Children's
Screen Time

The Brief

Craftzing gave us three research options for this project, and our team picked “Growing up with screens: designing a mindful media journey for children (0–6).”

Babies and toddlers are spending more time on screens than ever, and parents feel stuck in the middle. Screens are a lifesaver when you need five quiet minutes, but parents constantly worry about overstimulation, sleep, focus, and social skills. Current parental control tools are confusing, frustrating, and completely ignore what a child actually needs at different ages.

Our starting prompt was: how can a custom, age-appropriate screen routine help parents and toddlers build healthy habits that balance fun, learning, and peace of mind?

Important detail: this project was all about research, not building an app. The client wanted us to really understand how parents make decisions in real life before anyone even thought about designing a product.

The Process

Scoping the Brief

We started by writing down everything we thought we knew about parents and screens (10+ assumptions each). Then we mapped them on a matrix to see what we could actually prove versus what was just a hunch. Turns out, almost everything was just a guess. Realizing how little proof we had stopped us from jumping straight to conclusions.

We also built an Ishikawa diagram to trace everyday problems back to their real roots. For example, a toddler throwing a tantrum over an iPad isn’t just “bad behavior” - it usually comes down to unclear rules, like dad being strict on weekdays while mom lets things slide on weekends.

2. Refining the Question

The project started with a super broad range of research ideas. Leading the question refinement meant running through multiple iterations, testing what worked, and shaping the final scope directly around client review feedback.

Things clicked when we stopped trying to jump to a solution and focused on the real problem. Immigrant parents deal with double the pressure: trying to fit into local Flemish culture while keeping their own rules and language alive at home.

Mapping the Ecosystem & Personas

We mapped out everyone who gets a say in a parent’s screen choices. That includes government guidelines that are too vague to help, daycares with rules that clash with home life, and other parents who trigger constant comparison. For immigrant families, screens were often used on purpose to keep their native language alive or stay connected to family back home.

We built two extreme personas to test our ideas:

• The Nerd: Reads every study, adjusts rules as her child grows, and doesn’t care if other parents judge her.
• The Noob: Hands over the screen during stressful moments, feels guilty right after, and just copies whatever other families are doing.

The real difference between them wasn’t their parenting style. It was confidence - and confidence depended almost entirely on how much they let other people’s opinions get to them.

Survey + Field Interviews

We ran a survey with 51 parents and did 14 deep, 20-to-30-minute interviews with immigrant parents living in Belgium. This gave us material to organize into 35 distinct themes.

I ran the correlation analysis on our survey results, which led to our clearest finding:

Parents who cared most about looking like a “good parent” were the same ones picking screen habits just to impress others ($r = 0.75$). Meanwhile, social pressure had almost zero effect on whether parents were willing to speak their mind ($r = 0.03$).

In short: pressure changed how parents acted, not what they actually believed.

Key survey stats:

• 71% felt Belgian parenting rules were stricter than what they grew up with back home.
• 51% could point to an exact moment they felt judged at a playground or school pickup.

The Cultural Probe

Interviews only tell you what people say when they have time to think. We wanted to see what actually happens in messy, real-life moments. So we made a 10-day physical booklet with quick drawing activities - like coloring a screen-time wheel or drawing a mountain to track their best and worst screen moment of the day.

Our first draft felt too much like a boring test, so we scrapped it. The version we sent out focused on quick drawings. Parents shared way more when asked to draw on a hand outline or a picture than they ever did filling out a text box.

The entries we got back were honest:

• One mom drew a map of her social circle and crossed out her daycare nanny as her biggest source of judgment (more than strangers or social media).
• Another mom logged handing her kid a tablet during a public meltdown “because people were staring.” A few days later, she logged that same week’s best moment: her kid on a video call with grandma. Same device, totally different feeling, all based on who was watching.

Synthesis

Three big takeaways stood out across every family we talked to:

• Guilt stays, even when screens help: Even when a screen solved a real meltdown, parents still felt bad about using it.
• Professional pressure hits hardest: Daycare staff created far more stress than grandparents, friends or social media.
• Small wins build confidence: Winning small, daily moments helped parents trust themselves much faster than following outside advice.

Final Result

We didn’t wrap this up with an app mockup or a prototype. Following the client’s brief, we delivered a clear set of proven facts about how immigrant parents in Belgium actually make screen decisions.

The Core Finding

The big issue was never really about screen minutes. It was about parent confidence, and how much room social judgment takes up in decisions parents are already capable of making on their own.

Pressure changed what parents did — not what they actually believed. That gap is the real design opportunity.

Next Steps

If a design team took our findings to build an actual product, the goal should be building parent confidence, rather than creating another strict, rule-based app full of timers and locks.

Here is what that design brief would look like:

• Focus on Confidence Over Control: Replace aggressive warning bars, countdown timers, and guilt-inducing charts with positive reinforcement when parents make intentional choices.
• Recognize Context and Value: Distinguish passive video consumption from meaningful engagement, such as video-calling family abroad or practicing a language.
• Keep Rules Private: Support families in setting habits aligned with their own values, away from peer benchmarks and external comparison.