Moms Talk: Do Your Kids Watch 30 Minutes or Less of TV Each Week?

Question: King County released some recommendations regarding screen time for kids in educational settings in concert with National Screen-Free Week, but can we apply these standards at home, too?

This week is National Screen-Free Week, which I didn’t realize until last night—oops. Perhaps they’ve been advertising it on network television, which I don’t watch.

In fact, I’ve been lulling myself this school year into thinking I’m doing a pretty good job limiting my son’s screen time, because although we own a TV, when we moved to Seattle last fall we didn’t hook it up (well, OK, I tried, but got no reception with the little box, and I can’t stand paying for cable TV, so I couch these factors as progressive parenting, much to my son’s chagrin). I figured the occasional show on Netflix would be a fine substitute and help me keep things in check, while eliminating the influence of commercials.

But, despite my best intentions, we still have had a lot of screen creep since the move, and what’s worse, I have created a small but persistent competitor for my computer.

Still, I’ve been feeling like a show or two a day is no big deal, and lately I’ve been considering having my son trade 30 minutes of outdoor activity for 30 minutes of screen time—then it rains all afternoon and the best of intentions come straight home from school dripping wet. Also, when we visit Grandma's house there seems to be a never-ending supply of Scooby-Doo episodes on the Cartoon Network, which are hard to tear my mystery lover away from.

But when I looked at the recommendations for kids in a daycare or educational setting outlined in a news release from King County, I had to start wondering if I’ve been deluding myself even more seriously than I thought.

Looking at the list of recommendations, if I were to hold myself to the same standards as my son's school, I would score pretty well in most regards: children younger than 2 shouldn’t watch DVDs—check; children shouldn’t watch TV or the computer during meals—check; children’s use of computers (I'm assuming for games, educational or otherwise) should be limited to 15 minutes at a time in educational settings—check.

However, there’s one area in which I am clearly not meeting the recommendations.

The release recommends, for children older than 2, no more than 30 minutes of total screen time—wait for it—per week. Easy enough in a school setting, but could this be possible at home, too?

I’m no saint, but I think I’m not alone in seeing this as a very challenging goal, along the lines of, say, climbing Kilimanjaro with my 6-year-old strapped to my back.

The release asserts that kids spend between 20 to 30 hours a week in front of a screen, which can lead to obesity and problems concentrating.

Now, even though we’re already a few days into the official week, I’m considering starting our own screen-free week now, as a way to rein the screen creep back in, and hopefully the weather will cooperate enough after that to make a more honest effort on the trading activity for a TV show idea.

Also, I wonder if I’m not alone in this struggle (I hope I'm not). How does your family deal with the TV issue, and do you think that it’s possible, in our gadget-based society, to limit kids’ screen time to 30 minutes a week? If you do it already, please tell us how!