Home I Design Screens for a Living & My Son Doesn’t Use Them.

I Design Screens for a Living & My Son Doesn’t Use Them.

I believe deeply in technology and the future we’re building. Waiting to introduce screens to my one-year-old is part of how I’m preparing him to participate in it.

October 3, 2026

byVeronica Shelton

Illustration of a mother looking at her phone while her toddler, held on her hip, watches the screen.

My son is one, which is something I can’t believe I’m saying since it feels like he was 6 months a week ago.

He has never watched a show, swiped through a tablet, or been handed a phone in a restaurant. Meanwhile, I run Oak Theory (a design and development studio) and Chunky Bones (an app development studio). Screens are a fairly significant part of how I pay for the wooden toys.

But when the laptop closes, the job changes. All day, people want my opinion…they book time for it. By evening, I’m on the floor presenting a spoon to someone who has no interest in my credentials and mostly wants to either chew it or hit me with it.

Illustration of a toddler holding up a wooden spoon to his mother on the living room floor, a closed laptop beside her.

Yes, I know…he’s one. Holding off on screens right now is the easy level. He can’t even ask for one yet. The negotiations come later. But the decisions start now, so this is me at the very beginning, writing it down before I have any idea how it goes.

And let me just keep it real, while he hasn’t used a screen, he has certainly seen them. He sees me on my laptop, at my computer, testing something on my phone while promising I’m almost done. I’m not a perfect parent. I’m a working one, and my work happens to be on glowing screens. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I love technology. I believe in what we’re building, in AI, and in the possibilities of humans and technology becoming more integrated. I know that last part can make a parenting conversation interesting but I stand ten toes down on it anyway. Even if one toe is painfully sitting on a lego.

I expect technology to be woven through almost every part of my son’s future. How he learns, works, creates, connects, and solves problems. I want him to have access to that world, and the confidence to help shape it. That belief is part of why I build the things I build.

The question I just keep coming back to, is what does he need before he gets there?

Logan (my partner) and I are making these decisions together, but underneath my part of the conversation is a very ordinary mother’s worry. His world is and will be full of technology. Am I giving him a good foundation by limiting his access for the next 4 years, or accidentally preparing him for a thriving career in 1894? Nods to Nikola Tesla.

So I went looking. And because I’m neurodivergent, “looking” was unlikely to mean reading one reassuring paragraph and going peacefully to bed. I wanted to understand the system. The research, the assumptions, the thing underneath the thing. I needed a real reason besides the obvious to why my son shouldn’t have access to screened technology.

I started with what I already know

The first place I looked was my own job. I build these things…I know what goes onto a screen.

In design, we think about where your eye lands, what feels obvious, and what happens next. A button’s placement can help someone reach their destination sooner. Clearer language can make a complicated task a lot less intimidating, and remove one unnecessary step in a user journey and you’ve handed someone back a piece of their day.

That’s work I believe in.

But those same skills can serve a different goal: keeping you there. Autoplay removes the moment when you might decide you’re finished. An endless feed makes sure there is always something else waiting. The experience can feel effortless because someone worked very hard on your behalf…or on behalf of your continued attention.

Same design skills. It just depends who we’re trying to help, and we aren’t always trying to help the customer.

I don’t think every screen is a trap, but I do think knowing how the doors are built makes you more thoughtful about which ones you open for your child.

My own relationship with attention is part of this. The way my brain is wired makes me think carefully about stimulation, transitions, and how an environment can make a task easier or harder. I’m not assuming my son’s brain works like mine. I’m paying attention because I know brains don’t all arrive with the same settings. And at one, he is still learning what his settings even are.

A video call and an endless feed are not the same thing

Then I went to the research, and the research starts with a number.

“Screen time” sounds wonderfully measurable. A number, a limit, a little parental dashboard. Finally, something in parenting that might fit into a spreadsheet.

Except the number leaves out quite a lot.

A video call with someone who loves him, a cartoon playing automatically, and an app we use to make something together can all happen on the same device. Counting their minutes doesn’t tell us what the experience is doing.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2026 guidance takes that wider view. Its framework considers the child, the content, whether media is being used to calm, what it crowds out, and communication within the family. For infants, current AAP advice emphasizes limiting use, sharing any viewing, and protecting time for play and interaction. WHO guidance still recommends no sedentary screen time for one-year-olds.

That distinction matters. I can choose to wait (having screen time) without pretending the research has issued one identical rule for every child and every screen.

There are reasons to be cautious though.

A Japanese study following 7,097 children found associations between more screen time at age one and later developmental delays, particularly in communication and problem-solving. But an association is not proof that screens caused those outcomes. Family circumstances, what children watched, and why screens were being used all matter when we interpret a finding.

There is also something researchers call the video deficit, or transfer deficit. Young children often have more difficulty applying something learned on a screen to the physical world than something demonstrated in person. That can happen with touchscreens too, although responsive interaction and adult support can help.

Recognizing a block on a screen and holding one in your hand are different assignments. The real one has weight. It falls. It makes a noise. Someone picks it up with you and says, “You dropped it.” For a child learning how the world works, that is a considerable amount of information in one small block.

He does not need screens yet.

Lowkey, I was kinda hoping he did.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to admit. I truly went into the research hoping to find the opposite. I wanted a study that said early screens make children more capable later…something that would let the designer and the mother agree. Something that for some reason made sense in my unexperienced mom brain.

What I couldn’t find was a convincing reason to believe my one-year-old needs screen practice now to be capable with technology later.

One study linked earlier touchscreen scrolling with earlier block-stacking milestones. Interesting, yes. Evidence that babies need tablets to prepare for their future careers, no. It was an association, and it didn’t establish a lasting advantage.

That was a little disappointing, honestly. I build this world. I wanted it to be good for him now, and later too.

So my brain did what it does. Fine…I’ll just make something. An app designed specifically for a one-year-old, with very deliberate limits and control over what it does. I develop apps. Of course I looked at a parenting question and thought, “We could build something for this.”

The developer in me would happily begin scoping features. The mother in me has to ask whether the user actually needs the product. At the moment, the user is still…very interested in a spoon.

And I’m okay with that, this one is for him. He isn’t falling behind by waiting. My whole job is making apps easy enough that anyone can pick one up in minutes, so he won’t need years of practice to use them. What takes real time is judgment…knowing what’s true, noticing when he’s being sold to, deciding what’s worth doing with a tool. That part I can teach him as he grows.

And the groundwork doesn’t need a screen. So much of technology borrows from the physical world. We turn things on and off, open and close, move one thing and watch another change. He can work a light switch with his hands long before he meets a toggle in an app.

Illustration of a toddler reaching for a light switch while a parent's hand steadies him.

And most importantly he gets to be a child inside all of this. To me, a block is a thought about systems. To him, it’s something to knock over. His interpretation is equally valid, and considerably less work.

The things that can’t wait

So if the screens can wait, what can’t? The things no app can install.

Curiosity. The kind that belongs to them. Noticing something, wondering about it, and eventually asking a question that sends you both looking for an answer.

Language. First so they can tell you what hurts, what delights them, and what they need. Later, it’s how they’ll work with people…and with tools that respond to what they ask. Apparently a child who can clearly ask for a snack is already halfway to a decent AI prompt.

Staying with something. A book. A pile of blocks. Whatever fascinating object you were about to put in the recycling.

Boredom. An unfilled moment that turns into something. This is the hard one. When a moment goes quiet, the urge is to supply the next activity. And “just sit still” isn’t the goal either…a quiet child isn’t always a regulated one, and a busy child isn’t always a distracted one.

Their minds deserve a little room to introduce themselves…and a life to draw from before everything becomes a drawing surface.

None of this means never. It’s a sequence, and Logan and I will adjust it as we learn who our son is.

First, the physical world. Hands, faces, books, weather, mess. There is a lot to investigate, and he takes the assignment seriously.

Then, technology together. Take a photograph. Record a sound. Look up why an insect does something deeply unreasonable.

Then, a little independence. With boundaries, and without expecting perfect self-control. Adults would fail that admission process.

Feeds, last. With conversations about how they work, and what they want from you.

And yes, that means looking at my own habits. It would be a fairly ambitious parenting strategy to teach him about attention while answering him from behind my phone.

There is hope in this, too

I don’t think I’m the only one holding this. Plenty of parents believe in the tools they use and make, and still get very careful when it comes to their kids. Including some of the people who built them.

“I spent my career at Microsoft trying to imagine what technology could do, and still I wasn’t prepared for smartphones and social media.”
Melinda French Gates, in The Washington Post

“I think finding a way to budget your child’s time with technology has always been the work of parents and will continue to be.”
Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, on The Ezra Klein Show, via Business Insider

That doesn’t make any of us careless, or hypocrites. There is room to be excited and discerning at the same time.

And I’m not here to grade anyone. Screens give a parent a moment to cook, work, recover, or simply breathe. I’m one year into this job with a pile of research, and I’ll get parts of it wrong. The beautiful wooden toy still loses to its own packaging most days. Fair feedback, honestly.

There will be screens. There will be tools I’m excited to show him, and probably tools he will have to explain to me while I insist that I used to do this professionally. It always comes back around.

I started with a question…what does he need before he gets there? I’m a year in, and my best answer is simply time. Time, a spoon, and people beside him who love him. Ask me again when he’s four and negotiating like a tiny lawyer. This is the first chapter of a long adventure, and I fully expect him to rewrite a few of my rules.