interactive screen time I don't mind at all. It's the passive screen time—YouTube, Paw Patrol, or even when my wife watches football during football season—that

interactive screen time I don't mind at all. It's the passive screen time—YouTube, Paw Patrol, or even when my wife watches football during football season—that I have a problem with. As long as my kids are thinking and responding to what they're watching, I'm okay with it. My 8yo son has been watching YouTube videos for inspiration for a few years now. He gets excited about something he sees in a game on youtube — Minecraft, Scrap Mechanic, Cities Skylines, Garry's Mod — then starts working on something similar himself, coming up with his own "challenges", setting up races for himself and me to compete against each other in, and making his own videos (which are really rough, but then we have a chance to talk about appropriate content in shared videos, and we review them together before making them public). He's had a few situations where he couldn't figure out how to make things work, like Minecraft redstone machines, and we go back over the video he saw it in and work through it. It's a great way to spend time with him, working on something together, and learning something and doing some critical thinking. I monitor his usage (I have a chrome profile that is logged into his account under my domain) to check the viewing history and (un)suggest things for him, to open up a dialog about the content of some videos.