Practices

One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.

The young person in front of you almost certainly says it too, so any version that sounds like a reprimand will close the conversation down. Naming…

If the screen limit in your house is only your preference, every evening turns into a negotiation about your preference. Borrowing a published figure, roughly two hours a day of leisure screen time for a child over two, moves the argument off you.

The carve-outs matter as much as the number. A video call with a grandparent is a conversation, and a laptop open for homework is schoolwork, so…

For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.

Talking through a headset takes out most of what makes conversation hard: no eye contact to hold, no faces to read in real time, no silence to fill.…

More hours on social media goes with more anxiety and low mood. That is a reason to aim at fewer hours, a conversation you can actually have, rather than at none, which usually ends the conversation.

Pick a number genuinely below the current one and low enough to notice, then look at what has changed in a fortnight. Sleep and mood are the things…

Some of what circulates makes being unwell look good. Drugs filmed like a party, low mood styled into something delicate and photogenic, until the illness starts to feel like a personality.

This is worth spotting because of what it does to recovery. If sadness has become part of how someone is known, getting better means losing something…

The quietest damage comes from a young person deciding that feeling like this is simply how it is, because everyone around them feels it too.

Once distress counts as ordinary it stops being reported. Nobody mentions it at home, nobody brings it to an appointment, and years can pass with…

Tell someone their phone is wrecking their sleep and you have handed them something to argue with. Ask instead what they notice on the mornings after a late scroll, and let them say it.

This is the difference between a conclusion arriving from outside and one a person reaches themselves, which they then have to take seriously because…

There is a rough benchmark for homework: about ten minutes a night per school year, so a child in their first year does ten minutes and a final year student tops out near two hours.

It helps to have the number before a school meeting, because "this is too much" sounds like an opinion while a benchmark sounds like a standard. Some…

A rule that holds in your house and nowhere else is not really a rule. Children locate the unrestricted house within about a week.

So the awkward job is the useful one: a short message to the parents of the two or three friends your child spends most weekends with, agreeing…

Things posted in ten seconds have got young people excluded from school, and worse. It is worth asking about online conduct in the same routine way you would ask about anything else that could go badly.

Ask what has been posted, what has been sent, what someone would not want read out. Not as an inspection and not as a lecture about permanence, but…

Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.

It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at…

An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.

The choosing is part of why any of it works. A limit handed down gets tested and beaten, while one somebody picked themselves tends to survive a bad…