The Best Parenting Hack Is Being Rich
Young kids shouldn’t have screen time, a new report warns. But who can afford to follow that advice?
By Olga Khazan
AUGUST 3, 2026, 7 AM ET
SCREENS ARE DESTROYING YOUNG PROPLE
A news flash that won’t surprise anyone: Screen time is bad for young kids. The latest such reminder came from a systematic review conducted by a consortium of British researchers, who found that more screen exposure for toddlers is consistently associated with less interaction between the parent and child, as well as delayed development, sleep issues, and eating problems. The authors determined that children under 2 should not get any intentional screen time.
The review was performed under the auspices of a nonprofit called the 1001 Critical Days Foundation; the organization’s founder, Andrea Leadsom, told The Guardian that the conclusions were a “wake-up call.” But I am guessing that most readers of The Guardian are already awake. Richer, highly educated parents—the kind who have the time and resources to read the news and incorporate the warnings of experts into their child-rearing—are already more likely to limit their kids’ screen time than less educated, lower-income parents are.
High-earning and highly educated parents are likelier to follow all sorts of parenting advice on things such as breastfeeding and baby-led weaning. Because of this, researchers may never truly know if the advice appears to work because it’s good advice or because of the particular characteristics of the families who follow it. The unspoken secret of the parenting-strategies world is that, much of the time, the best parenting hack is just being rich.
Of course, wealthy parents can be irresponsible, and low-income parents can create loving, enriching homes. A high household income doesn’t guarantee a good childhood. But researchers have observed for decades that the children in families with more resources tend to have better outcomes in many areas of life. Greg Duncan, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied child poverty for many years, told me that this is because rich parents are better able to provide a home environment that leads to success. They are also able to afford to live in safer neighborhoods and send their kids to better schools, and to some extent they pass genetic traits such as high conscientiousness and IQ on to their kids. (In this story, I use parental income and education somewhat interchangeably, though education—especially the mother’s education, according to Duncan—seems to have a stronger effect on a child’s life outcomes than parental income.)
Consider how this all plays out with screens: High-income parents expose their kids to much less screen time than low-income parents do. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that children living in households earning less than $50,000 a year spend twice as much time with screens as children from households earning $100,000 or more. A Pew report found that low-income parents were more permissive with all sorts of screen time: They were more likely than high-income parents to let their child watch YouTube daily, for example, or to use smartphones to calm their child down
See less
Shared post from Laura Beall
American democracy has always been an experiment—centering ideas about individual freedom and collective responsibility. This reading list explores how those ideas evolved, and were interpreted by thinkers and reformers who tried to understand what democracy could mean in practice: https://hubs.ly/Q04qvH7B0 #America250 #USHistory #History #PoliSci
American democracy has always been an experiment—centering ideas about individual freedom and collective responsibility. This reading list explores how those ideas evol…
See more
The Best Parenting Hack Is Being Rich
Young kids shouldn’t have screen time, a new report warns. But who can afford to follow that advice?
By Olga Khazan
AUGUST 3, 2026, 7 AM ET
SCREENS ARE DESTROYING YOUNG PROPLE
A news flash that won’t surprise anyone: Screen time is bad for young kids. The latest such reminder came from a systematic review conducted by a consortium of British researchers, who found that more screen exposure for toddlers is consistently associated with less interaction between the parent and child, as well as delayed development, sleep issues, and eating problems. The authors determined that children under 2 should not get any intentional screen time.
The review was performed under the auspices of a nonprofit called the 1001 Critical Days Foundation; the organization’s founder, Andrea Leadsom, told The Guardian that the conclusions were a “wake-up call.” But I am guessing that most readers of The Guardian are already awake. Richer, highly educated parents—the kind who have the time and resources to read the news and incorporate the warnings of experts into their child-rearing—are already more likely to limit their kids’ screen time than less educated, lower-income parents are.
High-earning and highly educated parents are likelier to follow all sorts of parenting advice on things such as breastfeeding and baby-led weaning. Because of this, researchers may never truly know if the advice appears to work because it’s good advice or because of the particular characteristics of the families who follow it. The unspoken secret of the parenting-strategies world is that, much of the time, the best parenting hack is just being rich.
Of course, wealthy parents can be irresponsible, and low-income parents can create loving, enriching homes. A high household income doesn’t guarantee a good childhood. But researchers have observed for decades that the children in families with more resources tend to have better outcomes in many areas of life. Greg Duncan, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied child poverty for many years, told me that this is because rich parents are better able to provide a home environment that leads to success. They are also able to afford to live in safer neighborhoods and send their kids to better schools, and to some extent they pass genetic traits such as high conscientiousness and IQ on to their kids. (In this story, I use parental income and education somewhat interchangeably, though education—especially the mother’s education, according to Duncan—seems to have a stronger effect on a child’s life outcomes than parental income.)
Consider how this all plays out with screens: High-income parents expose their kids to much less screen time than low-income parents do. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that children living in households earning less than $50,000 a year spend twice as much time with screens as children from households earning $100,000 or more. A Pew report found that low-income parents were more permissive with all sorts of screen time: They were more likely than high-income parents to let their child watch YouTube daily, for example, or to use smartphones to calm their child down
See less
Shared post from Laura Beall
American democracy has always been an experiment—centering ideas about individual freedom and collective responsibility. This reading list explores how those ideas evolved, and were interpreted by thinkers and reformers who tried to understand what democracy could mean in practice: https://hubs.ly/Q04qvH7B0 #America250 #USHistory #History #PoliSci
American democracy has always been an experiment—centering ideas about individual freedom and collective responsibility. This reading list explores how those ideas evol…
See more