Teenage Boy Screen Time Tips

By Grady Jordan, a Teenage Boy

How as a teenage boy with a social life I average under 1.5 hours of screen time a day. 

Now if that sounds like a lot to you, you might as well click off this article because nowadays if you average under 4 hours of screen time a day, then that’s good. I have some friends that average north of 8 hours and they see no problem with it! One trick is to delete any unnecessary apps because the biggest things that were increasing my screen time were the video games- Pokémon Go and Baseball 9. I do not play any video games on my phone but do enjoy NYT games (like Wordle and Connections). Once I realized I didn’t need these apps, and that they were consuming 75% of my screen time, deleting them dropped my screen time significantly. Another important thing is to be aware of the time you’re spending on your phone- for example, pay attention to the screen time tracker.  Over half of my screen time was spent reading pointless articles that I didn’t need to be reading because they didn’t benefit me at all.  Realizing that was pointless helped me to stop doing it.  My last, and final, tip is to limit social media and mindless scrolling.  Most of the content on TikTok is a waste of time.  I don’t know how much of the articles about how screens melt your brain are true, but with all the dumb purposeless content on there, I am not too excited for the future when our leaders have a serious addiction to watching car wrecks and Subway Surfers gameplay on TikTok.