The Screen Time Solution: Proven Strategies to Reduce Screen Time and Boost Real-World Play

Omar Eley is a child development researcher and parent educator whose work focuses on the intersection of early childhood development and family technology habits. He holds a master's degree in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where his graduate research examined the effects of background media on parent-child interaction quality in low-income households.

Over the past fifteen years, Eley has worked directly with more than three thousand families through his clinical practice and workshops. He began his career as an early intervention specialist with Early Steps, Florida's early intervention system, supporting families of children with developmental delays from birth to age three. It was during this work that he first noticed a pattern: children with the highest screen exposure were consistently the slowest to develop language, social reciprocity, and sustained attention—regardless of socioeconomic background. This observation sent him into the research literature and ultimately shaped the trajectory of his career.

In 2019, Eley founded the Family Tech Balance Project, a community-based initiative that partners with pediatricians, preschools, and parent groups to deliver evidence-based screen time reduction programs. The project has since reached over twelve hundred families across ten states and has been cited in the American Academy of Pediatrics' ongoing review of screen time guidelines for young children. His work has been featured in *The Washington Post*, *Parenting Science*, and the Zero to Three Journal, and he has presented at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial conference and the National Head Start Association's annual meeting.

Eley's approach is grounded in a conviction that he states plainly: parents already have everything they need to raise healthy, screen-balanced children. His job is not to lecture or shame but to remove the barriers—lack of information, lack of support, lack of practical strategies—that stand between parents and their instincts. He is known for his non-judgmental, pragmatic tone and his insistence that perfection is not the goal. "You're going to use screens," he writes. "The question is whether you use them or they use you."

He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and two children, ages four and seven