Teach Kids Digital Nutrition

Instead of fixating solely on screentime, parents should help children discern between healthy and junky content

- By Kaitlyn Regehr

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, when my eldest daughter was three, I overheard her proudly telling a friend she was getting a smartphone for her birthday.

The way she talked about it reminded me of my three-year-old self asking my mother if I could play with her high heels—it was an almost mythical marker of big girlhood. She wouldn’t be unwrapping a phone, of course, but that moment was a wake-up call for me. I work as an associate professor at University College London in the area of digital humanities, or how the online world impacts our social lives. Yet even I’ve struggled to find truly practical and actionable advice on how to teach my children responsible digital use beyond limiting screentime.

I agree with some mitigation of device use, including the classroom bans that recently rolled out in Ontario and B.C.—provided they're paired with education. I also don’t think any kid should have a phone in their bedroom at night. (Plenty of research shows that teens aren’t sleeping enough already.) Guidance to cap screentime was originally born out of obesity and diabetes research in children: if they’re spending hours in front of an iPad, they’re likely not moving much. Cutting down is good advice when it comes to physical health, but mental well-being requires a more nuanced approach.

Even if parents regulate the amount of time their kids spend online, they still need to think critically about whether the content itself is any good. A 2020 Pew study out of the U.S. showed that 89 per cent of kids between the ages of five and 11 are on YouTube, a largely unregulated, algorithmically driven platform. That figure alone isn't cause for concern. The real problem is that many parents are leaving their kids to surf unsupervised—sometimes with headphones on.