Screen time

The Norwegian Directorate of Health's screen time ceilings for every age: no screens under 2, at most an hour for ages 2 to 5, an hour and a half for 6 to 12 and one and a half to three hours for teenagers. Just as important: why the limits exist and how to be your child's guide without the constant nagging.

Half an hour to an hour a day at most, says the Norwegian Directorate of Health, ideally less and ideally with you on the sofa. But what kind of screen matters more than the minutes: made for kids, no ads, no autoplay. The numbers, the criteria and what I learnt from two runs through the toddler years.

Kids who are told why a rule exists take it with them when they leave the room. Kids who just obey leave it at the door. The research behind one of my principles: no rule without a reason the child gets to hear.

Trigger, action, variable reward, investment: the four-step loop from the book Hooked is the recipe behind the apps that are hardest to put down. This is how each step works, with the apps your kids use as the examples.

Language researchers at the University of Oslo followed 1,442 Norwegian toddlers: the two year olds with more daily screen time knew fewer words, and the children who were read to a lot knew more. A British study points the same way. Best of all, the strongest move is also the cosiest one.

Your brain has a network of its own that wakes up only when you're not doing anything in particular. The research makes a strong case that boredom is underrated, and there's one concrete step you can take today.

You've probably heard you should dim the lights and put the screens away an hour before bed. But did you know it matters just as much to bring your core body temperature down, and that the shower that helps is a warm one, not a cold one? Why We Sleep by sleep scientist Matthew Walker is one of the most interesting books I've read, packed with useful science for better sleep.

A counter that resets when you take a day off is loss aversion by design, and the mechanic doesn't care whether the content is vocabulary or selfies. How streaks work, what they do to kids and three moves against the counters.

Be consistent. A child who learns that nagging never works gradually grows into smarter questions and better arguments. Here is the mechanism that keeps the nagging alive, and the strategies I use at home to keep nagging and whining down.

Rarely the way you hope. Confiscating the phone ends tonight's battle, but it doesn't teach your child to put the phone down on their own. What works better: limits that live in the system and agreements made in peacetime.

The Shorts feed has been given a daily time limit of its own on supervised accounts, and since March that limit can be set to zero. Norwegian media watchdog Barnevakten retested it in September, and this time it holds.

The Norwegian Media Authority has studied how 1,753 children and teenagers actually use social media, and the verdict is blunt: the design, not the kids, sets the pattern. The TikTok users in the study watched 200 to 400 videos a day.