Do not give children a smartphone before the end of secondary school (around age 16-18). This prevents early exposure to harmful effects during critical brain development stages.
Ensure children do not use social media platforms until at least age 16. This protects adolescents from platforms designed to exploit insecurities and cause mental health harm.
Advocate for and support schools in implementing phone-free policies, requiring students to lock up their devices in special lockers during the school day. This eliminates classroom distractions, improves learning, and supports student mental health.
Provide children with significantly more unsupervised free play, independence, and real-world responsibilities. This is essential for proper brain wiring, social development, and cultivating a sense of purpose.
Team up with a few other families to collectively delay smartphone adoption and support healthier digital habits. This reduces social pressure on individual children and makes it much easier for parents to implement these changes.
Approach the reduction of screen time by focusing on giving your child a ‘play-based childhood’ rather than just ’taking away the phone-based childhood.’ This positive framing makes the transition and implementation easier for both parents and children.
Emphasize and facilitate real-world interactions that are embodied, synchronous, one-to-one or one-to-several, and rooted in stable communities. These types of interactions are crucial for healthy human social development and brain wiring.
Ensure children are rooted in stable, real-world communities such as family, school, or religious groups. This provides a vital sense of belonging and stability for healthy social development.
Actively help children and families reduce the time they spend online, particularly on social media. Clinical observations show that this can lead to significant improvements in children’s mental health.
Disable almost all notifications on children’s devices to prevent constant interruptions. This protects their attention and reduces the compulsive urge to check their phones.
Resist the urge to use phones as a crutch to make things easy or to entertain children. Children need to strive and struggle with difficulties to grow and learn, and making everything easy hinders their development.
Provide children with a basic flip phone for essential communication instead of a smartphone. This allows them to reach you or be reached while making casual, distracting use difficult.
Place internet-accessible computers, such as a desktop, in public areas of the home like the living room or kitchen. This allows for necessary internet use while ensuring supervision and preventing unmonitored access to harmful content.
Prevent children from taking any devices into their bedrooms at night, especially unmonitored ones. Unmonitored nighttime device use is a primary source of problematic interactions, exposure to harmful content, and sleep disruption.
Implement clear rules and expectations for device usage at home, such as designated ’no-phone’ zones or specific screen-free times. This sets a consistent framework for healthy device habits, even if not perfectly followed.
Avoid drifting into permissive parenting; instead, adopt an authoritative parenting style. This involves setting clear rules and boundaries while also explaining them and being flexible when appropriate, which is crucial for children’s well-being.
Foster strong family grounding by prioritizing ample family time and regular communal meals. This builds stability, security, and resilience in children, providing a strong foundation for their development.
Intentionally encourage children to spend more time with relatives, such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents. This helps cultivate a strong sense of family, tradition, and community, which children are naturally hungry for.
Give children errands, chores, and responsibilities within the family. This helps them feel useful, proud, and contributes to their sense of value and purpose, countering feelings of uselessness from excessive screen time.
Schools should reduce or eliminate personal technology like laptops, Chromebooks, and tablets from classrooms. These devices are significant distractions that hinder learning and academic attainment.
Establish primary schools as environments focused on pen-and-paper learning, with no personal screens for students. This helps to establish healthy habits early and provides a more human childhood experience.
Schools should avoid requiring homework to be completed on screens, especially in the evenings. Screen-based homework interferes with circadian biology and sleep, promotes distraction, and undermines parental efforts to limit screen time.
Schools should offer non-screen-based homework options or provide clear guidelines to avoid screen time close to bedtime. This addresses concerns about sleep disruption and excessive evening screen exposure.
Schools should critically re-evaluate the use of technology in education, prioritizing genuine educational and developmental benefits over administrative convenience. Much technology was adopted for ease, not proven student well-being.
Intervene to disrupt problematic digital patterns, even if a child is in their late teens or early 20s. The brain retains considerable plasticity during these years, offering hope for change and improvement.