It usually begins as a solution rather than a problem: a phone during meals, a cartoon while the cooking finishes, a tablet on a long afternoon when nothing else will hold a toddler’s attention.
Three Indian families who reversed that habit told The Better India what worked, and how long it took.
Jodhpur: Replacing the Screen, Not Just Removing It
For Gaurav and Rashmi Pandey, screen time entered their daughter Nandini’s routine at around 18 months, initially as television during meals. It settled into habit.
The couple began working on it deliberately once Nandini turned four. Gaurav started by redirecting her towards drawing, which she already enjoyed. The family moved from phone to limited television, then reduced television too, filling the time with park visits, crafts and children’s yoga.
They also stopped using phones in the bedroom and cut their own screen use in front of their daughter. Their advice to other parents is to stop pairing food with television.
Dehradun: Making Household Chores the Entertainment
Khushboo Goel, an IIM Lucknow postgraduate and former supply chain manager who now runs an early childhood venture called The Hush Tree, treated screen time as a decision rather than a battle.
She involved her son Udayan, now three and a half, in ordinary household work from toddlerhood. Setting the table, washing vegetables, folding clothes, making chaach and watering plants all became his tasks. The spillage and the extra time were accepted as part of the arrangement.
Watering and pruning now occupy him for close to 40 minutes a day.
Faridabad: Never Introducing Screens as Entertainment
Neha Garg, who works in branding and podcasting, and Siddharth Batra, a football coach, followed their paediatrician’s advice of no screens before the age of two.
Their son Rishaan, now three, has never used a screen for entertainment. His first exposure was watching old videos of himself and video calls with grandparents.
The couple use screens for work, communication and sports scores, and keep him occupied with play, books, household tasks and their community work for rescue dogs.
The Wise Take
None of these families describe a rule that solved the problem. They describe substitution, which is slower and asks more of the adult than a screen does. What the three accounts share is that the child’s screen time fell only after the parents changed their own habits, whether that meant putting phones away at mealtimes or accepting spilt water on the kitchen floor. Screen guidance for young children is easy to find and hard to follow. The difficult part is deciding what fills the hours instead.
