Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.
This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar things, or how fast a video ends and the next begins, then you are setting limits on something you cannot picture. Spend twenty minutes on it yourself before the next conversation. The rules you make afterwards will be different ones, and your child will be able to tell that you know what you are talking about.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true (Quran 17:36). It reads as a caution about accepting things, and it works just as well as a caution about ruling on them.
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of mobile and interactive media use by young children notes that research on how these devices affect learning, behaviour and family life has lagged well behind how quickly they were taken up. That is a comment on the research rather than on parents, and it does not test parental education as an intervention. The parallel is fair enough: the adults making decisions about these tools, in households and in universities alike, have been running behind them.
Jenny Radesky; Jayna Schumacher; Barry Zuckerman (2014). Mobile and Interactive Media Use by Young Children: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown. PEDIATRICS doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot make a sensible rule about something you have never watched working.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Who pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.
When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.
Pick one series and watch it together on the same evening each week. The point is not the programme. It is that something puts the two of you in the same room on purpose.