Two-minute warnings may work well in sports, but they don’t, apparently, work for children.
New research shows that giving a child a “two-minute warning” before turning off a video game or TV show does not make it easier for a child to turn away from a screen. In fact, it makes it harder.
To learn more about how families manage a child’s screen time, researchers from the University of Washington’s Computing for Healthy Living & Learning Lab interviewed 27 families with children ages 1 to 5 about how they limit and end a child’s viewing time. They then asked a separate set of 28 families to fill out a diary describing each time their child interacted with a screen over a period of two weeks, including how the screen time experience ended, whether the child was upset with the ending, and how the screen time fit into a child’s ordinary routine.
Parents reported that their children were significantly more upset, more often, when given a warning that screen time was about to end than when screen time was stopped without a warning.
It’s a small study, but a detailed one, and its results surprised the researchers.
“We had thought that giving kids a little bit of a warning to set expectations would help things go better, and it actually made them much worse,” said the lead author, Alexis Hiniker, a University of Washington doctoral candidate in human-centered design and engineering.
Julie Kientz, associate professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington and the paper’s senior author, said the researchers had a theory: maybe instead of easing a child’s transition away from screens, a two-minute warning prepares them to fight it.
“This is definitely the age where parents are trying to avoid power struggles and kids are very welcoming to them,” said Dr. Kientz. “We think possibly that the two-minute warning kind of primed them for knowing that there was going to be this battle.”
To be certain that the behavior was related to the two-minute warning, the researchers culled through their data, looking for other associations. Did the parents offer the two-minute warning only before less pleasant activities, or before parents were getting ready to leave? But they weren’t able to find any associations other than the warnings themselves.
Ms. Hiniker said programs that automatically repeat or show previews immediately after a show is over can make it difficult for a child to turn away from a screen. Parents were also successful in easing transitions by blaming the technology, declaring the battery dead, the Wi-Fi broken, or pretending that a program a child watched on vacation was not available at home.
“What the technology itself did made a huge difference,” said Ms. Hiniker. “If the technology was backing the parent up, and kind of saying ‘screen time is done now,’ then things went better than if the parent just told the child ‘you’re done.’”
Making screen time part of a routine also eased the transition away from it, the researchers said. If a screen was always turned off at a particular stage — for example, when breakfast was ready — children rarely objected. But parents, they said, were reluctant to use that as a tool, worried that it would “cement screen time into their schedule” and lead to more.
One final surprise for the researchers, and for the parents who participated in the research: In general, the transitions away from screen time went remarkably well. And in about one in four screen sessions, children turned screens off on their own, something many parents interviewed said had never happened before — suggesting that parents may be putting too much weight on a few negative experiences when they think about screen time.
“About 80 percent of the transitions were totally fine,” said Ms. Hiniker. “In fact a lot of the time kids were happy about it — they were excited to do whatever was coming next.”