Maks Chmerkovskiy explains why screen time is ‘important’ for children
So you think you can dance right Maks Chmerkovskiy is a parenting professional, just like him and his wife Peta Murgatroyd get ready to welcome baby no. 3, and he shares his best-kept hacks with Us.
“Screen time is important because it is his time. I think [in] 2024, you can fight this, but you’re going to lose because he’s going to do that [learn] what we want him to do, which is socialization,” 44-year-old Chmerkovskiy said recently We weekly while we are talking about the eldest son Shai. “So he has a huge schedule after school, we kind of look back at it and say, ‘We need to adjust for next year because his play dates are the minimum.’ It’s because it’s this class, it’s that class. We take you there, so it means you do this, this and that. So we try to balance it. So when he gets home he says, ‘Do I now my time? Have I earned it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you did. Just do it.'”
Chmerkovskiy and Murgatroyd, 37, share sons Shai, 7, and Rio, 7 months. Murgatroyd is also currently pregnant with the couple’s third baby. Because Shai has reached different milestones than his siblings, there are certain rules that only apply to him for now, especially regarding screen time.
“My deal, though, is that it has to be informative and he has to learn something new,” Chmerkovskiy noted, adding that Shai gets to play Minecraft. “At first I thought, ‘I’m not sure about that.’ But then my friend, who also has young children, said, “This is the best way to program.” I was like, ‘Done. Here we go.’ You know what I mean? Because when I was seven, I didn’t know how to operate a screen, open it, close it, [say], ‘Dad, I’m trying to use WiFi.’ He’s seven. I didn’t know he could read all that.’
The professional dancer continued, “I didn’t know anything about this. So how am I going to look at it and say, ‘It’s to his detriment, he should be playing in the field and planting trees?’ Frankly, we are entering VR, or have already entered it [and] flying situations. I can’t take it back to tractor days. You know what I mean? You can’t avoid it. That’s how I treat it.”
While Chmerkovskiy sees the value in allowing Shai (and eventually Rio and baby No. 3) to use electronic devices, running their own social media pages is out of the question.
“I manage that. I mean, I want to have an account, [and] we are the type of family he can definitely benefit from,” Chmerkovskiy said Us. “So the accounts we have now are Shai and Rio’s… and I’m going to publish it. The only reason I do this is because for me it is a low maintenance approach so he can have it early on.”
Chmerkovskiy noted that when his boys “come of age,” he will transfer the accounts so they don’t have to “start all over again” and build a profile.
Nicole Kidman, Pink and more celebrity parents figure out how to limit their kids’ screen time. “They don’t have a phone and I don’t allow them to have an Instagram,” Kidman told Vanity Fair in an April 2019 interview with her and Keith Urban’s daughters, Sunday and Faith. She’s not alone. Pink, who shares daughter […]
“That has value in my opinion,” he noted. “If I’m wrong, it’s very easy to delete it. It’s just two clicks and it’s out. What I’m absolutely against is him having a phone with all that on it. …I know he’s smart enough to get a device that we can learn to use both ways, but it won’t be [a] device that TikTok will be on, that’s for sure.”
Watch the video above for more of Chmerkovskiy’s best parenting tips and tricks.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi