A mom bans screens—Toy Story 5 landed hard

When a tablet-style villain shows up in “Toy Story 5,” a mother who restricts screens for her three children feels the movie hit her own parenting line—no battery-powered toys, no screen time except family movie night.

When she walked out of the theater, the message wasn’t abstract. It was the kind of scene that sticks because it looks too close to home.

For eight years. the mother behind this story has kept a strict rule: her children don’t get screen time—except Friday nights. when the family does dinner in front of the TV and watches a movie together. She also avoids toys with batteries, a decision she says she didn’t come from advice or reading. It came from lived experience: toys that light up and make noise felt “utterly annoying. ” so she leaned into old-school wooden Montessori toys.

Now her kids are 8, 6, and 6. Their toy bins have evolved—there are Lego blocks and makeup kits—but the core line has not. She still holds that battery-powered toys aren’t part of their routine, and that includes toys with screens.

That’s why the trailer for “Toy Story 5” pulled her in. The film introduces a device resembling an iPad as the villain, and she says she knew the movie would connect with her.

When the movie came through, she felt seen.

The premise centers on Bonnie getting a tablet-style device. Her parents believe it will help her make friends because, in the film, other kids are already using them. But the toys spend most of the story trying to reconnect with Bonnie. and she described how the film depicts abandoned toys waiting for attention in a world increasingly dominated by screens.

One scene, she says, was a “true gut punch”: Woody, Jessie, and an army of Buzz Lightyears run through a house where every family member is staring at a glowing screen instead of interacting with each other.

For her family, the takeaway is simple and personal. She doesn’t want dinner conversations to be replaced by devices. and she doesn’t want play to drift into what she calls being “zombiefied in front of an app.” She also contrasts her approach with what happens around her—meals with other families whose children are the same ages often come with iPads at the table or smartphones handed over for the duration of dinner.

She knows screens have gravity. Her own kids, she says, are attracted to them “like moths to lightbulbs,” and she admits the temptation isn’t limited to children. In her own downtime, she finds herself doomscrolling—losing hours to reels she doesn’t even remember watching.

Then “Toy Story 5” adds a second layer that lands even harder as her children get older.

She points to Jessie’s memory of a previous owner and how she stopped playing with toys at some point. While watching that. she says she got teary-eyed. not just because the story is sad. but because it feels like watching a timeline pass in real time. She describes how the baby years gave way to toddlers who “had no walk mode. ” then to kindergartners who wanted to do everything themselves. Her oldest. she adds. already looks like a teenager and calls her “bro” instead of “mom” more often than she’d like.

After the credits, she asked her kids what the message of “Toy Story 5” was. Her oldest answered quickly: “screens are evil.”

She acknowledges the wording is a bit extreme—especially since, in the film, the tablet is called Lilypad and does help the toys in the end. But she says she appreciated that her children understand why her family parents this way.

When they got home, her kids didn’t drift back into screens. They ran to the landline to call their friends and tell them about the movie—like she says she would have when she was their age after watching the first “Toy Story.”

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