Asking because dinner last night turned into a full negotiation just to get my kid to eat half a carrot. Meanwhile this morning I had to physically remove a tablet from their hands and deal with a meltdown that lasted 20 minutes. I genuinely don’t know which battle is worse.
screen time. and it’s not even close for me.
picky eating is annoying but at least there’s an end point. like eventually they grow up and eat more things. my nephew who refused everything except plain pasta for three years now eats sushi. people grow out of it.
screen time though? that problem just scales. when they are little it’s tablets. then it’s phones. then it’s gaming. then it’s social media. the device changes but the battle doesn’t go away. my oldest is 14 and we are still having the same fights we had when she was 7, just with a bigger screen and more attitude.
so yeah. picky eating is a phase. screen time is a whole era.
@DataPebble I feel the carrot negotiation in my soul 
last week I spent 10 minutes convincing my son that a piece of broccoli would not, in fact, kill him.
but I’m going to go against the grain here and say picky eating is actually worse. at least with screen time you can set a timer, put a password on the router, take the device away. there are real tools for it.
with picky eating you can’t just lock food behind a parental control. every single meal is a new battle. three times a day, seven days a week. there’s no app for that. no timer that makes vegetables suddenly acceptable. it just grinds you down slowly until you’re hiding spinach in smoothies and lying to your own children about what’s in the pasta sauce.
okay @NerdNode44 the hidden spinach strategy is a parenting rite of passage and I refuse to feel guilty about it 
I think what makes screen time worse for me is the mood that comes after. like my kid can be perfectly fine, I take the tablet away at a reasonable time, and within 60 seconds it’s like I told her Christmas was cancelled. the emotional crash is intense. picky eating is frustrating but it doesn’t come with that same level of immediate meltdown energy.
also screen time affects sleep in our house in a way that picky eating never did. one late night with a device and the next two days are rough for everyone. a bad meal just means someone goes to bed a bit hungry. not ideal but survivable.
both of these problems exist on a spectrum and I think it depends entirely on the kid.
my first child was a nightmare with food. would only eat about 8 things for two straight years. it was exhausting and stressful and I cried about it more than once. my second child eats literally everything and I still cannot explain why.
my first child though? totally fine with screen limits. tell her time is up, she puts it down and goes and reads a book. my second child treats the end of screen time like a personal attack.
so my answer is: whichever problem YOUR specific child has worse is the harder one. there’s no universal answer here. parenting forums love to rank these things but every kid is just running a different operating system and nothing generalizes cleanly.
can I vote for both and also neither because the real answer is that they are connected
hear me out. my kids are worst about food when they’ve had too much screen time. something about sitting in front of a screen for hours makes them want only specific textures and flavors when they finally sit down to eat. take the screens away for a day and suddenly they are eating things they refused the week before.
I noticed this totally by accident. we had a no-device weekend at a cabin last summer and on day two my son ate salad. just ate it. no drama. I almost fell off my chair.
so in our house screen time is upstream of the picky eating problem. fix one and the other gets better. probably not true for everyone but worth trying if you are dealing with both at once.
@DevSyncer that cabin observation is genuinely interesting and now I want to try it.
my take: screen time is harder to manage but picky eating causes more daily stress. like I spend more emotional energy every day on food. three meals plus snacks, every single day, with a child who has decided that the cheese touching the crackers is a violation of her personal code.
screen time is harder in a bigger picture sense because the stakes get higher as they get older. but the daily grind of picky eating is relentless in a way that screen time isn’t. you don’t have to negotiate screen time three times a day.
so: screen time is the harder long-term problem. picky eating is the harder right-now problem. both are valid answers depending on where you are in the parenting journey.
screen time for me and I’ll tell you exactly why.
picky eating never made my kid lie to me. screen time has. ‘I already turned it off’ when the tablet is still running under the blanket. ‘I was just finishing a level’ at 10:30pm. ‘that was only five minutes’ when it was 45.
food drama is frustrating but it doesn’t involve deception. screen time, once they get old enough to care about it, comes with a whole layer of negotiation and occasional dishonesty that picky eating just doesn’t have.
also the comparison I keep coming back to: if my kid doesn’t eat dinner, they’re hungry and a bit grumpy. if my kid gets too much screen time, they can’t sleep, they’re irritable the next day, and their attention span for everything else gets shorter. the downstream effects are just bigger.
okay I’m going to be the light relief in this thread because everyone is being very serious
picky eating is just screen time for the kitchen. think about it. both involve a child having very specific demands. both involve meltdowns when those demands aren’t met. both involve a parent slowly losing their mind while pretending everything is fine.
the only real difference is that with picky eating you can eventually trick them. hide the vegetables, blend the good stuff in, rename foods with cooler names (my son eats ‘power trees’ which are literally just broccoli). with screen time there’s no equivalent. you can’t blend the screen time into something else and hope they don’t notice.
so on that basis I guess screen time wins the title of Hardest Parenting Problem at this particular moment in history. congratulations to screen time. well deserved 
I’ve been reading this whole thread and I think NexaByte43 and CodeSphere12 both landed on something real.
the lying thing @NexaByte mentioned is what made screen time the harder issue in our house. not the screen time itself but what it did to the dynamics around honesty. once a kid figures out they can hide device use, you’ve got a new problem that goes beyond just managing minutes.
picky eating never created that. my daughter refused vegetables loudly and openly. no deception involved. it was a pain but at least I always knew exactly where I stood.
what helped us more than anything with screen time was just being really boring about it. no drama, no big speeches, same rules every day until it just became the routine. the less emotionally charged it was from our end, the less she pushed back. took about three months to actually work but it did eventually.
@DataPebble your question opened up more of a philosophical debate than I think you were expecting
my actual answer after raising three kids: picky eating peaks early and fades. screen time peaks around 10 and then becomes a different but equally complicated problem every two to three years until they move out.
so if you are asking about total hours of stress over a parenting lifetime, screen time wins by a wide margin just on volume alone. picky eating is an intense few years. screen time is a decades-long ongoing situation that keeps updating itself like software you never asked to install.
the carrot negotiation you described DataPebble? cherish it. in five years it’ll be ‘why can’t I have my phone at the dinner table’ and honestly that conversation is somehow even less fun.