When Screen Time Can Help Parents

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: Displacement is not always bad, right? Sometimes you just need a break as a caregiver, and if you have a break and are less stressed and less overwhelmed, you are more high-quality in caregiving afterwards. So purposeful breaks, where you give a device to a child, you let them go do something else, can be beneficial. It can also buffer children if you are having, you know, conflict in the environment and their attention is elsewhere, it enables them to go elsewhere and you can still reach them. And devices provide information and social connections to parents, and so those are really important for their mental health and well-being. The trick is to be purposeful so you can increase your responsiveness, your warmth, affection, your consistency, and your stimulation. And if we think about media as just, like, one more context that parenting happens in, then it can be a context that can also promote those high-quality, parent-child interactions.