Parenting Screentime: Using Mentoring and Monitoring to Promote Healthy Digital Engagement

Grady Johnson, LMFT July 2025

“Get off your phone”, “You are so addicted to that game!”, “TikTok is going to rot your brain”. As parents, we all want to call out and limit the poor effects of screen time and social media use on our kids. This is not without reason, either! There is good evidence to suggest that as screen time and social media use increase, attention spans, social engagement, and mental health decrease. This is not a one-to-one cause-and-effect as there are many other factors to these relationships, but the fact remains: as use skyrockets, many parents are trying to figure out how to help their kids have healthier relationships with digital spaces. But how? Criticizing our kids for using their phones clearly isn’t the answer (even if that’s what most of us do). Digital monitoring and mentoring are two approaches recommended by experts in the field and a mix of both is needed to help your kids develop safely in this new digital frontier.

Monitoring

Digital monitoring is an approach to keeping kids safe online that utilizes digital and analog restrictions and alerts to keep your kids safe online. This includes not allowing phones or TVs in private rooms, using an alert system like the Bark app to flag and restrict specific content, or limiting the screen time allowed on different apps or devices. Digital safety advocate Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes advocates for forms of digital monitoring and restriction because of developmental capacity of our children (their brains aren’t designed to handle the amount of information the internet provides) and the predatory nature and carelessness of some online spacesi.

Monitoring is beneficial because it limits the risks and challenges our children may face in digital spaces. Our 10-year-old doesn’t have to possess the superior self-control to say “I shouldn’t play anymore Roblox today, it’s not healthy”, if the device shuts off after 60 minutes. More crucially, if we allow our children free access to devices and apps that display pornographic or violent content or contain digital predators, we are setting them up for failure and trauma no matter how responsible they are. The judgement of your grade-schooler should not be the last line of defense against risky or excessive digital use.

Monitoring is not the only answer, however. Eventually, our children age to the point where unrestricted access to use and risk is unavoidable. If your child has never practiced how to engage online in a safe environment, they are likely to fall into bad habits when they do gain access to it (remember, these spaces are largely designed for attention and profit, not health). Furthermore, if monitoring and restriction are done in secret or with a critical attitude, they can motivate sneaky behavior and undermine trust with your child. Both McKenna and Devorah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World encourage that monitoring only be part of digital health and safety—not the whole. The base must be a relationship of trust and safety. This is where mentoring comes in.

Mentoring

Digital mentoring is both the modeling of healthy engagement and direct guidance we offer our children around technology use. The goal of digital mentoring, according to Heitner, is to build the skills our kids need for healthy independent decision-making. To do that, they need time and exposure to those decisions with someone to guide them. Mentoring provides the relational base that monitoring relies on for credibility. If we don’t demonstrate engagement and understanding with our kids on these topics, they will likely dismiss and circumvent any discipline or restriction we try to introduce.

If you would like your preteen to know what an appropriate Instagram photo is, invite them into your thought process as you post a photo and then sit with them as they make a post of their own. If you want them to spend less time watching TV and more time outside, model this behavior by adopting these habits first. When it comes to traumatic digital exposure, let your kids know early and often that if they encounter something online that makes them uncomfortable or unsafe, they can always come to you with no judgment or consequence. We don’t want our kids hiding that they saw porn for the first time (even if it was on purpose) because they are scared we will be mad. Mentoring is essential for healthy lifelong habits for your kids and for nurturing safety when monitoring fails or isn’t present.

Bringing it All Together

Mentoring and monitoring are both part of a balanced approach to raising wise technology users. The specific balance of the two depends on your child’s age and development, the risks involved with different devices or sites, and your own values. If you want to make an impact long-term, mentoring is non-negotiable from the first introduction of a screen. Monitoring and restriction are more variable and should be relied on more heavily when your kids are younger and phased out as they get older. Chris McKenna advocates for “Slow Tech” over “No Tech” and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has proposed commonsense digital principles like no smart phones before high school and no social media before age 16ii. In figuring this out for yourself, find like-minded families who want similar guidance for their kids and collaborate with them. Access online resources for current guidance or schedule an appointment with a knowledgeable therapist to create a digital guidance plan for your household. You don’t need to figure it all out by yourself!

With justified concerns about the digital world, parents need a mix of mentoring and monitoring to keep our kids safe and healthy. While tech world is moving forward at a bafflingly breakneck pace, parents need to act with confidence in their convictions and with understanding towards their children, because our kids need present, compassionate guides in this new and confusing digital world.

Notes:

i. References to Chris McKenna’s opinons are taken from a variety of information on www.protectyoungeyes.com and the Protect Young Eyes Instagram page.

ii. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

i References to Chris McKenna’s opinions are taken from a variety of information on www.protectyoungeyes.com and the Protect Young Eyes Instagram page.

ii Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash