Is Keeping Your Young Kids Off the Internet Important? What We’ve Learned So Far
Last fall, at a birthday party, I watched my five-year-old daughter stand in front of a tablet propped against a juice pitcher. A cluster of kids had gathered around it, and nobody was talking. They were watching a video of someone opening plastic eggs. My daughter looked up when I called her for cake, then looked back at the screen. She didn’t move. I had to physically steer her away by the shoulders, and she asked, twice, if she could watch it again.
That was the moment the question stopped being theoretical for me. Is keeping your young kids off the internet important? Before that party, I would have said yes in a vague way, the way you say yes to eating more vegetables. After it, the answer came with a knot in my stomach.
I’m not a screen-free absolutist. I don’t think a tablet is a moral failure, and I don’t believe a child’s brain dissolves after eleven minutes of cartoons. But I’ve noticed something in our house that’s hard to argue with: the longer we keep the internet out of my kids’ daily reach, the more they seem to do. My son, who is seven, builds things out of cardboard and tape. My daughter makes up songs about the dog. They fight, they get bored, they complain. None of that is charming in the moment. But it’s the stuff that seems to be building something in them.
What changed our approach wasn’t a study. It was the way my daughter acted after that party: flat, whiny, oddly uninterested in her own toys for the rest of the day. I don’t think one video caused that. I think the whiplash did — going from a world where she was in charge of her own play to a world where something else was.
We started small. No solo screen time at all for the youngest. The tablet lives in a kitchen cabinet and comes out when an adult is sitting right there, usually for something specific — a video about volcanoes, a call with Grandma. My phone stays in my pocket at the park. We don’t hand it over in restaurants. It’s not a ban, exactly. It’s more that the device is inconvenient and always attached to a person.
What that does, practically, is create friction. A four-year-old can’t reach a cabinet. A six-year-old can ask, and the answer is often “not right now.” That friction matters more than any rule, because the internet is designed by people who are very good at their jobs, and a young child has no defense against that. The problem isn’t even whatever questionable video might pop up. It’s that no adult is there in the moment to say, “Wait, what did that character just do?” or “Why do you think that happened?”
There’s a difference between a screen and the internet, too. A downloaded movie has an end. YouTube doesn’t. The algorithm has no natural stopping point, and young kids don’t have the internal brakes to create one. My son once watched a fifteen-minute video about excavators and then calmly handed the tablet back. He has never once done that with autoplay.
One thing that helped us: we stopped treating screens as a reward. If the tablet is what you get for finishing homework, it becomes the most valuable thing in the house. Instead, we treat it like a tool that lives in the kitchen, same as the blender. Nobody begs for the blender.
The hardest part isn’t the kids. It’s me. There are afternoons when I’m fried and the tablet is the only thing that will buy me twenty quiet minutes. Some days I take it. I don’t think that makes the whole project a failure. It just means the standard is “mostly, with exceptions,” not “always.”
What I’ve noticed is that the exceptions have a cost I can see. When my daughter gets a long stretch of screen time, the next hour is rough — she’s restless, quick to cry, uninterested in anything that isn’t a screen. When we hold the line, the first ten minutes of boredom are loud, and then something shifts. She finds the markers. She starts a game with her brother that involves a lot of rules and a lot of arguing. It’s not peaceful. But it’s hers.
I don’t know how long we can keep this up. My son is already asking why his friend has a phone and he doesn’t. The questions will get harder, and at some point the answer “because you’re seven” will stop working. For now, the plan is to keep the internet in shared spaces, on shared devices, with an adult nearby — not because I think screens are poison, but because I want the first version of the internet they meet to be one where someone is sitting next to them, talking.
So is it important to me? Yes, but not as a rule I’m proud of. More as a bet. I’m betting that a few more years of cardboard forts and made-up songs will make them better at handling the internet when they finally get it. I could be wrong. Ask me again when she’s ten.
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