How we work

Who writes here

The guide is published by the editorial team behind familydevice, a screen time app by ANTICIPATER GmbH from Karlsruhe. So we have an interest in parents engaging with screen time. This is how we deal with that: in the guide’s articles we recommend no products, not even our own. Where technical tools make sense, we describe them in general terms, such as the parental controls built into operating systems.

Evidence, assessment, advice

Every article visibly separates three kinds of statements:

• Evidence: what studies, professional societies and authorities show. Each of these statements has a numbered source with a link to the original.
• Our assessment: what we conclude from the research. This is opinion, and we give our reasons for it.
• Our advice: what families can actually do, broken down by age where it makes a difference.

Sources

We link to original studies, guidelines, laws and the institutions’ own pages, not to summaries. For articles by the editorial team, we check figures and quotes against the original. We do not invent figures, studies or quotes, and we name the limits of a study, for example when it only shows correlations and not causes.

Without scaremongering

We name risks clearly, but in proportion: how many children does this apply to, at what age, under what circumstances? We avoid sweeping statements about “children” or “young people” as a whole, because children differ — in age, development and circumstances.

Updates and corrections

Under every title you will find the publication date and, if the content has changed, the date of the last update. We review guides at least twice a year and as soon as a new study, guideline or legal situation emerges. We correct errors immediately and note the correction at the end of the article.

Privacy

The guide sets no cookies and uses no analytics or advertising tools — like the whole website. You can subscribe to the RSS feed without signing up.