I’ve been sitting on this announcement for a while. It makes me nervous to finally share it, but it’s time.

Jen T. and I have spent a long while building an online program for parents called the Screen Balance Program, now live at www.screenbalanceprogram.com.

What the Screen Balance Program Is

The idea came out of a familiar pattern in our own clinical work at EBTCS: a lot of what we do with families around screen problems is education, assessment, and planning, and much of that process doesn’t actually require sitting across from a psychologist. It can be done well at home, with the right structure. That’s what this program tries to be.

It’s organized into five modules and twenty-nine lessons, and takes about two hours to complete at your own pace. Any future updates to the program are included. Parents start with an assessment (the same one used in the free Screen Balance Check, below), which will help parents place their child into one of four screen balance profiles and shapes everything that follows.

How the Program Works

From there, the program walks through identifying which changes are actually worth making, building a family screen time plan and agreement, and handling the pushback when limits are set. From there, it moves into specific topics like first phones, social media, sleep, gaming, and online safety. Altogether, the program works to help parents understand how to manage screen time for kids.

Tools Inside the Screen Balance Program

A few pieces I’d point to specifically:

• An interactive heatmap and decision tree that narrow a family’s situation down to one or two changes worth prioritizing
• A parental control comparison to help sort through the options
• A few simulators, including one for rehearsing how to handle difficult moments, and another that walks parents through giving their thirteen-year-old a new phone with everything switched on.

The program is not built around the premise that screens are inherently bad. It’s built for parents who want a workable approach for their own family, at any child’s age, teenagers included.

Try the Free Screen Balance Check

If you know a parent, client, friend, or family member this might be relevant for, I’d appreciate you passing it along. There’s a free Screen Balance Check at www.screenbalanceprogram.com/screen-balance-check that takes a few minutes and gives a starting point on its own, whether or not someone goes further with the full program.

I’d welcome feedback from anyone who takes a look.

P.S. The logo was colored in by my son, who was deep into drawing dolphins at the time. He wanted “to be famous” and asked if his art could go online, so here it is.

Privacy: Your Family’s Data Stays With You

On privacy: everything entered into the check, the assessment, or a family’s plan is saved locally, in the parent’s own browser, on their own device. We don’t see it, and it isn’t sent to us.