Snickers bar,” she said. “And that made my life so much easier.”
Meisel wants the school to do something similar with screen time by sharing widely accepted guidelines and best practices, or hosting events where parents can learn how to set controls on kids’ devices or learn about other tools to help monitor screen time.
Finally, Meisel wants more information—directly from teachers or the principal—on how much her children use technology when they are in their classrooms.
Parents also need clarity on what kind of device use, exactly, they should be managing, said Rodrigues, who’s a mother of five teenage sons.
“I’ve heard the question time and again, ‘What are we supposed to actually count as screen time as parents?’” she said. “When the pediatrician during a wellness check is saying, ‘how much time [is your kid] spending on screens?’ A lot of our kids are spending a good chunk of the school day on a Chromebook.”
Schools and pediatricians should help provide that clarity, say experts, because not all screen time is equal. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics no longer recommends a strict time limit on screen use.
Screen time should not supplant good sleep habits and regular exercise
Generally, experts say that screen time is negative when it’s supplanting something positive in a child’s life, such as if it’s isolating a child or replacing sleep and exercise.
Not all screen time is bad. For example, video calls with a grandparent, watching educational TV with parents, or using social media to learn new skills and develop hobbies are all positive uses.
Parents and educators should also work on modeling healthy screen-time habits for kids, experts say.
At home, Rodrigues uses an app called Bark that helps her manage her sons’ screen time and monitor the content they see on their phones. She also turns off the house Wi-Fi at 10 p.m. every night during the school year, and 11 p.m. during the summer.
Those aren’t really things that schools can do. But Rodrigues says schools do have a role to play in teaching students digital literacy and healthy tech habits. And she is worried that schools will likely focus on this less as they ban cellphones and restrict technology use in classrooms.
For parents who feel like they need to manage their kids’ screen time more, it can be hard to find independent information and high-quality resources , Rodrigues said. She points to the National Parent Teacher Association coming under fire for partnering with, and receiving funding from Meta, the company that owns Instagram and Facebook, to provide resources for parents on developing safe online habits for their families. (The National PTA has since cut ties with Meta.)
“Parents cannot take action on something if you are not equipping them with the information they need to know about how bad the problem is, what the consequence is, and what they need to do about it,” Rodrigues said.
A separate analysis by Pew of online parenting communities found that parents are often seeking guidance on on technology. For example,1 in 5 posts on Reddit’s popular r/Parenting group mentions kids’ technology use.
Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and Common Sense Media provide guides to create family media plans to help parents establish healthy tech habits that are tailored to their needs.
Parents and teachers have some common cause when it comes to technology. Cellphones, and by extension social media and gaming apps, have not just made teachers’ lives more difficult, they have complicated parents’ lives too, according to a 2020 survey by Pew.
“We found that many parents thought parenting had gotten harder over the years and that technology was a major reason for this,” McClain, the researcher at Pew, said. “So, tech is not a new struggle when it comes to parenting. The details may evolve, but this has been a struggle for parents over the years.”
