How to manage screen time for successful sleep
Screens are a part of all of our lives at this point, and they are here to stay. Adults need them for work, children use them in school and everyone, at some point, enjoys zoning out and using screens for entertainment. These days though, figuring out how to manage screen usage for our children can feel like a full time job. I know that personally, with my own teenagers, I am constantly trying to navigate this changing terrain.
In my work with families, I often find myself in the role of instructing parents on setting limits to their children’s screen usage as part of the overall process of improving sleep for their children. In some cases, watching shows is part of the bedtime routine. This can happen because parents might use this time to clean up from dinner and get things organized without having their children under foot or sometimes parents think of it as a transition from playing and having dinner and now winding down for bedtime. Sometimes the practice of looking at photos on a parent’s phone (very often the child wants to look at photos of themself) may be one of the last steps of a bedtime routine. Or sometimes parents will put on videos for their child to watch as a means of helping them drift off to sleep. All of these are circumstances that we may find ourselves in for various reason, and I don’t make any judgements about anything that anyone does as a parent. Parenting is the hardest job many of us have ever done and with bedtime happening at the end of an already long and exhausting day, sometimes we get desperate to just “cross the finish line.” Nonetheless, all of these are things that are likely to worsen your child’s sleep.
When it comes to screens and sleep, the data is clear. There is no benefit that comes from watching screens close to bedtime and there is a lot of detriment. First and foremost, the American Academy of Pediatrics advises against all screen usage, that isn’t video chatting, for children under 18 -24 months. For children 18-24 months, they recommend co viewing so that your child is learning from watching and talking with you. Beyond those age guidelines, the research on screens and sleep is clear in that there is a decrease in total sleep time and increases sleep onset latency following use of screens prior to bed, especially in the hour prior to bedtime. This is due to the fact that the blue light from the screen suppresses melatonin which is the hormone that your brain uses to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Most often, I advise parents to eliminate screen usage following dinner time. While parents often fear intense push back from their children when they implement this recommendation, I find that there is often far less resistance when parents replace that screen time with time spent together with a parent or as a family. Like with anything, it requires that parents are consistently following through with this change despite the possibly vocal resistance when it is first announced. Instead, this can be a great time to play a game or work on a puzzle together. There is nothing that children want more then the attention of their parents. Even with how luring the prospect of watching something can be, it is no match for extra positive attention from parents. It is hard to overstate the importance of your child not falling asleep watching a screen at bedtime. This is a sleep crutch (it is actually the # 1 sleep crutch among adults in America), and if your child falls asleep watching something then they are likely to wake at some point in the night and demand to watch something in order to go back to sleep.
As to parents concerns that they need to help their child wind down before bed, I often recommend listening to something instead. I would check out one of the various kids relaxation podcasts or the Sesame Street/headspace collaboration Good Night World as a final part of the bedtime routine. I have worked with many families whose children listen to music on a Toniebox which is a non screen audio player. This is a good option although I don’t recommend that children fall asleep listening to it. In the instances that parents are looking at photos on their phone with their kids at bedtime, I have often suggested that they make a photo book instead that their child can look at as part of the bedtime routine. As any parent of a small child knows, being able to end screen time is often met with resistance and negotiations for more time. Pulling any screens out of your child’s bedtime helps them fall asleep more easily and sleep better overnight.