Before I spent 13 weeks interviewing experts about children and screens, I was convinced the rules existed.
Someone had them. Some brilliant researcher, psychologist, educator or parenting expert had cracked the code and could tell me exactly how much screen time was acceptable for an 11-year-old with ADHD and anxiety.
I wanted a number. I wanted a schedule. I wanted someone with several impressive letters after their name to say: Let him have this many minutes. Turn it off at this exact time. Allow these activities. Block these apps. Follow these steps and his attention, sleep, mental health and development will all be fine. Your child will develop a healthy relationship with technology and never scream, “BUT I WASN’T DONE!” when the timer goes off.
Instead, after 13 weeks of conversations with internationally recognised experts, I had accumulated a notebook full of nuance, a phone full of additional research and approximately 700 new questions.
The 13 weeks of interviews were both a professional project and a very personal attempt to understand how I could protect and guide my own son. I am a neurodivergent single mother raising an 11-year-old son with ADHD and anxiety. Screens are not a simple subject in our house because my child’s relationship with technology is not simple.
Technology gives him access to things that are genuinely good for him.
He can explore an interest for hours, teach himself how something works, create, problem-solve and connect with other kids. He can experience competence in digital spaces on days when the nondigital world has mostly reminded him about the things he forgot, misplaced or failed to finish.
A screen can help him regulate after holding himself together through an exhausting school day.
It can also make the next transition approximately 4,000 times harder.
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The same game that gives him connection and confidence can become the thing he cannot stop playing. The same video that teaches him something fascinating can lead directly into 36 more videos selected by an algorithm that has never once said, “You know what? That’s probably enough for today.”
Technology can be a tool, an accommodation, an escape, a social space, a creative outlet and a complete pain in my ass. Sometimes it is all of those things before dinner.
That is why generic screen-time advice has never completely worked for us. “Just take the device away” sounds simple until the device is also where his schoolwork lives.
“Let him experience the natural consequence” sounds reasonable until the natural consequence is missing an assignment posted on one of several platforms I was apparently supposed to check.
“Encourage offline interests” is wonderful advice. We do. But offline interests do not erase the fact that his friends communicate online, his teachers assign work online and much of the world he is learning to navigate exists online.
I cannot raise him for a childhood that no longer exists. I also cannot pretend every digital experience is harmless just because technology is unavoidable.
So when I began those 13 weeks of expert conversations, I was looking for certainty. What I found was context.
Not all screen time is the same. Twenty minutes spent creating something is not necessarily equivalent to 20 minutes of passive scrolling.
Talking to a real friend is different from interacting with a chatbot designed to imitate one.
A video that helps a child understand a maths concept is different from an endless feed engineered to remove every natural stopping point.
The same digital activity can also affect two children very differently. That is particularly important in neurodivergent families. A child who struggles with impulse control, transitions, time awareness or immediate rewards may experience certain technology differently from a child who can easily put down a device when asked.
Even within the same child, the answer can change. A game might be fine on Saturday morning and disastrous after a long school day when his nervous system has already used every available coping skill. A video might help him decompress one evening and keep him awake another. A device might support learning during school and completely derail homework 20 minutes later.
I kept waiting for the experts to remove the uncertainty. Instead, they kept giving me more things to consider. What is he doing on the screen? How does he feel while he is using it? How does he respond when it is time to stop? Is it replacing sleep, movement, responsibilities or connection? Is it helping him participate in his life, or helping him avoid it?
Those are good questions. Considering them also requires much more work than setting a timer. A universal limit would have been easier. I could have followed it, enforced it and congratulated myself on being a responsible mother. Context requires me to pay attention.
It asks me to notice patterns, adjust expectations and accept that a rule that worked last month may suddenly fail because my child changed, the platform changed or some developer introduced a new feature designed to make leaving less appealing.
And there it was again: responsibility returning to the parent.
Create the family media plan. Research the app. Check the privacy settings. Activate the parental controls. Monitor the messages. Watch for behavioural changes. Know what the algorithm might show them. Keep up with every new platform, feature, threat, trend and workaround. Then repeat the entire process every time something updates.
At some point, I began to wonder whether I was researching healthy screen boundaries or training to become my family’s unpaid trust-and-safety department.
This work rarely looks dramatic. It looks like standing in the kitchen reading app reviews while pasta water boils over. It looks like researching whether a chatbot is safe after your child is asleep. It looks like receiving another school notification while you are trying to work and checking a screen-time report from the supermarket car park.
It looks like attempting to remember which parental-control PIN belongs to which device while your child stares at you like you are the sole obstacle standing between him and happiness. It is dozens of tiny decisions scattered across the day. And like so much invisible family labour, it frequently lands on mothers.
A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that in different-sex couples where both parents work full time, 52% said the mother performs more parenting tasks. Only 10% said the father does more. Full-time working mothers were also roughly twice as likely as fathers to say they frequently manage parenting responsibilities while working.
The survey did not specifically ask who stays up late researching whether a child’s new app allows strangers to send private messages. I have some theories.
Mothers are told that good parenting requires vigilance. We should know what our children are watching, who they are talking to, what they are searching for and how long they have been online.
If our kids spend too much time on screens, we have failed to establish boundaries. If they are excluded socially because they cannot use the platforms their friends use, we have failed to understand their world. If something harmful reaches them, we should have been monitoring them more closely. If we monitor too closely, we invade their privacy and prevent independence.
Cool. That seems manageable.
For most of my 13-week campaign, I believed the solution was for parents to become better at this impossible job. Then California enacted a package of 13 laws addressing technological risks to children.
The measures address multiple parts of children’s digital lives, including addictive social-media features, AI companion chatbots, AI-enabled toys and school-issued devices.
Assembly Bill 1709 prohibits covered platforms from providing addictive features to users younger than 16 and requires them to take reasonable measures to keep those features away from young users. The legislation does not merely focus on what children view. It addresses how platforms are designed to keep them engaged, including features such as addictive feeds and autoplay.
Senate Bill 1119 requires operators of companion chatbots to assess and mitigate risks to children. It includes requirements involving crisis responses, advertising, children’s data, accessible safety controls and independent audits.
The laws are not perfect. Age-verification systems create legitimate privacy concerns. Restrictions can have unintended consequences for disabled children, LGBTQ+ youth and other young people who rely on online communities for information, accessibility and connection.
Technology companies will challenge regulations. Enforcement will be complicated. New risks will appear faster than lawmakers can name them. But reading about those laws, I felt something I had not experienced during my entire search for the perfect screen-time rules. Relief. Not because California had solved the problem. It had acknowledged who created it.
For once, the official response was not simply another list of things parents should do. Lawmakers were placing responsibility on the companies designing the products. That distinction matters.
Parents absolutely have a role in helping children develop a healthy relationship with technology. I am not suggesting we hand an 11-year-old an unrestricted phone, wish him luck and blame Silicon Valley for everything that happens next.
But no amount of excellent parenting can transform a deliberately persuasive product into a neutral one. No timer can eliminate an algorithm designed to anticipate what will hold a child’s attention next. No family media plan can make a chatbot safe if the company operating it has not adequately assessed how it affects a vulnerable child.
We have been treating children’s technology as a private parenting challenge when it is also a product-design and public-policy problem.
I spent 13 weeks talking to experts because I believed the right rules would remove my uncertainty. What I learned is that uncertainty is part of parenting a real child in a rapidly changing digital world.
We still need boundaries. But we also need products designed with children’s well-being in mind. We need meaningful default protections, transparent data practices, independent safety testing and laws that recognize parents cannot personally outsmart every algorithm placed in front of their children.
Most importantly, we need to stop treating every digital risk as evidence that a mother somewhere failed to pay enough attention. No mother can personally monitor every interaction occurring inside every device while also working, cooking dinner, answering school emails and occasionally attempting to use the bathroom alone. I can set boundaries without pretending those boundaries are powerful enough to correct every decision made by a multibillion-dollar technology company.
I never found the perfect screen-time rules. But I finally stopped believing their absence made me a bad mother.
Danielle Kelly is a neurodivergent writer, single mother and host of Chaos & Caffeine, an ADHD parenting podcast reaching more than 10,000 monthly downloads. She writes honestly about raising her 11-year-old son with ADHD and anxiety while navigating the beautiful, exhausting reality of neurodivergent family life.
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