'Screen time' is dumb

5 questions for educational/technology expert and advocate Richard Culatta

If there is any black hole of parental worry in my life, it is surely that ominous phrase: screen time. Do I give my children too much of it? Am I a bad parent because of the too much? How will the too much impact them in the long run? Will they not love books, other humans, the truth? What is it I was self-flaggelating about again? The too much of what now?

If you relate to any of this, then I can’t recommend Richard Culatta’s book, Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World, more highly. It takes this big bad monster in the closet—screen time—and breaks down what it is that we’re actually talking about in the light of day. Turns out it’s a dumb phrase, and it takes a very smart guy to wake us up to that. Richard was the Chief Innovation Officer of the state of Rhode Island and was appointed by President Barack Obama to lead the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, before his current role as the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. He also carries himself with a tremendous amount of humility and curiosity, which shows up big time in the writing, too. What a gift. Meet Richard…

Courtney Martin: This was a real wake-up call for me: “It’s not reasonable to expect that our children will be able to translate the norms we teach them about their behavior in the physical world to the very different context of the digital world.” I have totally taken that for granted. Can you say more about this?

Richard Culatta: One of the most important things to understand about human learning is that we connect what we learn to the environment where we learn. This is why learning tied to experiences or stories is more effective than just memorizing random facts.  But it also means that because our learning is connected to a specific context, it can be challenging to apply something we’ve learned in a new scenario.  There are a whole bunch of skills that we teach our kids about how to be good humans in the physical world. We teach them what it looks like to be kind, to be safe, to help others, and to learn new things. But if we never explicitly show them what those skills look like in a digital space, transferring those skills online can be very hard.

It is incredibly important that we teach skills like kindness, service, safety, learning, and problem solving in digital spaces as well. If we want our kids to be inclusive and kind in virtual spaces, we have to teach what kindness and inclusivity looks like in those virtual spaces. One of the best ways to do this is simply to talk about what effective digital behavior looks like. In the book I share research that shows that the vast majority of teens don’t respond when they see someone being mistreated in a virtual space because they have never practiced what they should do. Even though if they saw someone being mistreated in a physical space they would immediately know how to act - it’s a skill they’ve practiced since the first days of kindergarten. 

One of the best ways to help young people apply the norms for being good humans that we teach in the physical world to their behavior in the digital world is by asking good questions. We might ask things like, “How can you show kindness online?” or “What could you do if you see someone acting in a way that is not right online?” 

With older kids you might discuss what we should do if we share something online that we later find out is not true. Or discuss as a family what type of people we want to be know for in digital spaces. These conversations might lead to several written statements describing the type of behaviors we want to uphold as a family. 

Bridging the concepts we learn about being good people the physical world to the digital world can have enormous benefits for the future wellbeing of our families and broader communities.

You say that two of our biggest errors when talking about digital culture with our kids is only focusing on safety and what NOT to do. Instead, you advocate for five attributes that should guide our approach to teaching digital well-being. Can you break those down quickly?

Digital wellbeing is a complex skill. And learning any complex skill - whether it’s playing a new sport or learning a new language - takes practice. That’s why it’s important to talk about the digital skills we want our kids to have instead of just making lists of all the things we don’t want them to do.  You can’t practice not doing something. I like to think about digital wellbeing, or digital citizenship, as a combination of 5 key attributes. These behaviors can be guidelines for families when thinking about how to help young people become members of our digital world:

Balanced. Balanced digital citizens participate in a wide range of online activities and make good decisions about how to prioritize the time they spend in virtual and physical spaces.

Informed. Informed digital citizens know how to consider the accuracy, perspective, and validity of digital media and have strategies for curating useful information they find online.

Inclusive. Inclusive digital citizens are open to hearing and recognizing multiple viewpoints and engaging with others online with respect and empathy.

Engaged. Engaged digital citizens use technology and digital channels to solve problems and be a force for good in their physical and virtual communities.

Alert. Alert digital citizens are aware of their digital actions and know how to be safe and create safe spaces for others online. 

As parents we have to model these behaviors as well. It’s likely that you are already using technology in ways that align with the above principals. But to an observer (our kids), our use of technology looks the same no matter what we’re doing (Dad’s just on his laptop again). Unless we are overt about how we’re using technology in the ways described above, the opportunity for modeling is lost. This modeling is easy to do and can be as simple as saying “I’m posting information on Nextdoor about the blood drive at church next week, want to see what I wrote?” Or “I’ll be right there, I’m sending a message asking Chris if he needs anything because his daughter was in the hospital.” 

As a final word of caution, this may also mean changing some of your behaviors as well. As part of our family technology norms, we decided that having good balance meant not having digital distractions at meals. The first couple of days our kids grumbled and then totally adapted to device-free meals. My wife and I on the other hand found it much harder - and were often caught sneaking a text under the table by our kids (who found it hilarious that we were the ones struggling to find balance).

You also complicate “screen time”--arguing that we should consider all the different ways of being online. There is sedentary screen time, when you are just watching passively, and then there is engaged screen time, coding, editing a movie, playing a learning game. It made me realize how binary I've gotten about “screen time” with my kids; I think of it as a necessary evil that I let them have so I don't go crazy. Something I'd like to keep out of photos of our family, as if I don't want anyone to know that my kids watch Netflix. Your book made me curious about where I got that semi-conscious messaging. How does class play into all of this? I suspect I have been shaped by some pretty elite cultural norms in terms of how I relate to “screen time.”

Yeah, I wish it was possible to just say “2 hours of screen time per day” is the right amount - or whatever.  It would be so much simpler.  But the fact of the matter is that limiting tech use based solely on the clock is highly problematic. It teaches the concept that all digital activities are of the same value, which is absolutely not the case. I’ll come back to that in a second.   

You bring up the issue of class. While that wasn’t the main focus of the research for my book, I have observed that screen use has become an indicator of eliteness among some parents. I’ve heard claims that the CEO’s of tech companies don’t let their own children use technology (which from my research is largely a myth). I remember talking to a mom after a talk I had given who said she just lies when other parents ask how much screen time she allows her kids to use because she was so tired of the shaming from other parents. As I’ve shared that story I’ve been surprised at the number of parents who say they do the same!  

The fact of the matter is that by focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due. 

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances. I provided many tips in the book on how to evaluate the value of different digital activities. . 

There are many other ways to bring balance to our technology as well. Turning off autoplay on all video services and turning off notifications on apps can make a big difference. App developers build alerts and notifications in an attempt to compete with each other for our time. This takes away our agency. Simply turning off app notifications and autoplay (which can easily be done in the settings) can allow us to look at apps and videos when we want to, not when an app decides we should. The underlying principle of tech use is that we should be teaching our children (and ourselves) is to use technology on our own terms and recognize that we should change our digital activities based on having the right balance in our lives, not because a timer goes off.  

One of my favorite things about your book was the little moments when you would let us peek into your own family’s practices, like the “low-, neutral-, and high-bar Sunday activities,” and the extended family councils. Can you tell folks about those two ideas? 

Yes, in the book I shared an example of how we try to teach this idea that different types of tech use have different values. On Sunday afternoons, our family has a block of free time between when we get back from church in the morning and when we have dinner in the evening. We’ve made a conscious decision to take a break from doing schoolwork on Sundays so our kids can have a day to reset. But we also found that without some structure, our well-intentioned Sunday family time turned into fight-with-your-brothers-all-afternoon time. 

Together with our kids, we created a list of low-, neutral-, and high-bar Sunday activities. We assigned values to them and put them on a chart. For this list, we included both physical world and digital activities, but to illustrate my point here, I’m only including the digital ones. Low-bar activities were things like watching National Geographic videos, listening to music, or playing Minecraft. Medium-bar activities included things like playing a chess app with a sibling, reading an ebook, or listening to a podcast. High-bar activities included writing a letter to a friend, FaceTiming with a grandparent, learning new Spanish words in Duolingo, or composing a song in GarageBand. Medium- or high-bar activities could be done at any time. But high-bar activities could also offset low-bar activities. So, if one of our children wanted to play Minecraft, they could earn that opportunity by writing a message to Grandma or composing a song. 

This Sunday plan helped reinforce the concept that different digital activities have different values—a fundamental part of learning balance in the virtual world.

If you had a magic wand and could change one thing, structurally, about the digital world our kids are growing up in, what would it be?  

Oh wow - that’s a hard question. I think I’m going to cheat and pick two :)  

The first is that I wish we could change the fundamental business model of the internet. Early online services were based on a paid subscription (remember AOL or CompuServe, and Prodigy?). When the world wide web was introduced there was an idea that it should be “free” for everyone. While this sounded like a great idea, it meant that instead of paying for content directly we created a model that constantly bombards us with advertising. And unlike the old-school ads from TV or magazines, web-based ads use our own personal data to take advantage of our individual weaknesses for commercial gain. This is even worse in the case of children who often can’t distinguish between advertising and non-advertising content. While this model is unlikely to change in the near future, there are steps we can take to make it better.  Talk to your kids about advertising and specifically how web-based advertising works. Install ad-blockers on web browsers. And when there are valuable services or apps that offer an add-free version for a few extra dollars, consider doing so.

My second wish would be that all young people could have increased experiences in using technology to increase curiosity and problem-solving. There are many amazing apps and online services out there to support this (check out SkyGuide, or See Click Fix, or Wikipedia). Through simulations technology can bring context to concepts that are difficult to understand in the abstract. And tools like Zoom can help connect with experts anywhere in the world.  Unfortunately much of the tech use in schools is passive. Presenting content (powerpoints, digital worksheets, etc.) is the least interesting thing we can do with technology from a learning stand point. But if tools can be used in active ways - helping students create and collaborate, problem solve and engage with experts - these tools can dramatically improve a young persons ability to learn. In addition it teaches kids that these devices we carry with us aren’t just for entertainment but are the world’s most powerful problem solving tools. 

To fix this we must be willing to put far more attention into teacher training on effective use of technology. The non-profit I lead, (The International Society for Technology in Education) has created amazing programs to help teachers use technology in powerful ways to support learning. But learning to use technology in transformational ways in school takes time and must become a priority or we will continue to use powerful digital tools to do basic worksheet-type activities. 

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Richard had asked us to donate to this teacher’s classroom effort in honor of his wisdom. Feel free to pile on!

And I’m so curious to hear from you — what’s a “high-bar” digital activity you love doing and what’s a “low-bar” digital activity you want to do way less of in the coming year?