Teenagers and screens: how much is too much and where to draw the line

“Five more minutes.”

It is half past ten at night. The hall light is on, and a bluish glow is coming from under the door of your teenager’s room. You are standing outside it, knowing that “five more minutes” will turn into forty. You also know how it will end if you knock: a slammed door, a “you never let me do anything”, and that particular helplessness of being the adult with all of the responsibility and none of the real power.

Families talk about this scene more and more often. Not because today’s parents are stricter or today’s teenagers more rebellious than before. The screen has simply become the place where an old and entirely developmental conflict plays out: how much freedom, and how much control. This piece is for parents who are not looking for a magic number, but for a way of setting a limit without every evening turning into a battle.

“How many hours?” is the wrong question

When parents ask how much screen time is still fine for a teenager, they expect a number. Two hours? Three? I understand why — a number can be measured, checked and defended. But the research gives us less here than we would like.

In 2019, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski at the University of Oxford analysed data from several large surveys covering more than 350,000 adolescents. The link between digital technology use and young people’s wellbeing was negative, but very small: it explained at most 0.4 per cent of the differences in how well young people felt. By way of comparison, the authors noted that a similarly strong link with wellbeing appeared for whether a teenager regularly ate potatoes or wore glasses.

This does not mean screens do not matter. It means that the number of hours on its own tells us little. Two hours a teenager spends talking to friends they play with in the evening are not the same as two hours of aimless scrolling through short videos at one in the morning. The number makes them equal; life does not.

That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) dropped a single number of hours for school-aged children and adolescents back in 2016. Instead, it recommends a family media plan: consistent limits that protect sleep, physical activity and time together, plus places and times without screens. That is a very different line of thought from “how much”.

What the screen is pushing out

A more useful question than “how much” is “instead of what”. Researchers call this the displacement hypothesis: the problem with a screen is not necessarily what happens on it, but what does not happen because of it. A day has twenty-four hours. If screens eat six of them, something else disappears.

With teenagers, sleep almost always comes first. In 2015, Lauren Hale and Stephanie Guan reviewed research on screens and sleep in school-aged children and adolescents and found that, in the great majority of studies, screen use was linked to going to bed later and sleeping less. There are several reasons: a screen does not switch itself off, the content is stimulating, messages keep arriving at midnight, and once a teenager is woken by a vibration it is harder to fall asleep again. In puberty the body clock shifts towards later hours anyway, and the screen stretches that shift further. I have written more about this in Teenagers and sleep: why they go to bed at two and what it means.

The second thing is movement, the third is friends in person, the fourth is family. If your teenager sleeps enough, moves, sees friends and sits at the table with you at least once a day, then three hours of screen time a day is probably not your biggest problem. But if one of these is disappearing, that is where it is worth starting — and it is a limit a teenager understands more easily than a bare cap on hours.

Why we argue about it so quickly

Parents often tell me that what bothers them most about arguments over the phone is how quickly they escalate. One sentence is said and the accusations are already flying, many of which have little to do with the screen: “You don’t care how I feel.” “All you do is shut yourself in your room.”

This is no accident. Adolescence is the time when a young person developmentally moves away from their parents and builds a world of their own. Today the phone is to a large extent that very world: friends, jokes, group chats, first crushes, music, identity. When a parent takes the phone away, the teenager does not experience losing a device. They experience being cut off from their peers — at an age when peers’ opinions matter more than at any time before or after. The developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg describes how the teenage brain is especially sensitive to reward and to the presence of peers. So the reaction to having the phone taken away is often bigger than a parent would expect.

On the other side stands a parent who is worried and who often feels they have lost their child to a device. That worry is legitimate, but it easily turns into control, and control pushes a teenager into hiding. And so we go round in circles: the more the parent monitors, the more the teenager hides; the more they hide, the more the parent worries. I have written about what happens when a teenager goes completely silent in When a teenager goes quiet: how family therapy opens the conversation.

A limit is not the same as a ban

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see limits as something that organises a relationship, not as a punishment. A limit shows where one thing ends and another begins: where the teenager’s space is and where the family’s shared space is. You can read more about what boundaries really are in the knowledge base under boundaries.

A ban is one-sided: “From now on, no phone after nine.” A limit is explained, predictable and applies to everyone who lives in the house: “After ten in the evening the phones sleep in the kitchen. Mine too.” The difference seems small, but in practice it is large. A teenager experiences a ban as proof that you do not trust them. A limit that applies to the parents too is easier to experience as a house rule — one they can still criticise, but cannot read as a personal attack.

There is something else parents tend not to hear. Teenagers notice very precisely how much time we spend on our phones. If we sit at dinner with a device next to our plate and then explain to our teenager how harmful scrolling is, the message is confused. This is not about a parent having to be perfect. It is about the fact that a limit which applies only to the child loses much of its weight.

I have written more generally about setting limits for a teenager while staying connected in How to set boundaries with a teenager without losing your connection. Here I am focusing on screens, because they have a few particular features.

How to reach an agreement that actually holds

Agreements about screens most often fall apart for three reasons: only one parent sets them, they are too vague (“less phone”), or the teenager had no part in making them. When a teenager can negotiate a limit, they will not necessarily respect it every time. But they will know why it exists, and they will have fewer reasons to experience it as unfair.

A few things that often work in families:

• Screen-free places. For example, the dinner table and bedrooms at night. This is one of the AAP’s recommendations and also the easiest rule to check.
• Screen-free times. For example, the last hour before sleep or a shared meal. It is easier to agree on when there are no screens than to count how many there are.
• The charger outside the bedroom. Phones charge overnight in the kitchen or living room — everyone’s.
• Clear exceptions. Schoolwork, arranging a trip with friends, a Saturday film. An exception agreed in advance does not break the rule.
• A review date. The agreement is not forever. After a few weeks, sit down and look at what is working and what is not.

In the knowledge base I have a template for this, the Family screen agreement, which you can print and fill in together. If you are interested in what research tells us about screens in younger children, there is a short overview under Screens and children.

What the conversation might sound like

The conversation below is composite and not about a real person. It shows how a parent might begin without the conversation immediately becoming an accusation.

“Can we talk about something? It’s not a punishment.”
“It’s the phone again, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’ve noticed you’ve been very tired in the mornings for the last few weeks. I don’t know whether it’s because of the phone, but I’m worried.”
“It isn’t the phone. I just can’t fall asleep.”
“Maybe. What would you suggest that might help you fall asleep?”
“I don’t know… Maybe not having it on my bedside table. But then you can’t have yours in the bedroom either.”
“Fine. Let’s try it for two weeks and then see whether it helps.”
(a composite conversation, not about a real person)

Something important happened in this conversation: the parent began with what they had noticed, not with what the teenager had done wrong. They asked for the teenager’s suggestion. And they accepted a condition that applied to them too. The agreement may not hold. But the conversation did not end with a slammed door, and that is often a big step already.

Exercise: a one-week family screen review

If you do not know where to begin, try this. You do not need an app or any special tools.

1. For one week, just observe — yourself included. No comments and no new rules. Note when screens in your family most often come on and when they are off. Be honest about your own habits.
2. Choose one single area. Sleep, meals or the time after school. Not everything at once. Ideally the one that has carried the most tension.
3. Say what you noticed, not what you fear. “I’ve noticed you’ve been falling asleep late these past weeks” sounds different from “you’re ruining your brain”.
4. Ask for their suggestion and take something from it. Even if your teenager’s suggestion is not ideal, include part of it. A rule they helped shape will be easier for them to keep.
5. Agree on a review date. In two or three weeks, sit down and talk about what has changed. Praise what went well and adjust what did not.

The point of this exercise is not to sort everything out in a week. It is to move the conversation about screens from an argument to shared observation. That is the difference between a parent as a supervisor and a parent as someone who is interested.

When the screen is not the real problem

I have to be honest: not every problem with screens is really a problem with screens. Sometimes the screen is just the most visible part of something else.

A teenager who shuts themselves in their room and watches videos until morning may simply be tired and unwinding. Or they may be escaping something they cannot put into words: loneliness, being mocked at school, tension at home, a low mood that has lasted for weeks. In their review of research on young people’s mental health in the digital age, Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen pointed out that the link often runs the other way: young people who are struggling spend more time on screens, not only the reverse. In that case the screen is more of a refuge than a cause.

So it makes sense to look more widely. How are they sleeping and eating, how are things at school, do they have friends, have they lost interest in things that used to make them happy? If signs of low mood, withdrawal or anxiety go on for several weeks, it is wise to consult your GP or paediatrician, the school counselling service, or a therapist who works with children and adolescents. I have described how to tell developmental mood swings from something more serious in Teenage depression: telling it apart from ordinary mood swings.

In Slovenia, young people can also turn anonymously to TOM, the helpline for children and adolescents, on 116 111. If you ever hear or notice that your teenager is thinking about self-harm or about not wanting to live, do not wait: call Klic v duševni stiski in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am), the Samarijan helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours), or in an emergency 112.

And one more limit: this piece is about everyday arguments over screens. When use is so severe that a teenager is dropping out of school, not sleeping, cannot stop, and becomes markedly irritable or aggressive when the device is taken away, that is a different question. I have written about where the line between habit and problem lies in Phone and screen addiction: habit or problem?

What about parental control apps?

Parents often wonder whether parental control apps are a good idea. The answer is not clear-cut and depends a great deal on age. For a twelve-year-old, time limits and content filters are reasonable protection that you can agree on openly. For a sixteen-year-old, secretly reading their messages is something else entirely.

The researchers Sonia Livingstone and Ellen Helsper distinguished between restrictive mediation (rules and technical limits) and active mediation (talking about what a child does and experiences online). With adolescents, talking seems especially important, because older teenagers often know how to get round restrictions. Technology can help, but it cannot replace the relationship.

My guiding principle is simple: monitoring your teenager knows about and understands is a limit. Monitoring you hide is mistrust. And when they discover it — which almost always happens — you lose more than you gained.

When to seek help as a family

If conversations about screens keep ending in shouting, if the two parents cannot agree with each other and the teenager turns to whichever one is more lenient, or if you feel the phone has become the only language you still speak to each other in, this may be a sign that the problem is not the device but a pattern of relationships at home.

In such cases family therapy can help. It is not about who is right, but about how the family talks, who takes on which role and what each person needs. It often turns out that the screen was not the cause of the conflict, only the place where an old conflict got new clothes.

What to remember

• The number of hours on its own tells you little. Research shows only a small link between screen time and how teenagers feel.
• The more important question is what the screen is pushing out: sleep, movement, friends in person and time with family.
• A limit that applies to the whole family and is explained holds better than a one-sided ban.
• A teenager will respect an agreement more easily if they helped make it and if it has a review date.
• If low mood, withdrawal or anxiety lie behind the screen, the screen is more a sign than a cause — that is the time to seek professional help.