Beyond Screen Time: Digital Wellbeing Begins with Stronger Families
Dr. Sharifa Noaman Al-Emadi – Executive Director, Doha International Family Institute (DIFI)
We have spent years asking how much time children spend online. Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.
A child can spend hours online learning, creating or speaking with family and friends. Another can spend far less time encountering harmful content, social comparison, misinformation or experiences that interfere with sleep, relationships and emotional wellbeing. Digital wellbeing cannot be understood by counting hours alone. It is about what children encounter, why they go online, how they use technology, and what happens to their lives and relationships as a result.
Our research at the Doha International Family Institute (DIFI) makes this increasingly clear. In our 2024 study, Childhood Wellbeing in Qatar: Survey of Qatari Families, 81% of children were reported to have internet access and to spend an average of around 4.5 hours online each day. Families recognized important benefits, including learning, access to information and social connection. They also reported concerns about sleep, repeated use, social comparison, self-perception and the reliability of information encountered online.
For global health, the implications extend beyond screen time. Digital experiences can influence children’s mental and physical wellbeing, education, relationships and development. Although findings emerge from the context of families in Qatar, they reinforce a broader need to understand children’s digital lives within the cultural, social and family environments in which they grow up. The lesson is not that technology is inherently good or bad. It is that children’s digital lives cannot be separated from the relationships and environments that surround them.
Strong families are not immune to digital pressures
DIFI’s research suggests an important paradox.
Our 2026 study, Family Cohesion in Qatar: Survey of Qatari Families, found strong levels of belonging, care and mutual support within families. Yet, 76% of respondents said family members were distracted by social media, 71% said younger family members spent more time on social media than older members, and only 54% reported having family rules for social media use.
Family cohesion, in other words, does not make digital pressures disappear.
A family can be loving and close while still struggling with interrupted conversations, devices at the dinner table, disagreements over boundaries or the constant pull of notifications. Technology can strengthen connections while simultaneously competing for our attention.
This matters because digital wellbeing is too often reduced to a parenting question: How do we get children off their screens?
The better question is: How do we help children develop a healthy and safe relationship with a digital world they will inevitably inhabit?
High levels of digital use do not automatically mean that a child has a problematic or compulsive relationship with technology. Duration is only one part of the picture. Concern becomes more serious when children lose control over their use, turn repeatedly to digital spaces to cope with distress, or when digital activity begins to interfere with sleep, education, relationships and daily responsibilities.
DIFI’s 2023 study, Adolescent Overuse of Digital Technology: Perspectives of Parents, Adolescents, and Practitioners in Qatar, developed with WISH, WISE and Hamad Bin Khalifa University, reached a similar conclusion. Parents, adolescents and practitioners identified concerns across health, education and family relationships, including anxiety, reduced concentration, poorer academic performance, preoccupation with devices and changes in family interaction.
But the research also revealed something equally important: many conversations between parents and adolescents about technology were vague, conflict-based or focused only on restrictions. Adolescents expressed a preference for dialogue rather than one-way instruction.
Taking away a device may stop an activity for an evening. It does not help a young person understand why they keep returning to it, how an algorithm is shaping what they see, how to recognize misinformation, what to do when an online interaction becomes harmful, or how to regulate their own behavior when no parent is watching.
The goal cannot be compliance; it must be capability.
Families are central to protection, but they cannot do it alone
Families are where children first learn how to interpret the world around them, and increasingly that world is digital.
Parental warmth, open communication, appropriate supervision and shared family routines can all serve as protective factors. Family wellbeing must therefore be placed at the center of responses to digital overuse and emerging digital harms. Parents are also powerful role models. Children observe not only how long adults use devices, but how they respond to notifications, engage with content and manage boundaries between online and offline life.
Yet putting families at the center of digital wellbeing must never mean putting the entire burden on parents. One of the most striking findings from DIFI’s research on adolescent digital overuse was that more than 98% of surveyed parents were unaware of local services that could support them.
This points to a support gap, not simply a parenting gap.
Parents need practical guidance and stronger digital literacy to understand the platforms and content their children engage with, recognize early signs of harmful or compulsive use, communicate effectively and know where to seek assistance. This includes awareness of privacy risks, harmful content, misinformation, online interactions, gaming dynamics, algorithms and persuasive design. A family-centered response must therefore connect families with schools, health services, family-support institutions and effective child online-safety frameworks.
The objective is not to replace the role of families, but to enable them to fulfil it. Strong families, supported by responsive institutions and safer digital environments, provide the most effective foundation for prevention and protection.
Applying the family lens
My perspective on digital wellbeing has been shaped not only by leading DIFI’s research and policy work, but also by my experience as a licensed psychotherapist, family-relations educator, policy advisor and practitioner in addiction prevention. Across these roles, I have seen that children’s digital behavior cannot be separated from the relationships, pressures and support systems that surround them.
Parents are often expected to manage risks created by platforms, algorithms and digital environments that they did not design and may not fully understand. Yet clinical and family experience shows that restriction alone is rarely sufficient. Children need communication, trust, emotional support, clear boundaries and adults who understand why they turn to digital spaces and what they encounter there.
For this reason, parental responsibility must be matched by institutional responsibility. Families should be treated as partners in prevention, not blamed when problems emerge. Policymakers, health professionals, educators, researchers and technology providers must work together to equip families with practical guidance, accessible services and safer digital environments.
The global health community should therefore adopt a family-centered and culturally responsive approach—one that recognizes the family not only as a source of care, but as a central partner in prevention, early intervention and long-term wellbeing.
A shared responsibility
Digital wellbeing cannot be secured by families acting alone. It depends on the conditions created around them: accessible support services, informed schools and health professionals, effective children’s online-safety policies, and technology designed with children’s wellbeing in mind.
The next step is to translate evidence into coordinated action. Policymakers, researchers, practitioners and technology providers should work directly with families to develop practical guidance, clear referral pathways, culturally responsive prevention strategies and safer digital environments. Families must be recognized not merely as recipients of support, but as essential partners in shaping solutions.
Children will grow up with technology. Our shared responsibility is to ensure that it strengthens their opportunities and connections without compromising their health, development or family relationships.
Author biography
Dr. Sharifa Noaman Al-Emadi is the Executive Director of the Doha International Family Institute, a member of Qatar Foundation, and a leading advocate for family cohesion. A licensed psychotherapist and part-time Advisor to Qatar’s Minister of Social Development and Family, she brings together clinical expertise, academic research and high-level policy advocacy. Her work spans family wellbeing, marital and family counselling, addiction prevention, social protection and evidence-based policy reform at national, regional and international levels.
