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…

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…

A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.

Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…

Before a phone gets taken away, it is worth asking what else goes with it. For a lot of young people the group chat is where their friendships actually live, and losing it leaves them alone at the moment they most need someone.

This is not an argument against limits. It is an argument for knowing what you are cutting. If the same device carries the friendships, the homework…

A screen is a privilege, not something a person is owed. Food, clothes, a warm home, medical care, school, being loved: those are owed, and a phone is not on that list.

Saying this plainly gives a household something firmer than mood to stand on when limits are set. It also keeps two things apart. The care and the…

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…

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…

If you want a way back in with a teenager who has gone quiet, ask them to show you the game. Not to assess it. Just to be shown something they are good at.

It works because it asks almost nothing of them. No eye contact, no explaining how they feel, no returning to whatever the last argument was about.…