Who's Raising the Kids? What We Took From Susan Linn's Book — and What It Means Here in Singapore
We read Susan Linn's Who's Raising the Kids? Here are the suggestions we found most useful for Singapore families — and where they line up with MOH's screen guidance.
REFLECTION
Adrian
8/23/20268 min read
(Photo from https://www.consumingkids.com/)
Susan Linn is a psychologist and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and she co-founded the organisation now known as Fairplay — a group that has spent two decades on exactly this question. So when she opens the book by saying it has never been harder to be a parent, no matter how much resource you have, it does not read as hand-wringing. It reads as someone who has watched the ground shift.
Her point is not that parents have got worse. It is that the environment has changed. We live inside a commercial and digital culture that runs from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and it is designed by companies with far more time, money and behavioural research than any of us has. Their main goal is to make profit. For us, it is to make connections. So expecting a three-year-old or a tired parent to simply out-willpower that is not a fair fight.
One thing before we start. Nothing below is a verdict on how you are parenting. If your child already has a tablet, or a phone, or watches more than you planned, that is not a failure. It is the default. What follows are Linn's suggestions, the ones we found most usable in a Singapore context, plus our own read where we would put it differently.
Here in Singapore, some of this is already official. MOH's Guidance on Screen Use in Children (published 2023, updated January 2025) recommends less than one hour a day outside school for children aged 18 months to 6 years, and less than two hours a day for 7- to 12-year-olds unless it is schoolwork. It also says no screens during meals or in the hour before bed, at any age in that range. Several of Linn's suggestions land in the same place from a different direction — we have marked those as we go.
For little ones, roughly 3 to 6
1. Once they can talk, you can start the conversation about values
Linn's view is that the values conversation starts earlier than most of us assume. Once your child can talk, you can begin talking about the choices you make and why.
Our Family Tech Values worksheet is built for exactly that conversation: what technology helps your family do, and where it gets in the way of what your family cares about. It is also the most useful thing to hand to everyone else in your child's life — a helper, grandparents, whoever does pickup.
Your little one will start noticing how other people use their devices, and those people will not all be doing what you do. It helps to say so out loud: different families have different values, and that is normal.
2. It is easier to increase screen time than to reduce it
This is the one we felt most in our own homes. You can introduce technology at any point you choose. Taking it back is a different job entirely.
Linn's position is that it can still be done — and she gives parents permission to change their minds. Her suggested line is roughly this: tell your child you made a mistake, and explain why you think the current rules are not working.
Our read: this is the most freeing idea in the book. A rule you set last year is not a contract. Saying "I got this one wrong, we're changing it" models something more valuable than getting it right first time.
3. Every child is different
Your child may hit developmental milestones alongside their peers and still have completely different interests, strengths and vulnerabilities.
So the question is not "how many minutes is correct." It is: what does your child do around devices, and is that use crowding out something they need — gross motor play, unstructured time, being bored? If it is, that is the signal to cut back on that particular activity and move them towards something that keeps them properly engaged.
4. Know the difference between "active" and "passive" — it may not be what you assume
Linn draws a line between kinds of screen time, and it is not the line most of us draw.
A complete film or television programme has a beginning, a middle and an end. It can move a child, make them think, and show them a world beyond their own. Crucially, they cannot swipe it away. Scrolling through an endless feed of short videos does none of that, however "educational" the individual clips claim to be.
Linn is also clear that a whole programme is not automatically safe. Very little of what children watch is commercial-free, and marketing messages sit inside plenty of content sold as age-appropriate.
Our read: this is the single most practical reframe in the book for Singapore parents. It moves the question from how long to what shape, which is a question you can actually answer at 7pm on a weeknight.
5. Choose age-appropriate apps and programmes — and use someone else's homework
Most of us have shown our child something well ahead of their age. Linn points parents towards independent review services rather than app-store ratings: Children and Media Australia (a business name of the Australian Council on Children and the Media) and Common Sense Media. Both review apps, games, films and television, and both offer conversation prompts you can use while watching.
Our read: neither is written for Singapore, so the cultural fit is imperfect. Use them for the developmental read, not the values read — that part is yours.
6. Be as open-ended as possible
Linn's preference is for apps that leave the creating to the child: freestyle drawing, making music, building. She is wary of apps that hand children pre-drawn images, or that have a "right" and "wrong" way to make art, when there should be no such thing.
Our read: this is the same principle behind everything we put in the Analog Bag. The less the toy does, the more the child has to.
For children, roughly 6 to 12
We hear this from parents constantly: this is the stage where it gets complicated. Children start school, they meet families with different rules, and peer pressure arrives properly — from classmates and from other parents. Some schools require devices for learning. And decisions get harder if the early foundations were not laid.
7. Linn suggests postponing a smartphone
Linn's view is that smartphones are the most difficult of all the devices, because they follow a child everywhere. Her suggestion is to delay giving one for as long as you reasonably can.
The example most often quoted here is Bill Gates, who told The Mirror in a 2018 interview: "we didn't give our kids cellphones until they were 14 and they complained other kids got them earlier." (Snopes has fact-checked this one and it holds up.)
Our read, and we want to be careful here: we are reporting Linn's recommendation, not issuing one. Fourteen is her number, drawn from an American context. A Singapore family with two working parents, a child who takes public transport alone, and no landline is solving a genuinely different problem — and "she needs to be able to reach me" is a real reason, not a weak one. What travels is the principle, not the age: decide deliberately, decide late rather than early, and separate being contactable from having the internet in your pocket. MOH's guidance makes the same separation, advising against giving children unrestricted internet access on a mobile device, and against giving 7- to 12-year-olds access to social media. There are plenty of "dumb" devices today that can help to keep your child contactable.
And if your child already has a phone — this is not a verdict. You can still narrow what is on it.
8. Think early about "but I want one too"
Most parents give in at this point, and usually because their child's friends already have a phone or a smartwatch. It is very hard to hold a line alone.
Linn's answer is not more willpower. It is other parents. Every win in her book came from parents who organised. So the move is to find the families who also want to wait, before you need them — a few parents in the same class holding the same line changes the social maths entirely.
Our read: this is why our WhatsApp community exists. Not for accountability, and definitely not for judgment. For the moment your child says "everyone else has one" and you would like it to not be true.
9. Back real-world play over digital play
Digital play does not meet the human need for community and physical connection — it simulates it.
It is tempting to frame this as a trade-off, where real-world play costs more upfront. We do not think that is the real difference. Most of the best real-world play costs nothing at all: a park, a void deck, a cardboard box. The actual difference is that none of those has advertising inside it, and none of them is optimising for how long your child stays.
And the habits we are working on ourselves
This is the part of the book that stung the most, and it is the part we are still working on.
10. Children learn the behaviour from us
If we want our children's tech use to be deliberate rather than automatic, we have to be conscious of our own — especially when they are watching. Which is more often than we would like to admit.
Note what this is not saying. It is not "use less." It is "use it on purpose."
11. Turn off notifications when you are with them
The beeps and buzzes are engineered to pull you to your phone. They do it well. And every one of them takes your attention off whoever is in the room.
12. When they are playing, pick a phone-free thing to do
When your child is playing on their own or with friends, choose something for yourself that is not a screen. Build something, read a physical book, do calligraphy, knit. It is not about supervising them. It is about what they see you choose.
13. Use technology out loud
Linn takes this one from the researcher danah boyd: if you need to use your phone in front of your child, say why. "I'm using my phone to book a ride." "I'm checking the weather so we know whether to bring the umbrella."
Say it every time and two things happen. Your child learns that devices are tools with purposes rather than a place adults disappear into. And you become conscious of how often you reach for it, which is the harder and more useful half.
Our read: if you only take one habit from this list, take this one. It costs nothing, needs no rules, and works from the first day.
14. Make some family time tech-free and commercial-free
Device-free meals are the highest-return version of this, because they are the ones that turn into conversation. Some families extend it to a tech-free evening or a whole day.
MOH says the same thing, which is worth knowing if you need to explain the rule to a grandparent: no screens during meals, and none in the hour before bed.
15. Think about where the screens live
We will be honest, this one is hard in Singapore. Our homes are small and the living room is often the only room that where everyone gathers and spends time.
Still, it is worth asking whether the TV or projector has to be the centrepiece that all the furniture faces. Even one corner of one room that is understood to be screen-free does real work — it gives everyone somewhere to be together that is not organised around a screen.
What we did not take
We should be straight about this, because we do not agree with all of it.
Linn's underlying position is that marketing to children is harmful in itself, and her remedy is regulation and organised resistance. We think the sharper line is narrower: the problem is marketing aimed at the child, using the child's attachments, to get to the parent. And our remedy is a family's own capability rather than policy — partly because policy is slow, and mostly because it is the thing you can actually act on tonight.
Read it yourself
There is far more in the book than we have covered here — the chapters on how "educational" apps make their money, and on how expert endorsement disarms our scepticism, are worth the price on their own.
Who's Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn (The New Press, 2022). Available on Amazon SG, and worth a search on the NLB catalogue before you buy.
If you would like to start with the conversation rather than the book, our Family Tech Values worksheet is in the Parent Hub, and the WhatsApp community is where the actual problem-solving happens.
Sources
Susan Linn, Who's Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, The New Press, 2022 — Amazon SG
Ministry of Health Singapore, Guidance on Screen Use in Children (2023, updated January 2025)
Snopes, Did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Other Tech Billionaire Parents Advocate Limiting Children's Technology Use? — sourcing the Gates quote to a June 2018 Mirror interview