I wrote last spring about screen time and the anxious generation, and about what Jonathan Haidt’s work means for divorced parents trying to hold a line across two households.
Something has shifted since then. The fight in my office is no longer about how many hours. Parents have largely accepted that hours matter. What they are fighting about now is content. Which games? Which apps? Which settings are switched on, and at whose house.
That is a harder argument, and it is a more consequential one, because content is where the actual risk to a child sits.
The Argument Has Moved From How Long to What Exactly
Two hours of a math app and two hours in an unmoderated voice chat with strangers are not the same two hours. Every parent knows this intuitively. Very few parenting plans reflect it.
The plans I see still say things like “reasonable limits on electronic device use.” That language was serviceable in 2019. Today it resolves nothing, because both parents can comply with it while running completely different households.
What actually reduces conflict is specificity. Named platforms. Age ratings. Whether voice chat with non-friends is permitted. Whether purchases require a parent’s approval. Whether the child’s account is linked to a parent’s account so the settings cannot be quietly changed after a handoff.
Games Are Their Own Category, and Parents Should Treat Them That Way
Video games are not passive screen time. They are social environments with chat, spending, and other users in them, which is why they generate a different kind of argument than a movie does.
The platforms have moved on this. Roblox in particular has rolled out a set of parental controls and age-based communication settings, including facial age estimation to sort players into age groups and restrict who can talk to whom. Parents can link to a child’s account, see who they are chatting with, set spending limits, and turn off certain communication entirely through the platform’s parental controls.
Here is why that matters in a custody dispute. Once a safeguard exists and is free to switch on, “I did not know” stops being an answer. A parent who cannot say what their child is playing, who they are playing with, or whether spending is capped is describing a supervision problem, not a preference difference.
Consistency Between Households Is the Legal Argument, Not Your Preference
Parents come in wanting a court to agree that they are the better parent because they have stricter rules. That is not how this works.
New York courts look at the best interests of the child. Screen time and content become relevant when they touch the things a court already cares about: the child’s stability, their functioning at school, their sleep, their safety, and whether the two households are capable of consistency. It becomes even more relevant when one parent is using the device as leverage, running the permissive house to be the preferred house, or handing over an unrestricted tablet during their parenting time because it is easier than parenting.
That reframing is what makes the argument workable. Stop litigating whose rules are correct. Document the effect on the child, and negotiate structure.
Assume the Devices Are Discoverable
This is the part parents do not expect, so I will say it plainly.
Devices show up in discovery. Screen time reports, viewing history, app inventories, chat logs, and account settings can be requested and subject to subpoena, and they are being requested. A parent who has spent two years complaining about the other household’s digital rules should expect to have their own household’s records looked at with the same interest.
Two practical consequences. First, if you are going to raise it, be prepared to substantiate it, and to be consistent yourself. Second, do not solve your concern by installing monitoring software on your co-parent’s device or by planting a tracker to see where they are going. Surveillance of an adult is a separate legal problem, and it will overshadow whatever you were worried about in the first place.
What to Actually Put in a Parenting Plan
If you are negotiating or modifying an agreement, this is where I push for detail:
- Named platforms and games that are permitted, and the age ratings that apply
- Whether voice or text chat with users outside an approved friends list is allowed
- Devices in bedrooms overnight, or not, in both households
- Purchases, loot boxes, and in-game spending, and who approves them
- Which parental control settings must be enabled, with accounts linked to both parents where the platform allows it
- A rule that neither parent changes a child’s account settings, passwords, or linked accounts without notice to the other
- How a disagreement about a new app or game gets resolved, and by whom, before it becomes a motion
That last item is the one people skip and the one that saves the most money. New platforms will appear that nobody contemplated when the agreement was signed. If there is no decision mechanism, every new app becomes a fresh dispute, and some of those disputes end up in front of a judge at a cost that is wildly out of proportion to the question.
Where the conflict is chronic rather than occasional, a parent coordinator can absorb these decisions without a court appearance.
The Bottom Line
The screen time argument grew up. It is now a content and safety argument, and the parenting plans written a few years ago are not built for it.
If your agreement still says “reasonable limits,” it is not protecting your child and it is not protecting you. Get specific, get the platform controls enabled in both houses, and get a mechanism for the next platform nobody has heard of yet.
If device use, gaming, or online safety is a live issue between you and your co-parent, contact an experienced attorney to talk about what belongs in your agreement.