For years, the advice was simple: two hours of screen time a day, no more. In 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics quietly dropped that rule entirely, because screens are now unavoidable — school laptops, digital textbooks, family group chats. The replacement isn’t a new number. It’s a family media plan built around quality over quantity. Most parents haven’t caught up to this yet, and are still fighting the old battle over minutes and timers.

This 16-page guide gives you a real system instead of another rule that gets argued with every night: The Screentime Reset — Audit, Rebalance, Talk, Check In.

Inside: a step-by-step audit to see your family’s real usage, what the research actually supports (it’s less about total hours, more about sleep and what kind of screen time it is), a red-flags checklist, a framework for building your own family media plan, the one habit backed by the strongest evidence (phones out of the bedroom overnight), negotiation scripts that turn your kid into an ally against manipulative app design instead of an opponent, an offline-activities menu by age, and a 30-day plan that makes it stick — plus worksheets, a glossary, and an FAQ.

This isn’t about banning screens or guilt over the ones your kids already use. It’s about a plan your family can actually follow.

Guide 2 of the Digital Parent Playbook series, from Parenting in AI-Era.