“Parents who jump to screen time in a bid to give their kids an educational edge may actually be doing significantly more harm than good—and they need to dole out future screen time in an age-appropriate matter.”
(Liraz Margalit, Ph.D.)

All week we’ve looked at the power of screens in our lives; here are some guidelines. You’ll see more of these in the 10th Anniversary Revised Edition of ScreamFree Parenting (due out in October), but here are some quick guidelines:

* No mobile screens of any kind until age two (and limited TV exposure)
* One hour of mobile screen time per day for toddlers, or two hours of TV
* One to two hours of non-school-related screen time per day for school-age kids
* No smartphone till age twelve or thirteen
* Two hours of non-school-related screen time per day for teenagers (this includes TV)

Now, how about for you and me? Obviously, we’re grownups completely in charge of our own lives. But that’s actually not true if we’re increasingly addicted to screens, and the advertisers that own our eyeballs and thus, program our brains. While I could write a whole book on this (and I may be doing so), here’s a challenge for now: Set a bedtime for your phone sooner than your own bedtime. If you currently do it an hour before bed, set your phone down 90 minutes before bedtime. Let’s just you and me try it for awhile, and see what happens.

Peace begins with pause,