Not all screen time is the same. That sounds obvious — until you notice how often the debate collapses into one blunt rule: fewer hours.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — author of The Anxious Generation, and a researcher who studies tech and society at NYU Stern — makes a clearer argument: there is good screen time and bad screen time. The difference isn’t just duration. It’s what the screen is doing to a child’s attention, relationships, and sense of self.
In the clip below (~47:40), he lays it out plainly. Here’s the part every parent should hear — and how it connects to why Makerplay exists.
Watch on YouTube · starts at 47:40
Good screen time, in Haidt’s words
Haidt asks parents to stop treating “screens” as one bucket. Two kinds of screen time, he says, are basically fine:
One-on-one connection
A phone call or FaceTime. Real conversation with a real person. No problem with that.
Long stories
Movies and longer narratives. Humans are storytelling animals — we’ve always raised kids with stories.
A movie doesn’t train a child to swipe away boredom every five seconds. You settle in. You follow a story. That, Haidt argues, is a very different beast from short-form social feeds.
Bad screen time: each platform harms differently
Then he draws a hard line on short-form social video — and explains that platforms aren’t interchangeable. Lumping them together as “social media hours” dilutes what the research can see. Each one has a different profile of harm.
Social comparison on steroids
Especially destructive for girls’ self-esteem. It puts them into constant comparison — not with the ten or twenty girls in their class, but with thousands of curated, filtered images of beauty. Haidt argues it’s a major driver of depression and anxiety in teenage and preteen girls.
TikTok
The slot machine for attention
Less about status comparison, more about addictive entertainment. Watch five seconds; if it isn’t gripping, swipe. That’s a slot machine — teaching kids that the moment they feel boredom, they should escape it. Haidt calls it a major driver of fractured attention — what kids themselves call “brain rot.”
Snapchat
Strangers, secrecy, disappearing evidence
Makes it dangerously easy for kids to connect with people they don’t really know — including unverified adults. Messages disappear. “Friends” balloon into thousands of strangers. Haidt notes its role in enabling predation, sextortion, and easy access to drugs when everything is ephemeral and unaccountable.
Discord & Roblox
Talking to strangers
Haidt’s lab is still studying these more carefully, but his rule of thumb is already clear: don’t put kids on platforms where they talk to unverified adults and strangers. Any product that grows by pulling children into open social graphs with unknown adults is playing a dangerous game.
His bottom line isn’t subtle: our kids are being chewed up. These companies sell children’s attention. As a society, we protect children — even when a 14-year-old could theoretically make money being exploited.
What this has to do with Makerplay
I built Makerplay because I watched my son create something — a real game — and share it with people who loved it. That moment felt like the opposite of the feeds Haidt describes.
Makerplay is deliberately designed as a different kind of screen time:
Haidt’s framing helped put language to something many parents already feel: “less screen time” is incomplete advice. The question is whether the screen is turning your child into a consumer of other people’s content — or helping them become someone who can make something of their own.
We want Makerplay to be firmly in the second camp.
If this resonates, rewatch the clip above — and if you want to talk about what “good screen time” looks like in your house, write me anytime.