Screen Time

the ever so scandalous topic and how we approach it in our household

Saturday night I posted an Instgram story about family movie night and was surprised by the influx of questions I received in my DMs in response. “How often do you do this?” “When did you start movie night?” “Do your kids watch the entire movie?” etc. So, here we are.

I think a lot of people had logistical questions, which I continuously forget to share when I’m doing things with the boys and then always surprised to see how many people are curious, and then others wanted to know more about my thoughts on screen time in general. I was in search of a Mom’s Musings topic for today’s post, so I figured why not lay it all out in one piece.

Let’s start on the big kicker - screen time. This makes certain people feel a lot of strong emotions. As always, I want to make it very clear that I am not judging anyone who does anything differently than me and I am by no means an expert on this topic. This is simply what has worked for us and how we go about it in our household. These also are not black and white hard rules, but more guidelines that we do our best to follow. I am someone who believes that we live in a digital world and therefore the kids are going to be exposed to screens. Because of that, I am comfortable with them having access to TV time. That being said, I do not want it to be what they consistently turn to when we have downtime in the house. I don’t know if there is a name for the way that we parent in our household, but we very much want to incorporate certain aspects of the ‘90s childhood that we were raised in: outdoor play, neighborhood games, sparking creativity, and encouraging independent play. Because of that, technology plays a smaller role in our household and we hope for that to continue as the kids grow older. That being said, here are our guidelines around screen time: