Healthy screen time

As a company creating software to teach 3 year olds to read, one of the most common questions we get is “but isn’t screen time bad for kids?” Parents and teachers are often surprised to hear that I agree.

But the screen isn’t what makes screen time bad. The problem is what kids consume through the screen. Today’s digital experiences are candy for the brain. They’re designed to overstimulate our neural circuitry, to release floods of dopamine, and to keep kids engaged and entranced for hours.

YouTube, Netflix, and the App Store are like supermarkets. They’re full of junk food because that’s what sells. People decide what to eat based on “what tastes good”, not “what is good for me?”

But completely avoiding screentime is like completely avoiding grocery stores. I don’t need to grow all my own food at home just to eat healthy. There’s healthy food in the supermarket too, once you’ve learned where to look for it.

Healthy eating means replacing junk food with healthy food, not avoiding food entirely. Similarly, healthy digital habits is about teaching kids the difference between healthy and unhealthy screentime.

Unfortunately, the market for "healthy apps" today is small, like the market for "healthy food" was 40 years ago. Mentava is working to grow the market for healthy apps by making genuinely educational software for kids. But the reality is that when it comes to education, companies committed to prioritizing mission over profits have struggled to find viable business models.

As a result, almost every digital experience for children today is the digital equivalent of highly-processed, sugary snacks. Videos are inherently non-interactive and designed for passive consumption. Children’s “educational software” is designed to entertain, not to educate. An occasional piece of candy isn’t a big deal, but it’s hard to convince a kid to eat their vegetables if all they’ve ever eaten is candy.

The value proposition for teachers and parents is “babysitting without guilt”, or “entertain my kid for hours”. Advertisements can be surprisingly blunt about this fact, like Pok Pok’s ad which starts out: “if you’ve ever struggled with a toddler tantrum while you drive…”

Cognitively demanding experiences are generally self-limited because your brain gets tired. The same way you can't go to the gym and do squats for hours, kids' brains will be tired after 15-30 minutes of intense learning.

There’s a good rule of thumb for identifying healthy food: “if you can’t pronounce the ingredients, it’s not healthy”. When it comes to apps, the best rule of thumb I’ve found is: “if you can play it for hours, it’s not educational”.

Vegetables will never taste as good as candy, but they can still be delicious. At Mentava, we’ve seen the most success with kids who are the most restricted on screen time. For a child who hasn’t been desensitized by the extreme stimulation of modern apps and YouTube videos, a genuinely educational software experience can still be really fun, even if it requires them to think hard.