“It has snuck into all parts of our life” – A phenomenological account of a Swedish single mother’s experiences with screen time in everyday family life

Screen time has become one of the more pervasive debates in recent years, eliciting recommendations from states and health organizations alike. While the debate often focuses on the negative aspects of screen time and screen use, actual experiences are seldom at the forefront of these debates. This article explores a Swedish single mother’s experience with her child’s screen time, in their everyday domestic life. The case is selected from a larger empirical body of 23 semi-structured interviews with 34 parents living in Sweden. A social phenomenological perspective is applied to explore the everyday expectations and negotiations this mother experiences and engages in. It is clear that the way screen time is experienced is highly context-dependent and often reliant on negotiation work around ambivalence and uncertainty. As the mother moves through the small life-worlds of her home life, screen time attains differing, and often diverging, meanings. As a phenomenon, screen time holds a distinct place in everyday life, dependent on modes of attention (visible in negotiations around rules, management and notions of trust) and inattention (as ‘naturalized’ and routinized in the domestic space).