CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — A few months before her daughter started kindergarten, Claire Benoist saw a Facebook post that stunned her. Another family with an incoming kindergartner was wondering if it was true that children in the Croton-Harmon School District, 45 miles north of New York City, receive an iPad when they start school.
Other parents confirmed this: Kindergartners are often on their own iPads during school, playing games and watching television shows and YouTube videos. “It had never occurred to me that screens would be used in such a way,” Benoist said.
A few weeks before school started, Benoist told school administrators in the 1,500-student district that she couldn’t believe schools would give devices to kids as young as 4 and 5. Benoist and her husband had followed pediatric guidelines recommending no screen time before age 2. After that, they only allowed occasional episodes of kids’ shows like “Bluey” or “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”
School administrators assured Benoist that iPad time would be limited to 15 minutes a day, she said. But once school started, Benoist’s daughter suddenly knew jingles from diaper and car commercials, which Benoist and her husband determined were playing before YouTube videos at school.
“It feels like too much,” said Benoist, whose daughter has watched videos during snack time, transition time and dismissal.
“I am just horrified by this,” she added. “I don’t understand how we’ve created a system that fosters this kind of screen time in school.”
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There’s 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 reassessing device use and cutting back at home. But some are encountering an unexpected challenge as they try to rein in screen time — their kids’ schools.
Elementary schools and districts that ramped up their use of technology during the pandemic have largely maintained those practices. Eighty-one percent of elementary teachers across the country surveyed by The New York Times in October said that at their school, students receive devices in class by kindergarten. And now too many schools have become reliant on screens to teach, entertain and, in some cases, just keep kids quiet, parents and experts say.
“Screen time, when it’s purposeful, can augment 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 across Florida. “The problem is, in many schools, it’s becoming less of a complementary activity and more of a default.”
The Croton-Harmon School District declined to answer specific questions for this story. In a statement, Superintendent Stephen Walker said 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.” Late last month, the district announced it would reduce spending on ed tech and end the practice of sending devices home with students in elementary school.
In other parts of the country, parents are pushing school districts to set limits with varying success.
In Evanston, Illinois, a parent-run group, Screen Sense Evanston, organized a petition last year requesting that the district remove non-educational apps and create daily maximum screen time limits for each grade. More than 1,000 parents have signed on. Last year, parent advocacy successfully pushed the district to limit YouTube in classrooms.
Miriam Kendall, a parent of three and the head of Screen Sense Evanston, said one of the group’s main goals is to remove “pure entertainment” activities, like videos and online games at school, and to get districts to set limits for device use.
Kendall, who monitors her daughter’s iPad usage online, said she noticed that the first grader was watching Taylor Swift videos in the middle of a school day.
“It’s unreasonable to assume that somehow students aren’t going to be distracted and only supposed to use these devices for education,” she said. “Literally millions of hours of very, very smart people’s time has gone into making these things absolutely irresistible on purpose.”
Similar demands to cut screen time have cropped up among parents and teachers across the country, including in California, North Carolina, Maryland, Texas and elsewhere in Illinois.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Many complaints from parents across the country are about screen time that is not directly related to academics and is nearly impossible to track. That includes children playing board games virtually or watching someone on YouTube read a book to the class, instead of their teacher. In some classrooms, “brain breaks” consist of loud, flashy dance or movement videos that are marketed exactly for that purpose to teachers. Parents say their children are watching movies and television shows during indoor recess, lunch and snack time.
For the youngest children, experts say, there are additional concerns. In addition to learning academic skills, school is a place to absorb social skills, said 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 doesn’t have a set time limit for screen use in schools, but it says screen time should be active and involve critical thinking activities such as coding or media and video production, not passive, like watching content for entertainment.
Some parents and experts say that even some of these active programs are problematic. They worry that apps that are “gamified,” for example, could encourage early addictions to screens by getting kids hooked on the dopamine rush that comes from mastering new levels and earning digital rewards.
Richard Culatta, the CEO of the technology nonprofit ISTE+ASCD, agrees that some apps are better than others and that schools should do a better job of vetting them. But, there are benefits to engaging, research-based games, he said.
“When kids hate learning because it’s boring, it will have far more damaging consequences than if they are playing a game that is helping them find learning more interesting,” Culatta said. And rather than a wholesale removal of tech devices, he said schools need to “rebalance.”
“We do have to be really careful that we don’t actually end up harming kids by taking away tools that are really helpful for them for their future,” Culatta said.
Samantha Harvey, whose daughter attends school in the Croton-Harmon district, didn’t realize how much screen time her daughter was getting at school until the kindergartner began talking about “apps” soon after starting school.
“I wouldn’t mind if it were once a day after school, or a special thing,” Harvey said. “It just seems like it’s ubiquitous. It’s every day, and it seems to pop up in every room.”
Then one day, Harvey was taking a video of her daughter dancing to send to her grandparents. When the song ended, her daughter finished her dance, looked at the camera and said, “If you like what you saw, click below to subscribe.”
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In part because of concerns from parents and educators, districts have already begun rolling back technology use. In 2022 in Missouri, Springfield Public Schools cut back on classroom technology for its youngest students. That same year, Santa Barbara Unified School District in California removed 1:1 devices from kindergarten and stopped sending devices home with first, second and third graders.
In 2023, Glastonbury Public Schools in Connecticut reduced technology use. A year later, several Kansas districts scaled back, including Wichita Public Schools, which eliminated screen time from pre-K and kindergarten classrooms. Lawmakers in several states — including Utah, Massachusetts, Vermont and Missouri — have introduced legislation to limit screen time or review ed tech products more closely. Countries like Sweden and Denmark have also transitioned away from digital learning.
In addition to state and district efforts, individual teachers are making changes within their own classrooms to move away from screens.
Jill Anderson, a third grade teacher, has experienced the screen time debate on both sides. Her children attend Croton-Harmon schools, but she teaches just south in the Ossining Union Free School District, which takes a more gradual approach to introducing kids to screens. Kids in Ossining schools don’t take home a device until fifth grade, and, unlike some districts that require students to complete a certain number of lessons on educational apps, Ossining does not mandate screen time.
In Anderson’s classroom, school-issued devices are tucked away in a cart that is often hidden by a large paper easel and barely touched by students. The shelves in the back of her room are overflowing with books, board games and Legos. Break time features games like hopscotch, and students who are not working with Anderson during small-group time play chess or with math cards.
Anderson embraced ed tech when it started rolling out in schools pre-pandemic. But then she started to notice more focus and attention challenges among her students, and she worried that it was the result of their overall use of screens at home and at school.
She started researching screen time and educational technology use and was dismayed by reports showing that few digital learning programs have met federal standards for demonstrating effectiveness. She was surprised to see schools were regularly using digital books, despite evidence that kids read better on paper than on screens. “I used all these interactive math games thinking they were so great,” she said. “Then I realized, ‘I don’t actually think they’re learning any math from asteroid blasting multiples of five.’”
Anderson has since replaced screens with more hands-on activities and writing. Instead of a smart board, Anderson now works through math problems on her paper easel while students follow along on individual dry erase boards. For class rewards, students play board games, get an extra outdoor recess or have a dance party instead of Chromebook time. Plans left for substitute teachers no longer include any technology.
“I feel like I see students detoxing under my eyes,” Anderson said.
Related: Technology overuse may be the new digital divide
Michael Hanna, director of technology in Ossining, said while students have more access to technology than before the pandemic, the district is mindful of how it is used.
“I’m not a proponent of using technology with our littlest,” Hanna said. “When they are in school, they should be learning how to make friends. They should be learning how to have empathy. They should be learning how to share. They should be learning how to do all of those things. And by putting them on a device, I think it’s taking away so many opportunities for them to engage with their friends and with their peers.”
Last year, Anderson formed a community group, now with more than 250 members, aimed at educating and helping families cut down on tech. She also founded Mindful Tech Lessons, a national organization that educates caregivers and educators and provides consulting to parents, teachers and districts on technology usage. In early February, she testified on behalf of a bill in Vermont seeking more oversight over ed tech used in school.
She starts every workshop by telling attendees why she advocates for change. “When I first started teaching 20 years ago, kids wanted to be veterinarians because they loved animals, teachers because they loved helping kids or athletes because they love playing sports,” Anderson said. “Then it changed. Now, the most common answer is, ‘I want to be a YouTuber or influencer,’ and they no longer tell me why.”
Benoist, the Croton-Harmon parent, joined Anderson’s collective and has also advocated for less screen time in front of the district school board. She said she has heard less about her daughter watching TV shows and ads at school since January. Benoist welcomed the shift away from screens for elementary students, but said she still feels defeated when she thinks about how much screen time her daughter has already been exposed to in school.
“I’ve done everything I can to shepherd her through this world that’s already so technology-driven, to shield her childhood, to have her have a normal, analog childhood,” she said. “And I just handed her off to a school district and they destroyed that within three months.”
Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.
This story about screen time was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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