Beyond the Numbers: What Parenting in a Digital World Actually Requires

Just because we can measure something, does that make the measurement meaningful?

It's the question at the heart of Jessamine Chan's dystopian novel The School for Good Mothers, where an institution attempts to determine whether a mother is fit to parent through brain scans, word counts, and blinking pattern analysis. The premise is that enough data, collected precisely enough, will reveal the truth about her capacity to love and care for her child. The absurdity is that it can't — and that the attempt gradually displaces the actual act of parenting.

The same question deserves to be asked of how we talk about children and technology.

The seduction of the measurable

There are so many things in the digital space that we can measure. How many hours did my child spend on a device today? How many times did they check their social media feeds? These questions have the appeal of concreteness — they suggest that if we track the right things carefully enough, we'll know whether we're doing it right.

But screen time as a metric tells you how long a child was looking at a device. And though it used to be a somewhat useful metric, it’s lost its meaning in today’s tech environment. Because it tells you nothing about what they were doing, who they were connecting with, whether they were creating or consuming, whether the experience was meaningful or mindless, harmful or genuinely valuable.

The same is true of age thresholds. Sixteen is not a magic number. Neither is thirteen, or eighteen. Development doesn't work that way — it's gradual, uneven, deeply individual. An age threshold is an administrative convenience dressed up as a developmental insight. It answers the question "at what age is this allowed?" while leaving untouched the more important questions: allowed for what purpose, in what context, with what support?

Who decides which metrics matter — and why?

Screen time was never a perfect metric, but it had some utility — particularly for young children, where the research on duration and displacement of other activities is more straightforward. The problem is that the threshold for "too much" was never as research-backed as it was presented. And in our current tech landscape, as children get older and their tech use becomes more varied and social, screen time loses its meaning. The "how much?" question crowds out harder ones like "doing what?" and "to what effect?" and "for this particular child?"

This matters because the research on kids and technology is genuinely complex. Effects vary enormously depending on the type of use, the platform, the context, the individual child's temperament and circumstances. A child using social media to maintain friendships with peers they rarely see in person is having a meaningfully different experience than one using the same platform to consume an endless stream of appearance-focused content. The screen time metric captures neither of these distinctions. It treats both as equivalent units of a problem to be reduced.

What gets crowded out

In The School for Good Mothers, the institution's metrics don't just fail to capture what matters — they actively interfere with it. Frida becomes so focused on performing measurable competence that the natural responsiveness of parenting — the instinct, the attunement, the relationship — gets squeezed out. The measurement replaces the thing it was meant to assess.

Something similar happens when parents approach their children's digital lives primarily through the lens of monitoring and control. The focus shifts to enforcing thresholds rather than having conversations about meaning. The relationship — which is ultimately the most powerful protective factor available — gets less attention than the numbers.

This isn't an argument against any boundaries or monitoring. Rather, it's an argument about where the center of gravity should be.

A lighter touch, a harder question

A more useful frame than "how much?" is "what for?" When a child is on a device, the more productive parental instinct isn't to count the minutes but to stay curious: what are they doing, and what does it mean to them? That curiosity opens conversations that monitoring apps can't. It builds the kind of relationship in which a child is more likely to come to a parent when something goes wrong online — which is, ultimately, far more protective than any content filter.

This doesn't mean abandoning structure. Boundaries around sleep, mealtimes, homework, and family time are reasonable and worth maintaining. But they're the floor, not the ceiling. Above that floor, the more valuable parental investment is attention — to the specific child, their specific relationship with technology, and what they actually need to navigate it well.

The questions worth sitting with aren't how much, or which apps, or what age. The important questions look more like “what does technology mean in my child's life right now?” “What are they getting from it?” And “what do they need from me?”

Those questions can't be tracked or scored. But they are the ones that matter most.