This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom that covers education.
From iPads in kindergarten to YouTube in the classroom, families are questioning whether rising screen time in schools is helping or harming children’s learning and development.
A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartener was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 40 miles north of New York City, receive iPads when they start school.
Other parents confirmed that during school, kindergarteners often used iPads to play games and watch television shows and YouTube videos. School administrators assured Ms. Benoist that iPad time would be limited to 15 minutes a day, she said. But once school started, her daughter suddenly knew jingles from the diaper and car commercials that would play before YouTube videos she saw in the classroom.
“I don’t understand how we’ve created a system that fosters this kind of screen time in school,” Ms. Benoist said.
There is mounting evidence that excessive screen time can harm young children — contributing to anxiety and depression, delaying social and emotional skills, increasing the likelihood of obesity, straining eyes and decreasing attention spans.
In response, many parents are cutting back on device use at home. But some families are encountering an unexpected challenge as they try to rein in screen time: their children’s schools.
Elementary schools and districts that ramped up their use of technology during the coronavirus pandemic have largely maintained those practices. Eighty-one percent of elementary teachers across the United States who were surveyed by The New York Times in October said that at their schools, students receive devices in class through kindergarten. Parents and experts say too many schools have become reliant on screens to teach and entertain children and, in some cases, just to keep them quiet.
“Screen time, when it’s purposeful, can increase the work of the teacher, and it can be wonderfully complementary,” said Dr. Michael Glazier, chief medical officer of Bluebird Kids Health, which runs a half-dozen pediatric offices in Florida. “The problem is, in many schools, it’s becoming less of a complementary activity and more of a default.”
In Los Angeles, Schools Beyond Screens is a grassroots movement of parents, teachers, and advocates (primarily within the Los Angeles Unified School District) dedicated to reducing the dominance of technology in the classroom.
The group isn’t strictly “anti-tech” but rather “pro-child.” They argue that the massive push for 1:1 device programs (one laptop/tablet per child) and AI-driven platforms has come at the expense of social-emotional development, handwriting, and deep reading.
In Croton-Harmon, Stephen Walker, the school superintendent, declined to answer questions for this article, but said in a statement that the district’s schools “are committed to ensuring that technology use is active, intentional and used to create learning experiences that wouldn’t have been possible without technology.”
In late February, the district announced that it would reduce spending on technology and end the practice of sending devices home with elementary school students.
In other parts of the country, parents are pushing school districts to set limits, with varying success.
Parents across the country have filed complaints about children playing board games virtually or watching someone on YouTube read a book to a class, instead of their teacher doing it. In some classrooms, “brain breaks” are accompanied by loud, flashy dance or movement videos. Parents tell their children are watching movies and television shows during indoor recess, lunch and snack time.
For the youngest children, experts say, screen time presents additional concerns. Beyond teaching academic skills, school is a place to absorb social skills, said Dr. Glazier, the pediatrician. “That doesn’t happen if they’re just in front of a screen, and they’re not interacting.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics does not suggest a specific time limit for screen use in schools but says that when students are using a screen, they should be engaged in critical thinking activities such as coding or media and video production, not watching entertainment content.
Some parents and experts say that even some education apps are problematic. They worry that apps that are “gamified,” for example, could encourage early addictions to screens by getting students hooked on the dopamine rush that comes from mastering new levels and earning digital rewards.
