Anna's blog: Wanted: Technology Manager for My Children

Of all my roles in life: comms and marketing, children’s taxi driver, cook, housekeeper, logistics manager, emotional punching bag… managing my children’s screen time is the one job I would really love to outsource. Here’s how the ad might look:

• Full time role. Research, plan and negotiate by day, lie awake worrying about it at night.
• Strive to keep constantly up to date with apps that you do not personally use, nor understand.
• Risk assess each app, game and device for each child: impact of social media on mental health, intensity of gaming, impact of short form content on attention spans.
• Canvass children’s friends’ parents to see what they are doing, and therefore whether child’s view that everyone has more access / time / apps than they do is correct (in fact don’t bother with this, the answer is always that they do not).
• Review and set up sub-standard parental controls on each app, which are all different and generally involve creating your own account (which you won't use) so do that too, and then pay to layer additional safety controls on top anyway.
• Figure out how to install these, and which package might conflict with another.
• Switch online chat functions off manually on every app, then prepare reactive Q&A to respond to children’s moaning.
• Teach children about their digital footprint, the importance of questioning what they see online, make them aware of strangers who could pretend to be small children, the basics of consent. Tell them stories of what can go wrong to help them to understand, but don’t scare them too much.
• Be firm and hold boundaries but not too strict; ensure you are approachable should a problem arise.
• Draft screen time charter including app limits / downtime schedule / overall time limits then build resolve not to buckle within 24 hours. Get buy in from full family.

Applications to me IRL please. (And bring chocolate).