Judgement-free screen time tips

In her new book Screen Wise, award-winning Australian journalist, author and commentator Madonna King (Bachelor of Arts 1985) explores one of modern parenting’s biggest challenges: raising children in a world dominated by devices.

Drawing on interviews with hundreds of children and experts (including UQ researchers), the book offers a practical, judgement-free guide to navigating screen time and social media with the kids and teens in your life.

In this extract, King interrogates the real impact of Australia’s world-first social media protections for under-16s and offers practical ideas for screen-free activities.

Parenting inside a global experiment

Parenting now is vastly different to when we were growing up. Remember disappearing to a friend’s home after school for hours, away from the gaze of our parents? Remember when it was disrespectful to call adults by their first name? Rules and discipline were clear, and consequences followed any breaches of respect or obedience.

Since COVID, parental engagement in school activities – from curriculum discussions to policies and rules – has increased exponentially. Indeed, market researcher McCrindle found that 83% of parents believe it is "extremely or very important for them to be practically involved in their child’s schooling".

Our own parents were perhaps less involved in our daily schooling, and it reflects a wider view that modern parenting is child-focused. The options open to our children now – from hobbies they can take up to school subjects on offer – are also a smorgasbord of opportunities, requiring our children to make decisions we didn’t have to make.

For older children, for example, just think of the number of school sports they can take up, or even the type or mix of univer­sity courses on offer, compared to only a decade or so ago. Consider also the parenting expertise now at our fingertips, with same-day telehealth appointments, parenting podcasts and influencer blogs guiding us on everything from healthy exercise options to teaching our child basketball and navigating teen troubles.

This points to what young parents told me repeatedly: that they look for evidence-based parenting practices more than their own parents ever did. Such is the focus, parenting itself now falls into different categories, with books and podcasts, television shows and online advice dividing parents into those who are authoritative or gentle, authoritarian or permissive – or even uninvolved!

A new definition of family has been forged over time too, with blended families and same-sex parents, and gender roles have evolved. Strict discipline is usually seen in historical contexts, while positive reinforcement and open conversations with our children now fill our parental toolbox. Thank goodness! Our appetite for physical risks has also diminished, and that’s been reflected in every­thing from the rebuilding of playgrounds to the decision by many parents to electronically track their children.

Our parents focused on whether we would smoke or drink. That’s changed. Now the biggest threats to our children’s safety are not even physical; they are digital. As screens have become smaller and are used in bedrooms, we don’t have the same ability to monitor our children’s interaction with them. Screens provide an entirely new and hidden challenge.

Digital ownership usually starts with a tablet, progresses to a smartphone and then to multiple devices. Overseas research shows four in ten children have their own tablet by their 2nd birthday, and that will grow to almost 60% by the time they turn 4. And here in Australia, 97% will own a personal screen device by adolescence, with about half being able to access or use 5 or more devices.

What the under-16s social media ban has (and hasn't) changed

The new Australian restrictions on social media appear, at this stage, to be more successful in encouraging parents to delay access rather than at removing children already on social platforms. Indeed, a huge majority of the students I asked in schools across Australia remain logged on to social media, months after the December 2025 law change.

But we can expect enforcement of the law will continue to improve, along with eSafety’s determination to ensure those platforms subject to the law prioritise the safety of children. Indeed, in late April 2026, a swag of young users woke to find they had been removed from Snapchat overnight. But in a sign that this new law will remain messy to implement and police, many of those removed were 17 or 18, and repeated attempts to log back on, with genuine verification, failed. Some of those students just swapped Snapchat for another platform. Others waited a week and were back on Snapchat.

The ways tweens and teens have worked around the law should not surprise us. Many accounts have not been deactivated or even contacted by those social media giants charged with changing their processes. Those children who had the plug pulled on a social-media account opened another account with an older date of birth, or relied on an adult – a sibling, friend, aunt, but mainly a parent – to help bypass verification requirements.

Professor Nicholas Carah, Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies at The University of Queensland, reminds parents that a "whole bunch of other kids" are likely to be accessing YouTube and TikTok in a logged-out state. That simply means they’re not signed in – they’re using it as a guest or without their own account login. But that can deliver many of the same dangers as in a logged-in state.

Remember, too, that these restrictions, heralded as a digital panacea, apply to just a handful of platforms. They don’t relate to general screen use, computer games, messaging services or many other platforms where concerning behaviour can continue unabated.

In a nutshell

We are living through a global digital revolution, the likes of which has never happened before. We can influence that history by how we parent our children, and the decisions we make inside our own homes. That’s because we hold the levers on how our children see their digital footprint and interact online, whether it’s on a computer game or with artificial intelligence. The advan­tages of smart technology are many and varied, but we need to consider the disadvantages too.

Australia’s world-first social-media restrictions relate to a small part of the screen pie, and we need to look beyond that to our child’s relationship with screens and their daily digital interactions. We have to take the tempera­ture of our own family and provide a plan that works for our children and for us.