What to Do Instead of Screen Time: An Honest List for Ages 5–10

Written by the team behind Soundame, a screen-free voice game. We make one of the things on this list and we have marked it as ours. Most of what follows has nothing to do with us.

The short answer: a screen is hard to replace with nothing. It is much easier to replace with something else that is absorbing, needs no setup, and does not require you to sit down and play too. Most parents fail at "less screen time" not because their child is unusually hooked, but because the alternative they had in mind needed twenty minutes of adult attention they did not have at 5pm on a Tuesday. The list below is sorted by how little of you each option costs.

Why swapping works better than removing

A tablet is not just entertainment. For a six-to-ten-year-old it is doing several jobs at once: filling boredom, regulating a mood, and giving a clear, low-effort thing to do. Take it away and all three jobs come back at once, which is what the meltdown actually is. The swaps that hold up are the ones that do at least two of those jobs. That is the filter used below.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because a lot of advice skips it: the goal is almost never zero. A child with no screens at all is not the benchmark most families are aiming at, and setting it as the target is how a reasonable plan turns into a fight. Cutting the passive, autoplay, infinite-scroll kind of screen time and keeping some of the rest is a real win.

Costs you almost nothing

These work when you are cooking, driving, or on a call, and need no preparation.

1. An audiobook or a story podcast. The single most reliable swap for video, because it does the same jobs — fills time, settles a mood, needs no decisions — with the eyes free. Libraries lend audiobooks free through Libby. Free story podcasts for this age include Story Pirates, Circle Round, and Wow in the World.
2. A screen-free audio player. Yoto and Tonies are the two common ones. You buy a box and cards or figures; the child runs it alone with no screen and no app. Expensive up front, excellent for children who cannot yet read, and the best answer if you want a physical object rather than a phone.
3. A voice game. A game the child plays by listening and answering out loud. This is the category we build in — Soundame plays a real-world sound and the child says what it is, or says a run of words for the child to repeat back. It uses a phone you already own, and once it starts, the screen goes dark and there is nothing to tap. Disclosure: this one is ours.
4. A timer and a boring room. Genuinely. Fifteen minutes with nothing scheduled is not neglect, and the first ten minutes of complaining are part of it working. Boredom is the raw material for the self-directed play everything else on this list is trying to imitate.
5. A job with a real result. Washing potatoes, matching socks, watering plants, feeding an animal. Absorbing in a way that "go play" is not, because it ends in a visible finished thing.

Costs one minute of setup

6. A big sheet of paper on the floor. Not a colouring book with lines to stay inside. Wallpaper offcuts, the back of a poster, anything larger than the child. Scale changes what happens.
7. A cardboard box. The most-cited toy in every honest parenting list, and it keeps earning it.
8. Cards. One deck covers Snap, Go Fish, Memory, and building a tower. Also fits in a coat pocket, which matters more than it sounds.
9. A kitchen-timer scavenger hunt. "Five things that are smaller than your thumb, back here in four minutes." Zero prep, works indoors and out, and the constraint is what makes it a game.
10. Sound bingo of the room. Sit still for sixty seconds and name every sound you both heard afterwards. It sounds too simple to work. It is the classic Montessori silence game, and it holds a seven-year-old's attention more often than it has any right to.

Worth the effort, needs you

11. Cooking something real together. Not decorating cupcakes — chopping, measuring, timing. Children who help cook eat more of what they helped cook, which solves a second problem at the same time.
12. One instrument, badly. Fifteen minutes of a cheap ukulele beats a term of lessons nobody drives to.
13. Building something with actual tools. A birdhouse, a shelf, a raised bed. Real saw, real supervision.
14. A walk with one job. "We are looking for five red things" turns a walk a child resists into a walk a child leads.
15. A weekly no-screen block everyone keeps. Including the adults. This is the one that changes a household rather than an afternoon, and it is also the hardest, because it is not really about the child.

The part most lists leave out

Swapping a video app for an audio app is a real improvement — the eyes come up, the autoplay loop breaks, and a child who cannot read yet can still run it alone. It is not the same as putting the phone away. If your actual goal is less phone in the house, an audio game on a phone is a smaller step than a library card and a story podcast on a speaker, and you should pick accordingly. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

The other honest caveat: every option here can trigger the same end-of-session resistance a tablet does, because the resistance is about the transition, not the medium. A five-minute warning before the end works better than a hard stop, whatever the child was doing.

About the one we make

Soundame is a set of five audio games for roughly ages 6–10. A sound plays and the child says what it is out loud; or the game says a run of words and the child repeats them back; or a sound is placed somewhere in the room and the child turns to face it. There is no reading, no menu to choose from, and nothing to tap once a game starts. It runs in a phone browser, and there is a free tier you can try without an account. Try a round.