The much anticipated summer movie Toy Story 5 features a battle between toys and tech — a plot likely to resonate with parents who see the pull of digital devices in their kids' lives, especially during the summer.
And that's not just a parental perception: Research clearly shows that screen time goes up dramatically during the summer.
"For kids, 7 to 12, they are using and spending more time on their screens, about 30% more, which is equivalent to about four more hours per week compared to school time," says Lauren Lee, a psychologist at Aura, an online safety company that compiled a very detailed report about kids' online lives based on data from nearly 30,000 devices.
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Aura gathered information through its parental control app that accesses children's and parents' devices and through surveys with parents and children around the country. It found that 75% of children ages 7 to 11 years old said that they would rather watch videos than play with toys.
It's a statistic at the heart of the Toy Story 5 plot, where 8-year-old Bonnie starts to ignore her beloved toys after her parents give her a "Lilypad" tablet that's the new social capital.
"Summer is a particularly vulnerable period for higher screen use," says pediatrician Dr. Jason Nagata, who was not involved in the Aura study. Nagata, who researches online behaviors of children and teens at the University of California, San Francisco, says the Aura research jibes with what previous studies have shown. In the absence of the structure and routine of school days, it is easy to reach for devices.
Higher screen time during summers is the norm now
The new study gives a degree of granularity, not just on the time children and teens are spending online, but on what they are doing — scrolling, playing video games and socializing virtually. (A virtual social group is a big part of the Toy Story 5 plot — but no spoilers here!) .
For teens, screen time goes up by 15% during the summer compared to the school year, the report finds. While younger kids are spending much of their time on devices watching YouTube videos or playing on the video gaming platform Roblox, teens are spending more time on social media apps, according to the new report.
Nearly 70% of children are on their devices by mid-afternoon, and 1 in 10 remain active on their devices at midnight.
"We are seeing nighttime messaging rates more than doubling across all age groups compared to the fall," says Lee.
The new Toy Story movie also portrays this, with Bonnie, staying up late on her new tablet, and reaching for it first thing in the morning.
More screens, worse sleep and mood
Studies also illustrate the negative health impacts of such high screen time during summers. The Aura report finds that as the summer wears on, one in three children score low on Aura's Digital Wellbeing Index, which correlates digital behaviors with a range of health parameters, including sleep, mood, isolation and their ability to regulate emotions. The company scores children on this index based on surveys of kids and parents as well as their screen habits.
"Time that is generally spent on screens is often displacing sleep, physical activity or outdoor time," says Nagata.
And those factors — adequate sleep, time outdoors, physical activity, in-person socializing with friends and family — are really important for the health and wellbeing of children, he says, especially during the summer when they aren't at school being engaged, active and interacting with others.
Kids don't want to be stuck to their screens all summer
There's some good news, too. The Aura report shows that kids have some self-awareness around tech: More than half of the children and teens surveyed recognize that too much time on screens isn't good for them, and more ranked spending time with friends (36%) and going outside (24%) higher than using a tablet (20%).
That's been shown in other studies, too, says Nagata. "Many children and teens themselves report that they actually don't want to be glued to their phones over the summer," he says. "It's just oftentimes, they're a little bit bored."
Screens are easy to reach for when bored, and many apps are designed to keep people hooked for extended periods, with constant notifications and alerts.
So, as kids around the country start their summer vacations, how can parents ensure that they don't spend their days sucked into their devices?
1. Give them something else to do. Fun and structure are the buzzwords.
Parents should try to provide fun alternatives to screens, Nagata suggests. "If you're just saying, 'Oh, you have to limit your screen use to 1 or 2 hours a day without providing fun alternatives, it can be really hard if the kid is still stuck at home and kind of bored," he says.
Nagata suggests activities that offer a "physical barrier" to devices, like swimming.
"I try to take my daughter swimming every weekend over the summers, and the pool has become our special father-daughter place," he says. "And it's also screen free. You cannot physically bring phones or devices into the pool."
He also recommends summer camps. A 2023 survey by the American Camp Association found that 90% of summer camps banned cell phones and tablets.
"Camps that especially provide opportunities for physical activity, outdoor play and opportunities for stronger relationships and social interactions may be especially beneficial for kids," he says.
For kids less interested in sports or physical activities, there are art, music and cooking camps, too. Niki Cordell runs a summer camp in Chicago called Junior Chefs Kitchen. Kids get hands-on experience cooking two recipes every day, and go to the park for about an hour. Once a week, they visit various restaurants in the city.
"Not all kids are super sporty, so this gives them the ability to build confidence and life skills in a different setting," says Cordell. Kids in her camp often go home wanting to recreate the recipes they learned, she says.
Organizing days around trips to the library or park, and taking advantage of community organizations like the Boys & Girls Clubs of America are lower cost ways to give summer days more structure.
2. Let the kids have a say. Try a "family bingo" approach.
Engage your kids in planning for days when they don't have camp or other activities, says Merve Lapus, vice president of education, outreach and engagement for Common Sense Media, an advocacy organization.
"It's actually really important to just have that discussion with the kids and recognize that it's very easy to get lost in screens, but we want to really be in agreement that this is something we're going to try and do together," says Lapus. He also recommends that parents do activities with their children.
"For my own teenager, this is going to be the year that she learns about driving," he says. "So we're going to spend a lot of time on things that are going to be very practical for their next stage [of life]."
Cordell, who is also a mother of three, says she and her children create a "family bingo sheet," with various activities. "It could be kayaking or water balloon fight day," she says. "Then we put a bunch of different activities in a jar."
When her kids get bored, they pick out an activity from the jar and do it. For this summer, one of her children suggested creating little characters out of shaving cream, says Cordell. "I was like, 'I've never heard of that before, but let's go for it!'"
Summer lists are also important to Simmons Hanson, a teacher and mother of three children, ages 8, 11 and 13.
"For years and years we have made a summer list," says Hanson, who lives in Washington D.C. "Sometimes it's big things on the list, like camps or vacations, trips to the beach. But it's also little things like a double-ice-cream-day."
Then there are activities that Hanson's middle child thinks of when she's bored that aren't already on the family summer list. Instead of writing them down, the 11-year-old Sallie Chappell Hanson says she files away the ideas in her brain for later.
"I think that your brain is like a catalog," she says. "Instead of saving files, it can save ideas."
Some of her ideas include entrepreneurial endeavors like selling lemonade or handmade bracelets in her neighborhood. Other ideas involve arts and crafts projects, or playing imaginary games with her 8-year-old sister.
3. Set some rules for the whole family (and follow them!)
"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends implementing a family media plan," says Nagata. That's an "individualized set of guidelines for your household."
That media plan should include times — like meal times and bedtimes — and places — like bedrooms — that are free of devices for the whole family.
"That means devices don't need to be on the table when we're having a meal together, if that's something that families are able to do," suggests Lapus. "It's really just important to recognize what are your family values and how do you center those?"
"We started to have some rules around limiting screen time because the kids were getting really grumpy after hours and hours of screen time," says Hanson.
And they revisit those rules at the beginning of the summer.
"Our family is sometimes managed by quirky rules, like you can have screen time when it rains," she says. "And sometimes it's determined by it's a long day after soccer camp and everybody needs to cool off and I need to make dinner. And so then that becomes screen time."
Her kids share an iPad and a Chrome Book, and each kid uses the devices for different things based on their stage of development. All her kids love listening to podcasts, she says, but they are often doing other things while listening to them.
4. Check your own screen use — and share your struggles.
Nagata also recommends modeling healthy screen use, especially as recent research suggests that children tend to mirror screen use by parents. Hanson agrees.
"We as parents, we have always modeled and narrated a lot of things around us," she explains.
"Even from when the kids were very young, narrating and modeling things about our choices – about why we choose to go here or there, or why we choose to wear this. Tech choice is no different."
It helps raise awareness in her children about the drawbacks of excessive technology use, and creates an ongoing conversation about it in her family.
Hanson used to regularly scroll through Instagram, she says. "And the kids love to look over my shoulder and look at Instagram," she says. "We would get stuck scrolling."
But recently, she realized such excessive scrolling through her feed was having a negative impact on her own mood.
"I could feel myself getting grumpy and getting short tempered with the kids, when I was trying to look at Instagram and parent at the same time," explains Hanson. "It's not a great combo."
So, she took Instagram off of her phone, and explained to her kids why she did that.
"Those sorts of choices continue to be necessary to explain as they grow up and are paying attention to everything that we are doing as parents," she says. "It feels really important to guide them in their choices with our own behavior."
Not surprisingly, Toy Story 5 also shows adults sometimes hooked to their screens. As Woody astutely observes in the movie, "Tech is for everything." But parents do need to put down their devices sometimes and help their children figure out how to use technology in a healthy way that leaves room for the good old imaginative play and real friendships they need.
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