achieve, although it does require some determination. If you want your child to read for pleasure you have to limit screen time, both to make space and time for reading and to help your child to focus and concentrate on enjoying a good story.
If there are no rules in place to control the amount of screen time, reading for pleasure will definitely suffer because children won’t have the interest, time, patience or attention span to read a book.
I sometimes think the principles of helping your child read for pleasure are like raising a healthy eater – we realise if we want a healthy-eating child we have to supply the good stuff, encourage them to try new things, offer a range of foods and restrict the bad stuff. We don’t let them eat chocolate until they are sick, or drink Coke until they are ill, but we do let them have sweets from time to time. Raising a reader and managing screen time is the same.
The really important point is that it’s not about denying children screen time but it is about being clear on what is allowed. It’s about finding a balance. Your child needs to know screen time is a treat or a privilege, but not their right to use as they wish. Children don’t know what is best for them, and left without rules they won’t turn off the TV, Xbox or Wii because, as I said before, they do not self-regulate. Screen time will take over if children are free to choose.
I think my nephew thinks all mobile phones are his by rights! As soon as I go through the front door he says ‘Can I have your phone?’ before he even says hello to me. Apparently he says this to all the adults he meets. I know his mum has regular dramas of having to physically wrestle with him to get her phone back. He’s only 3!
Angela, aunt to Lukas
It’s certainly made harder to find balance by the sheer number of devices a child typically has access to. I talked to a dad who likened restricting screen time for his children to holding back a tsunami. He told me that at home they have Sky TV, a PC, a laptop, mobiles, a Nintendo DS, a Wii and an Xbox, and the children are constantly badgering for time on screen, be it playing games or using social media to talk to friends. And technology is developing so fast. If you have a young baby now as well as an older child, you will be aware of the huge difference in the digital entertainment available to your baby. One mum I talked to told me she could see a massive increase between her 15 month old’s gadgets and pre-school apps and what her 8 year old had access to at that age.
So, how do you strike that balance? The most obvious and best place to start is by establishing some basic rules. Marking out boundaries is a positive thing for children – they know what is expected of them and it makes them feel secure. They also know that when they have kept to the rules they have done well. But so many families I meet feel they can’t, or don’t want to, say no to their children about screen time. I think they confuse having rules about it with punishment. When you restrict screen time you are not punishing your child, you are creating space and time to do other things. Rules about screen time teach self-control and discipline.
Our children all read a lot. My wife has a real gift for finding interesting books and we are very strict with computers and mobile phones. If they had no restrictions they would probably stop reading immediately!
Dad to Claire, age 15, Eva, age 13 and Luke, age 7
You need also to establish consequences if the rules are broken: if you have set a limit of one hour for gaming and your child won’t stop at the end of it, you can cut the amount of time when he next uses the machine or even take away the privilege. You are in charge. That is the only time when taking away screen time is a punishment; the rules themselves aren’t.
I can’t tell you exactly what rules to establish because they have to be workable for you and your family. But I can share effective ideas that I have come across in my conversations with numerous families.
Reading will most definitely suffer if there are screens in the bedroom. Research among 4,000 pupils in England found children with TVs in their bedrooms and children who own their own mobile phones suffered significant falls in reading achievement. So, do not have screens in the bedroom: no TV, no computer, no DVD player and no consoles. As your children get older and get mobile phones, make sure they are removed from their rooms at bedtime. If your child needs a computer for homework and works in their own room, consider getting a laptop, so that it can be put somewhere else at bedtime.
EXPERT VIEW
Increasing screen time is about access and consumption. Think about it, if you put a fridge in your child’s bedroom they’re likely to eat more. And if you told them one compartment had broccoli and sprouts, and the other had Ben & Jerry’s, your child is likely to eat more and it won’t be those healthy vegetables on offer.
Dr Aric Sigman
Limit school-day screen time. I met a family who have a rule that says no recreational screen time at all from Monday to Thursday – although of course if the children need to do homework on the computer that is allowed. Their children accept this. I have also met a family who allow their 12 year old 45 minutes in the evening, but only after their homework is done.
At weekends you might want to give a longer time for screens – maybe even up to 2–3 hours at a stretch as a maximum for teenagers. At younger ages you should probably reduce this amount of time but, again, adapt this to your child. Watch how they behave and feel after an extended period of play and change the time if necessary.
Turn off screens (including TV) at least 30 minutes before bedtime to give your child a chance to wind down and to give them a decent amount of time to read.
When you are dealing with very young children who don’t understand the concept of time, using an alarm or timer of some sort can be very useful. You could say they are allowed 30 minutes and when the alarm goes off, time is up. I used this strategy very successfully with my son when he was younger and he would simply turn off the laptop when the bell rang, no questions asked.
For older children who better understand time, it’s very useful to give a 5– or 10–minute warning that time is nearly up.
Make sure that your child asks if they can use the computer or games console before they turn it on. This reinforces that it is a privilege and not a right. You can answer ‘yes’, or ‘no’, ‘later’, ‘yes, for 30 minutes’, or ‘yes, if you’ve done your homework’ – whatever matches the rules you’ve laid down or agreed.
Even if you have no problems restricting screen time with your child at the moment and an informal, ad hoc arrangement seems to work just fine, or if they are young and perhaps not especially keen on digital entertainment as yet, I urge you to think ahead. Imagine your child is young, say four, and from time to time she wants to play on your iPhone. You let her do that and when you say that’s enough she complies. There is no problem. Before long she won’t comply, however, as she finds her voice and more firmly forms her likes
