The order and disorder of screen time negotiations in Swedish parents everyday life

’Screen time’ has become a catch-all concept for debates on people’s dependence of digital devices in general, and children’s use of media technology in particular, almost exclusively focusing on negative consequences. While children and young people more often than not are at the center of debates around screen time, parents and their everyday practices are held accountable for monitoring, regulating and controlling their children’s screen use. Through 23 in-depth interviews with parents living in Sweden (in two separate rounds of field work during 2019/20 and 2023), this paper explores how parents understand and handle screen time in their daily life. In the empirical material, it quickly becomes apparent that screen time is a dense moral issue, in which parents navigate and negotiate both the values and their related practices in an everyday that is lived in, with and through media technology (in what Couldry and Hepp refer to as "deep mediatization" (2016)). The parents are forced to handle a constant oscillation between order and disorder, continuously assessing and reassessing what they imagine as right or wrong, good or bad. While these parents everyday stories differ in at times fundamental ways, their reference points of what screen time is and the related "best practices" uncover a "shared sense of legitimacy" (Taylor 2004). In many ways, the parents negotiations are situated in "grey areas", where recommendations of screen time and screen use (from, for example, the state, WHO and/or medical associations) come into conflict with the lived everyday. Understanding these grey areas become paramount in unpacking what kind of impact issues around screen time actually has on the social world. The concept of imaginaries (Taylor 2004; Dant 2012; Chambers 2016) is used as a framework to understand parents and their negotiations and practices, which brings light to the complex moral layers the parents describe.