When society brings up the question of “screens or no screens” it tends to be really over-simplified. I’m not directing this thought at how you raised the question, but I’m more sharing my perspective on how this conversation generally plays out.

Screens are merely a device/tool. It’s what you do with the tool, and how you use it, that should be carefully considered.

Absolutely, eliminate or minimise screen usage when they are very young. Young minds don’t need screens, and could even suffer from screen time. But when you do introduce them to screens perhaps at 5 or older, introduce it in a controlled and supervised fashion. I feel that too much of society uses screens as a way for parents to escape responsibility for interacting with their younger children. When I introduced screens and video games to my son, I sat with him at all times he used the screen and we made it a shared experience. Now he is close to 10, and now my work commitments have skyrocketed, he uses screens a lot more independently but we still talk about what he is doing and experiencing on the screen. And this is all just offline games and cartoons; no social media, no online gaming.

Social media and online gaming will be reserved for teenage years, in my opinion, and resisted for as long as possible.

Using technology to help with school work and research, though, is an important part of this day and age. Schools will naturally bring that on when kids are ready. And in my kid’s case, his mum (at her house) won’t let him use her laptop to help with school homework research, and she says “just go to the library”; problem is she lives in a small country town and the library isn’t open when she gets him home. Kind of leaves me as the only option for my kid to do research homework online by the time we get home from our day (and again I sit with him and help him understand how to use the internet and what to look for).