Creators and YouTube execs get lots of screen time. For their kids, it’s different.

As a professional streamer, AboFlah spends much of his day in front of a screen. The Kuwaiti creator even entered the annals of Guinness World Records when he hosted a marathon charity stream that lasted for 268 hours.

Even though he himself is extremely online, AboFlah doesn’t want the same experience for his future children. While he has no immediate plans to become a dad, he told Wired that any sons or daughters of his would have to wait to get access to phones and social media.

“I won’t let her know about social media for a while,” he said. “I’ll let her live, experience life.”

AboFlah certainly isn’t the only creator thinking about this particular conundrum. How can parents enforce reasonable screen time restrictions if they rely on heavy screen time to support their families?

Different creators have different responses to that question. Casey Neistat joked that his kids are afforded “12 hours per day of screen time, not a minute more,” though he also questioned the link between excessive YouTube consumption and unwanted health outcomes. Fizah Nizam found a winning strategy by directing her kids toward creative uses of their screens. Ms. Rachel feels that cutting out all screen time is unreasonable, but she suggests that parents seek a balanced approach. Some influencers, like Erin Loechner, are so concerned about screen time that they have chosen to quit the creator lifestyle altogether.

As the debate over childhood screen time rages on, platform execs are weighing in. Even in cases where a parent runs a company that entertains millions of children, they still limit the amount of time their kids spend online.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, for example, has imposed screen time limits on his children, especially during weekdays. And when Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian had his first child with tennis legend Serena Williams, he said that he and his wife want their daughter Olympia “to be bored.”

Most recently, Dr. Garth Graham weighed in. The Head of YouTube Health is a father of four, and he opts for the Ms. Rachel approach. He strives for balance by doing his best to ensure that his kids use their screens for high-quality activities.

“You want to build a family media plan, a kind of contract laying out your screen time rules: How much daily, when, and what,” Dr. Graham said. “The number one factor in making it effective is creating it together. We sat down on a calm morning and co-created our plan, negotiating boundaries and consequences. It gave the kids a voice as co-owners of the rules.”

As part of his family’s plan, Dr. Graham makes use of the YouTube Shorts timer, which puts a 30-minute time limit on mindness, short-form scrolling. The timer is one of several products YouTube has unveiled that help its viewers take regular breaks. Creators who use those tools can enforce healthy screen time restrictions without coming off as overzealous or hypocritical.

As much as YouTube wants to promote its in-house mental health suite, the issue of screen time is ultimately a parent’s job to resolve. “The family’s responsibility toward the child is to make him aware once he grows up,” AboFlah told Wired, “so that [he says], ‘I don’t need to waste my time on things that don’t benefit me or my family.'”