This Dad Shared His Family’s Tech Policy On TikTok & It’s The Sweetest Document On Earth

Every family has their own approach to screen time, whether it’s a set amount of time per day, a complete free-for-all, or you keep your household completely analog (you guys impress me and scare me a little bit). Some states are even enacting legislation to limit how much time kids spend on their phones. But as we all know, sometimes it’s easier in the moment when you have a million things to do to cave and give your kids more time on their tablets or phones, even if it’s not really in line with your overall goals for your family. Personally, I catch myself telling my son yes or no about what he can watch, and when, kind of arbitrarily. So when I came across this TikTok video of a dad explaining how his family approaches technology use, I immediately adopted it for my own.

Leong Hiew is a dad based in Australia. In his video, he says his sons are old enough to start having a little spending money, and when he sat down to think about how to introduce them to this new responsibility, he realized the rules he already had in place for technology use in their house also applied here. And just... prepare to adopt a new family doctrine.

The guiding principle for their family is that money and technology do not make you happy — happiness comes from being kind, working hard, and spending time with loved ones, Hiew teaches. Money and tech are to be viewed as tools to help you learn and grow. Beneath that principle, there are five rules:

1. Do important things first, like eating and sleeping well, playing, spending time as a family, and completing homework and chores.
2. Learn small before doing big. “We practice spending $2 before we try to spend $20. We try playing with small apps before we jump on big platforms. We learn by biting off what we can chew,” he says.
3. If we show healthy signs, we get more; if we have warning signs, we get less. If using technology or spending money leads to hiding or sneaking, thinking about nothing else, or throwing tantrums when we don’t have them, those things go away.
4. Mistakes are OK, but hiding them is not. Honest kids and adults build trust and therefore earn more privileges by proving they’re trustworthy.
5. A kid’s job is to be a kid. When it comes to money, Hiew says it’s his responsibility as Dad to provide it. His children should not worry about that. Instead, they should focus on playing, learning, growing, and working hard at school, he says.

The document concludes with the sweetest reminder to his boys: “Daddy loves you, and I am here to help you learn and grow! If you are not sure, talk to Daddy, and Daddy will listen and help you learn what to do.” (My heart grew three sizes reading that.) As Hiew was drafting these rules, he said something important occurred to him: “These are rules I should keep for myself as an adult.”

As a parent myself, I love the idea of having a set of rules everyone in the house follows this way — it makes it feel less like Mom and Dad are the screen police and more like, as a family, we’re all living according to values that just prioritize other things. Keeping in mind healthy signs versus warning signs is helpful for those in-the-moment decisions, and the approach of openness and encouragement to share mistakes is so important for keeping kids safe from online risks.

Professional wealth planners, child therapists, and lawyers alike all flocked to the comments to tell Hiew how excellent these guidelines are. Parents joined in, saying they’ve been looking for verbiage they and their kids can fall back on when making screen time decisions, and plenty said they’re saving his advice for when their own kids are older. Personally, I’m about to go type them into a Word document and print them out myself.