Screens in Schools: What the FCC’s Listening Session Made Me Think About as a Parent
At seven o’clock on a Tuesday, I found myself in a Zoom room with about a hundred muted strangers. The FCC and NTIA were holding a virtual listening session on screen use in schools, and my second-grader was doing math homework on my old laptop across the kitchen table. Every few minutes I’d glance at her, her forehead wrinkled at long division, and then back at the panel of speakers taking turns defining “excessive screen time” in their careful, bureaucratic language.
It wasn’t the first time I’d participated in one of these. I’m a teacher by training, but I’ve also been the parent squinting at a Chromebook notification. The session was mostly procedural: people from different states, with different titles, testifying about eyestrain, attention spans, and the uneven quality of educational apps. But one line stuck with me. A school district liaison from somewhere in the rural Midwest said, “We keep asking whether the device is the problem or the lesson structure is the problem. So far the answer is, ‘Yes.'”
That earned a few muted chuckles. But she went on to explain that her district had spent years buying devices before anyone asked what would happen to a six-year-old’s body and brain after five hours of sitting straight as a pencil, staring at a backlit panel. Her point wasn’t that screens are bad. She just wanted the FCC to consider how they’re being used—in short bursts, with movement, or as a permanent replacement for paper, conversation, and glue sticks.
I thought about my own classroom before I had kids. I taught eighth grade English, and there was a period when every assignment needed to live in Google Classroom. We had no school-wide policy, so I made my own. On days when we were analyzing a poem, we’d all close our lids. I’d read the poem aloud, and they could mark it up on a printed page or just doodle in the margins. Those lessons weren’t anti-tech. They were just slower—a nod to the fact that not everything worth learning fits neatly in a cloud document.
During the listening session, a woman talked about her teen son who develops headaches by second period. She described adjusting his screen brightness, buying blue-light glasses, and asking his teachers for paper versions of assignments. One teacher refused, saying all materials had to be digital. Another sent her a PDF to print at home. The inconsistency, she said, was exhausting. “I don’t want him to be behind on typing,” she told the panel, “but I also don’t want him to hate school by fifth grade.”
I’ve heard that same exhaustion from parents in my own life. My friend Rachel has three kids in three different schools, each with a different app for attendance, grades, and homework. She is the unofficial IT department for her household. The listening session didn’t solve her problem, but for an hour, someone at the federal level was asking the right question: What are we actually expecting children to do with these devices?
The practical side, from where I sit, is less about policy and more about habit. If you’re a parent or teacher feeling overwhelmed by screens, there are small shifts that make a real difference. I started implementing “screen-free transitions” this year. Before we move from one subject to another, we spend three minutes with our lids closed—just talking or looking at the window. It’s not a mindfulness ritual. It’s just a way to reset. On a recent afternoon, my daughter looked at the oak tree outside the classroom and said, “That bird is so loud.” I hadn’t noticed. For those three minutes, we were both somewhere else.
At home, I’ve also become more comfortable saying no to certain digital assignments. If a worksheet can be printed, I print it. Not always—I don’t want to be the difficult parent who makes extra work for the teacher. But sometimes, the physical act of holding a page and circling an answer is enough of a break from the glare. When my daughter tells me her eyes feel tired, we take that literally. We don’t push through. A ten-minute break with a snack and a walk around the living room is often all she needs.
One more thing the listening session made me realize: teachers need backup. The panelists weren’t just asking about screen time limits. They were talking about training. A teacher in the chat wrote that she was never taught how to integrate a tablet into a lesson plan in a way that actually served the material. She just got the device and a directive to use it. So now she’s inventing her own system, trial and error, while also managing a room of thirty kids. That’s not a reason to throw out the technology. It’s a reason to be patient with the people on the ground.
As the session wound down, I closed my laptop and helped my daughter with the last few math problems. Her school has no formal limits on screen use, but her teacher sends home a newsletter each week with suggestions for analog activities—board games, drawing, reading a physical book. I appreciate that, because it gives me permission to step back without feeling like I’m failing some modern parenting benchmark.
I don’t know what the FCC will do with all those comments and testimonies. Maybe they’ll draft guidelines that give schools clearer guardrails. Maybe this listening session will just become a page of notes on someone’s desk. But it reminded me that the conversation about screens isn’t really about screens. It’s about how much trust we’re willing to place in the adults and kids who have to live with our choices. And that trust is something no federal agency can hand down. It has to be built, lesson by lesson, device by device—sometimes with the lids open, sometimes firmly closed.
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