“Screens are part of childhood now — so our job is not to fight them, but to make sure they do not crowd out the other parts of a healthy childhood ,” writes expert Dr Onyinye Nwaneri, managing director of Sesame Workshop International South Africa. South African parents navigating their children’s relationship with screens may soon have national guidance to help them, but one expert says that even well-intentioned guidelines risk missing the point if they focus too narrowly on time limits. In May, the Department of Basic Education (DBE) told parliament it is developingnational guidelineson screen time for children aged two to six, marking the country’s first targeted intervention on children’s digital exposure.
The department cited international research linking prolonged, non-educational screen use to delays in language development, reading cognition, and fine motor control, risks that the guidelines aim to address by protecting children’s development of language, attention, memory, and social skills. But Dr Onyinye Nwaneri, managing director of Sesame Workshop International South Africa, argues that framing screen time as a quantity problem obscures a more important conversation. “An hour spent alone, passively watching mindless videos is one thing; but an hour spent video-calling a parent who is away for work is something else entirely.
These are very different screen time experiences, even though the stopwatch says the same thing in all three cases,” Nwaneri opined in a thought leadership piece. For Nwaneri, the more useful question for parents and caregivers is not how much screen time a child is getting, but whether that screen use is helping or hurting the overall balance of their day. This distinction is particularly important in South Africa, where families are navigating circumstances that differ sharply from those in many developed countries.
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In some homes, a shared mobile phone may be the only device available, with every minute of use shaped by data costs. In other cases, children may spend more time on screens because caregivers are managing work and household demands simultaneously, or because there are limited safe outdoor spaces for play. “In these instances, more screen time doesn’t make the parents careless; it just makes careful assessment more important.
When guidance focuses only on hours, it misses the bigger picture of digital wellbeing,” said Nwaneri. Rather than tracking minutes, Nwaneri recommends that parents and caregivers ask a different set of questions: These questions, she argues, shift the focus from “how long?” to “how healthy?” – a crucial reframing for families whose circumstances don’t fit neatly into universal guidelines. Sesame Workshop’s guidance, which Nwaneri draws on, emphasises co-engagement; the idea that when adults are present during screen time, even occasionally, screens can become tools for connection and learning rather than simply a way to keep children occupied.
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