Voices from the Field shares what our Mikhulu team hears directly from parents and caregivers on the ground. This round: play, cellphones, and the tricky space between them.

Screens come up in almost every session lately, home visits, parent groups, ParentlineSA focus groups. Below is a rundown of what’s actually being said, not the polished version, just what our team is hearing.

Most of the time it starts with safety. Parents don’t feel okay letting their kids play outside unsupervised anymore, crime, traffic, just not knowing who’s around. “Go play outside” used to be the default instruction. It isn’t anymore, not in a lot of the communities we work in.

So a phone or tablet fills the gap. It’s quiet, it’s contained, and a parent knows exactly where their child will be for the next hour. Nobody’s saying this out loud as a great solution, it’s more of a shrug: what else are you supposed to do? Our team sees the effects downstream though, less running around, fewer of the small unscripted interactions kids used to have with each other on a street or in a yard.

This is where it got more complicated. The conversation moved past younger kids and into teenagers, and into the schooling system itself.

Schools are leaning further into tech every year. Google Workspace, online homework portals, teacher communication happening through apps rather than a note in a school bag. Some schools now list a phone or tablet as required stationery, not optional.

Parents in the group didn’t love this, but they got it. Their kids need the device to keep up, to do well, to have a shot at supporting themselves one day. The problem is the same device becomes the door to hours of everything else. A few parents said almost the exact same thing in slightly different words: their teen says “it’s for school” and they don’t feel like they can argue, because it might genuinely be true, and because school matters too much to risk it.

That’s the actual friction point, not whether screen time is fine, but how you set a boundary on something the school itself requires. Where does homework end and just being online begin, when it’s the same screen, the same tab, the same ten seconds it takes to swap between them? Nobody in the group had a clean answer.

One thing our team keeps noticing: the rest of the world seems to be pulling back, worrying about kids and phones and social media. South Africa’s schools are moving the other way, adding more tech, often because it’s genuinely more efficient or there’s no other option. Parents are stuck in the middle of that.

More kids have their own phone, not a shared family one, and that changes things. A shared phone can be handed over and taken back. A child’s own phone lives in their room, their pocket, and it’s theirs. Parents told us monitoring gets a lot harder here, not because they’ve stopped trying, but because actually keeping track of what a child is doing online takes time most parents don’t have.

Some schools run entirely on Google Drive now, assignments, marks, everything. Convenient for the school. But it also means the device isn’t really optional anymore, and “put your phone away” gets harder to say when the phone is also the homework folder.

Not everyone is dealing with too much access. Some parents told us flatly they don’t have wifi at home, or a second device for their child to use for schoolwork. That’s a different kind of disadvantage, and a real one. Kids without home connectivity are falling behind for reasons that have nothing to do with ability. This isn’t one conversation. It looks completely different depending on which family you’re talking to.

A lot of parents were honest about this. They don’t have the time to sit and play with their kids the way they’d like to. Work, commutes, just getting through the day. There isn’t much left over for unstructured play. Handing over a phone isn’t really about safety in these moments, it’s what’s available when a parent still has to cook dinner or finish a shift or get five minutes to themselves.

This came up constantly, across every group. Phones are everywhere, and for a lot of parents, opening TikTok and handing it over is simply the easiest option in a day with no spare minutes in it.

The one useful, hopeful thing that kept surfacing: screen time on its own isn’t the villain. What seems to matter more is whether a parent is actually in the room, asking questions, noticing what their child is watching.

Sitting next to a child while they watch something. Asking what it’s about. Suggesting a book about the same topic afterward. Small things, but they change what the screen time is doing. It stops being a way to disappear a child for an hour and becomes something shared. Our team keeps coming back to this with parents, it’s less about cutting the time and more about being part of it.

AI tools are starting to come up too, mostly around older kids using them for research or writing help. It’s early, and nobody in our groups has settled views on it yet, but it’s clearly the next version of the same question. Tech isn’t leaving children’s lives. The question parents are actually asking isn’t how to remove it, it’s how to stay involved once it’s there.

Screens aren’t simply bad or simply fine. Parents are juggling safety fears, a school system that requires the very device they’re worried about, unequal access to that device in the first place, and no spare time to begin with. Our job isn’t to tell anyone to take the phone away, it’s to help find the moments of actual connection in and around it. That’s the part that actually shapes a child, not the device itself.

Voices from the Field is an ongoing series sharing what our team hears from parents and caregivers on the ground. Got something from your own conversations you think belongs here?
We’d like to hear it.

Mikhulu Trust works in partnership with communities in the Western Cape to provide psychosocial support, mentoring, and capacity building. For more information, visit www.mikhulutrust.org