How to get your children off their phones
By Walter Kerr
Co-founder
It’s the question parents ask me most. In any talk I give, it’s the time parents get out their notebook, jot down ideas on their phones.
“My child’s getting sulky, they don’t talk to me anymore, dinners with them are like pulling teeth.”
There’s no silver bullet to getting your children off their phones. More widely, there’s a broader argument as to whether prohibition is in fact the best way to do so - movements like Smartphone Free Childhood have been decisive (and brilliant) in lobbying what the government will likely do to mandate a ban on social media for under 16s, but there’s increasing literature too about how education not prevention around tech use serves a similar benefit. That is discussion for another time.
Whatever the case, there are many good - and simple - things you can do to get your children using their phones less.
Here are some things to remember:
Your emails are their Instagram
Children are extraordinary mimics. Accusations of “pot, kettle” are rife within families. Before you say a word to your child about their screen time, take your phone off the table. Are you checking emails at dinner? Scrolling in bed? Reaching for your phone the moment a conversation lulls? You lose all leverage if you’re on your phone in front of them.
Analog is back
Prohibition has a peculiar way of making things more attractive. Tell a teenager they can't have something and you've essentially told them it's worth having. You need only look at some of the disasters around recent boarding school phone policy to understand what prohibition does to children’s attitudes towards phone use. Rather than waging a war you'll likely lose, think about making the phone less interesting. Or make having a brick phone a cool thing to have.
Gamify the alternatives
However much we don’t want to admit it, managing your children’s phone use is still a game of negotiation, give and take. Spend your half-term on a phone-free retreat; create a game of streaks to see how many nights you can spend together off your phones.
War and Peace can wait
Phone use and reading books are hand-in-glove issues when I speak to parents, so it’s worth two cents on how to get children to read more. I read the Glory Gardens cricket series until I was at least 14. At least I was reading, so said mum. Don’t worry if they aren’t reading German poetry – just get them reading something. It’s a trite example, but if they love whodunnit TV shows, get them reading John le Carré; if they love sport, autobiographies are a great starting point.
Opportunity cost
The key takeaway for me in reading Jonathan Height’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ was not necessarily the figures or statistics of tech use. It was in describing the opportunity cost of always being on your phone that struck me most as the prevailing takeaway for any parent.
It’s what a child is not doing if they are inside on their phone: a lack of play, a lack of being bored, a lack of imagination. Forget actually being on a phone and think about what they're foregoing. That to me is how you get a child off their phone.