What children do with screens matter more than how long they spend on it. Here's why

By the time this is read, several million Indian children will have been told that their screen time is up. Very few will be asked what they did with it.

Each year brings a fresh round of anxiety about screens, and a fresh round of rules: one hour on weekdays, two at weekends, none before bed. The rules are well-meant, and they have one great virtue. A stopwatch is easy to enforce and asks no judgement of a tired parent at eight in the evening.

That would be reason enough to keep them if duration told a parent much. The more useful questions are what the time was for, and what came out of it. Was the child consuming or creating? Did the screen do something paper could not, or did it simply replace paper with something brighter?

A device can be a slot machine, an endless feed engineered by some of the best-resourced companies in the world to make the next swipe irresistible. The same glass rectangle can also be a workshop, a place to write, to code, to compose, and to test an idea and watch it fail. Picture two seven-year-olds with forty minutes each. One scrolls through a hundred videos she will have forgotten by dinner. The other builds a bridge in a physics game, watches it collapse three times, and works out why. A forty-minute limit records the two afternoons as identical, and no parent who watched them would agree.

There is a simple test at the end of any session. Ask the child what she made. A story, a drawing, a solved puzzle, or a question she could not answer and then could, all count. If the honest answer is nothing, the time was consumption, however educational the app's description.

Some classrooms have already found a middle path between the screen-free sanctuary and the all-tablet showroom.  They use screens for what screens do well, such as instant feedback, collaboration and a live poll where every child answers at once, and paper for practice, depth and the slower thinking that arrives through the hand. Handwriting is kept deliberately. Each device is opened with a stated reason and closed when that reason is met. The technology sits around the teacher as a layer of support, and the teacher stays at the centre.

The research points the same way at home. An umbrella review of 102 meta-analyses published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2024 linked children's screen use to weaker literacy overall, and to stronger literacy when parents watched alongside them. One father this writer knows well began putting puzzle and logic games in front of his daughter when she was three, on a condition he set for himself rather than for her. He would play every game first, and she would never play alone. Every level was solved together on the same screen, with the same arguments about what to try next. Today she reasons through sequences and logic puzzles with real ease, and she stays with a hard problem until it gives way. Years on, they still solve puzzles together, and the company has mattered at least as much as the screen.

That suggests a sensible division of labour. Schools can teach purpose: the vocabulary of why a tool is in use, the routine of opening it for a reason, and the discipline of putting it away. Parents can supply what no app can, which is an adult on the other side of the screen showing what engagement looks like. Each needs the other, and a child who receives only one half usually feels the gap.

The device will keep getting better at holding a child's attention. The answer that lasts is a child who knows what her attention is for, with an adult sitting beside her while she learns it.

[The author is the co-founder and Chairperson of Acres Foundation that builds and runs schools in Mumbai.]