15 Days of Haidt #7: Five Reasons Why Measuring Screentime Is Tough
What Gets Measured Gets Done, they say; but what if you can't accurately measure?
(Guest blog by Sean Geraghty)
Screen time tracking sounds simple. Clearspace, ScreenTimeLabs, Google Family Link, Apple Screen Time.
It’s not simple.
For now, I don’t want to discuss here the pro/con of parental action on screentime.
I just want to point that for parents trying to engage on this topic - 40% of teens are regularly arguing with their parents about screentime, according to Pew Reseach Center - it’s hard to measure.
Extracting “legit” data from phone
Take our client B. His parents check the screen time report.
It's not even 9 AM yet - how could B have used 8 hours of phone time? He didn’t. B had an app running the background. Parents can’t say a simple “You were on your phone 45 hours this week.”
B, however, does engage in some trickery.
Changes the device’s time zone to reset limits.
Deletes and reinstall apps to restart app timers.
The smartphone could be both over-counting and under-counting.
Multiple devices
It’s not uncommon for a teen to have 5 or more different screens. A personal laptop. A phone. A school-issued Chromebook. An iPad. A smartwatch.
Some tracking tools link Apple devices under one account, but what about the school computer?
One of my clients says:
“Yeah, sometimes I just watch YouTube on my school laptop, so my mom doesn’t count it against my screen time.”
Because of #1 and #2, it’s hard to get a “number” for Mom and Dad to discuss with teen. They’re like prosecutors with multiple strands of evidence; B just has to find one “weak” strand (the 7 hour 54 minute citation) to try to “Dismiss the case.”
Even if he can’t win his motion for dismissal, sometimes he can exasperate his parents, so their own fissures emerge (Mom thinks B’s screentime is a big problem; Dad thinks it’s small).
Legit (parent approved), Grey Zone, and Unproductive
This makes the Parent/Teen discussion even tougher - the judgment overlay to # of minutes. We’ve got:
a. Productive : laptop to do homework, Google Maps to drive to a piano lesson, watching a YouTube tutorial on how to crochet, using Spotify as background music to help focus or sleep, watching a Netflix episode to unwind.
b. Unproductive for Type B parents: For some parents, unproductive just means “Too much Recreational Time.” 4 Netflix episodes back to back. Frantic, unceasing dopamine chasing of notifications, social media, reels, text chains, etc.
I.e., they don’t care so much about the details of which movie, video game, maybe a little porn cringe let’s not talk about that, texting with friends, social media. They’re laissez faire on content so long as it’s not
Talking online with Scary Adult
Ingesting cult-level content
Wrong time (like dinner)
Doom-scrolling anything that seems to obviously make kid unhappy or anxious
c. Unproductive For Type A parents: These parents DO care a lot about what’s actually on that screen (they object to much more of what teen wants to consume), AND they care about total time.
d. Grey Zone: Is the music while doing homework helpful, or is it just another distraction? (Depends on kid, choice of music, volume). Is watching one Netflix episode to decompress after school a good thing? What about texting with buddies (probably good) but sometimes one kid says stuff that is just waaaay over the line? What about while in-person hanging out with friends at Sbux while THEY are all on THEIR phones?
Measurement Versus “Patrol”
2015 Mom opens bedroom door after quick knock, sees kid on laptop: “Put that computer away and take out The Scarlet Letter.”
2025 Mom opens door, sees kid on laptop, kid shifted tabs instantly as Mom began turning knob:
“What are you doing?”
“Homework”
“Let me see it”
(Shows screen. Kid in truth WAS just chatting on Discord; but now the screen shows a History Paper with 2 sentence fragments. Kid brazenly feigns indignation).
Thanks to schools becoming nearly universally online for high school homework, 2025 parents have almost no way to “visually patrol” during the school year.
Measuring screentime vs sleep or calories
Fitbit imperfectly measures sleep, but it’s in the right ballpark! Whether it’s Sleep Score perfectly analyzes or characterizes deep, REM, light sleep, and awake time…it’s pretty easy to make this a productive tool. Sleep of any type is “good” in this context.
Lose It App imperfectly measures calories - you just take a pic of your food - but it’s in the right ballpark. Not only total calories, but “good” or “bad” ones.
No such luck here.
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MG Big Picture Recap:
Haidt argues smartphones are problematic, both because of “total time” spent and social media in particular.
Therefore he advises teens do not have smartphones until age 14 and no social media until 16.
What happens after teen has phone? What happens when parents, like frog boiled slowly, realize “Holy cow this is waaay out of control”? Less from Haidt there though his After Babel newsletter (recommended) has some guest blogs on this.
In Blog #6 of 15 we examined “Parents Who Look The Other Way” despite feeling that their teen’s use is problematic. Fight or flight? Flight.
Today Blog #7 of 15 Sean points out that Parents who do want to fight - to confront what they observe - start out at a disadvantage because of measurement challenges.
Coming attractions: Blogs 8 to 15 get deeper into this jungle….what to do about problematic teen screentime?