What's it replacing, not how long?

That's the question with the least useful answer. The evidence on total screen hours is weaker and more contested than the public conversation implies, partly because the category puts a video call with a grandparent, a homework session, a film watched together and three hours of short-form video into one number. The question that leads somewhere is what the time is displacing — sleep, physical activity, schoolwork, or time with people face to face.

Devices out of bedrooms overnight, for everyone in the house. The association between screens in the bedroom, use close to bedtime and worse sleep is among the more consistent findings here, and it's the only change that requires no counting and no nightly negotiation once it's established. The alarm clock objection will come up — a cheap alarm clock removes it, and buying one beats having the debate.

Because the fight is about the interruption rather than the rule. Being stopped mid-activity produces the explosion, and the same child stops without complaint at a natural endpoint — "five more minutes" is meaningless in a match with twelve minutes left, and a team game can't be abandoned without consequences for other people, which children experience as a real obligation. Tie the ending to the activity: finish the round, end of the episode, reach a save point.

That's the design rather than the child. Autoplay and infinite scroll exist specifically to remove the stopping point, so turning autoplay off reinstates a natural end and does more than any rule you could impose. Notifications do the reverse — they restart a session that had already finished. Both are worth changing before any new limit.

Think hard about making it the default, because of what it costs elsewhere. A child who fears losing their device will not report something frightening — contact from a stranger, upsetting content, something a friend sent — and hearing about that early matters far more than any amount of time saved. Say it to them plainly: they'll never be in trouble for telling you, and the device won't be taken away for it.