As children head back to school, parents are thinking about backpacks, school supplies, schedules, sports and homework. But we also need to ask: What kind of technology is actually helping our children learn? Can we have the best of both—a classroom that uses technology to enhance learning, not distraction and disconnection?

For years, the assumption was that putting more technology into the classroom would naturally improve education. One-to-one laptops, tablets, digital worksheets, and educational apps became standard in many schools. The pandemic accelerated that shift, and what began as a necessary solution became the everyday learning environment for millions of students.

Now we are beginning to hear a different, more nuanced conversation emerge, one that isn’t about eliminating all the technology schools brought in, but about using it only where it actually serves learning.

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Not All Classroom Technology Is the Same

In my work with ScreenStrong, one of the biggest “aha” moments in our workshops is when our audience understands the difference between immersive interactive screens and passive screens. Of course, this allows me to make use of one of my best jokes, that kids aren’t getting addicted to Excel spreadsheets (it always gets a laugh), but it also helps parents see that not every screen is the enemy, but rather certain kinds of screens.

In the classroom, it’s not just the matter of a passive screen versus interactive screen, but a shared classroom screen versus a personal student-only screen.

A teacher using a SMART Board, interactive whiteboard or projector at the front of the classroom is a night-and-day different experience from thirty students each looking down at their own laptop.

A shared display can help the teacher demonstrate a science concept, display a map, model a math problem, show a photograph, annotate a passage or bring something into the classroom that students could not otherwise understand. These are all examples where a shared screen experience, co-viewing with the class while the teacher delivers the content, actually enhances learning.

With these experiences, the teacher still has the students’ attention as they are looking, listening, discussing and responding together.

That matters because learning is inherently social. Students need to watch their teacher think through a problem. They need to hear classmates explain an idea. They need to turn to a partner, ask a question, disagree respectfully, laugh together, practice a presentation, and learn how to listen. And yes, they even need to watch something together every now and then.

When every student is behind an individual screen, that shared experience will disappear. The teacher may be teaching one lesson while thirty students are interacting with thirty different screens, some on task and others not. When technology is used this way, it changes the human experience of learning, to our kids’ detriment.

The Screen Should Support the Lesson, Not Become the Lesson

The question schools should ask is not simply, “Can we use technology for this?” It’s “Should we use technology for this?”

Can a worksheet be put on a Chromebook? Sure. But would students learn more by writing on paper, discussing the questions with a partner or solving the problem together? Almost certainly.

Can students watch a video to learn about a topic? Of course. But would a teacher-led demonstration, discussion or hands-on experiment create a richer learning experience? Absolutely.

Can students play a game or browse the internet when they finish their work? Yes. But would reading a book, writing in a journal, playing a strategy game with classmates, creating something, or talking with a classmate better support their development? Also yes.

The point I’m making is that technology should be task-driven, not convenience-driven, and this is one of the central ideas behind the ScreenStrong Human-Centered Classroom Guide. A human-centered classroom intentionally protects the experiences children need most: attention, relationships, communication, creativity, movement, hands-on learning and real-world problem-solving.

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What Are Students Losing When Screens Become the Default?

The concern isn’t simply that children are looking at screens. It’s that those screens are replacing experiences that are fundamental for learning and development: time reading physical books, time writing by hand, time talking to a teacher face-to-face, time collaborating with a classmate, time moving, building and solving problems without a device.

These practices aren’t outdated. They are how children develop. A young child learns by touching, building, drawing, talking, pretending, moving, not through swiping and tapping. An older student builds real confidence by presenting an idea out loud, debating a position, writing an argument, working through a hard problem with peers, and sitting with frustration instead of clicking away from it.

And this isn’t just parental instinct talking. It’s now backed by science.

The Research Is Giving Us a Wake-Up Call

Research is increasingly showing the challenges of digital distraction and passive technology use. The OECD’s PISA research has found that students report significant distraction from digital devices during class, and students distracted by their own or nearby devices tend to perform worse academically. Research on one-to-one devices has also failed to show that simply putting a device in every student’s hands automatically produces better learning.

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion takes a broader look at what decades of research tell us about technology and learning. His work challenges the assumption that digital tools automatically make education more effective.

The lesson isn’t that technology never works. It is that the device itself isn’t what creates learning. But good teaching does. Relationships do. Conversations with others do.

Students Need Technology Skills. But They Need Much More, First.

We don’t want to send our children into the future without technology skills. Students need to know how to type, research, communicate digitally, and use technology productively. I’m not making any argument there. But frequent screen use is not the same thing as digital literacy, and the question we should be asking is whether spending another hour on a device is the best use of a student’s school day.

Students also need to learn how to speak confidently in front of others, write clearly, think critically, manage their time, organize their work, collaborate, solve problems, tolerate frustration, and develop the confidence that comes from doing something difficult themselves.

Those skills are developed through human experiences, not simply through more screen exposure.

The goal of education is not to make students better at using technology. It is to make them better thinkers, learners, and human beings.

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What Would a Human-Centered Classroom Look Like?

To many of us, it may look surprisingly familiar.

It would look like students reading books and writing by hand. Teachers leading discussions. Students solving problems together. Science experiments. Art projects. Speeches and debates. Outdoor learning. Journaling. Group projects. Movement. Presentations. Conversations.

And when technology genuinely adds value, the teacher uses it. A projector displays a photograph that sparks a discussion. A SMART Board helps a teacher model a concept. A computer is used for a specific research or productivity task. Students learn keyboarding in a computer lab. Technology is available when it serves the learning objective, but it isn’t automatically there simply because it can be.

Students need access to technology, not constant access to technology. That may be one of the most important shifts schools can make.

The classrooms preparing students best for the future won’t necessarily be the ones with the most devices. They’ll be the ones that keep great teachers at the center of learning while giving students frequent opportunities to think deeply, write on paper, engage with others, create, move, solve problems, and practice the real-world skills they’ll use for the rest of their lives.

This school year, instead of asking only, “How much technology should my child have?” let’s ask: “Is this technology helping my child become a better learner, thinker, communicator, and human being?”

If it is, use it. If it isn’t, maybe we don’t need it.

Because sometimes the best thing we can give a child isn’t another app, another device, or another digital activity.

Sometimes it is a book.

A pencil and paper.

A conversation.

A challenging problem.

A chance to move.

A classmate to collaborate with.

Or maybe it’s simply a teacher who puts the screen down, looks a student in the eye, and says, “Let’s figure this out together.”

A Resource for Schools and Parents

If you want practical ways to bring these ideas into the classroom, we’ve created the free ScreenStrong Human-Centered Classroom Guide for educators, school leaders, and families. It includes the ScreenStrong 7 Best Practices, developmentally appropriate technology recommendations, screen-free classroom activities, school culture ideas, and strategies for strengthening the partnership between schools and families. It’s available for anyone to download at ScreenStrong.org/Schools.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains? with Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath”

Podcast - “How School Screens Impact Social Emotional Learning with Dr. Richard Freed”

Podcast - “Why Screens Are Changing the Classroom: What Parents Need to Know About Kids, Schools & Attention”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

Back-to-school season always brings the same round of questions from parents: What supplies do they need? What teacher did they get? What bus route are they on?

But there’s a bigger question schools and families should be asking this year, and it has nothing to do with school supplies: How much technology is too much in the classroom?

When technology first showed up in classrooms, educators were hopeful about what it could do. But even then, questions about screen time and attention were starting to surface. Then COVID accelerated the adoption of one-to-one devices, and kids ended up spending more time in front of screens than ever before, at school and at home.

Technology helped schools get through an impossible moment, but when schools reopened, technology didn’t go away. Students were back in person, using the devices in much the same way as they were during the days of remote learning. Now, a lot of teachers and administrators are quietly asking the same question: did we go too far? And if so, what do we do about it?

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What The Research Says

We now know that the early hopes for technology use in the classroom were just that: hopes. Study after study now confirms that the more screens dominate a classroom, the less kids actually learn.

Here’s some of the most recent data contrasting tech-centered learning with human-centered learning:

• 65 percent of students report being distracted by digital devices during classroom instruction. That’s not a small subset of kids losing focus here and there; that’s the majority of a classroom pulled away from the lesson at any given moment.

• Multitasking and constant notifications measurably reduce attention, working memory, and learning efficiency. Kids aren’t absorbing what’s being taught in front of them, because their brains are split between the lesson and the device in their hand or on their desk.

• Handwritten notes consistently outperform typed ones for understanding and memory. The very tool meant to make learning more efficient may be quietly making it less effective.

• Classrooms built around discussion, collaboration, and hands-on learning see student performance jump 2 to 3 times higher than more passive, screen-heavy approaches.

• Students themselves report feeling more focused, engaged, and connected during device-free learning experiences. Kids aren’t asking for more screens. If anything, they’re telling us the opposite.

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What a Human-Centered Classroom Actually Looks Like

What’s clear is that the fix to our education problems isn’t more technology, or even better technology. It’s less of it, and more of what only a classroom full of real people can offer.

That’s exactly the space ScreenStrong has been working in for the past decade, first in homes, and increasingly now in schools. We’ve spent years helping families understand what unlimited screen access does to a developing brain, and helping them build healthier habits at home. We’ve watched that same conversation spill into classrooms, as more teachers and administrators started asking us the same question parents have been asking for years: how do we actually pull this back?

So what does a human-centered classroom actually look like?

Human-centered classrooms aren’t ones that never use laptops or other forms of technology where appropriate. Instead, they’re ones that put technology back in its proper place, as a side dish, not the main course. In a human-centered classroom, the teacher stays the primary driver of learning, not the software. Kids spend their time reading, writing, discussing, creating, collaborating, and engaging face-to-face, with technology stepping in only when it actually serves that work.

The truth is that in a world where so many kids’ lives outside of school are already saturated with screens and digital distraction, what they need most from a classroom is something a device simply can’t give them: in-person connection, a place where they belong, and a caring adult who’s paying attention to them, not a platform designed to capture their attention.

Long after a student forgets a lesson, they remember how a teacher made them feel, whether they were challenged to grow, believed in, and cared for. No app replicates that.

Two Very Different Classrooms

It helps to picture the two paths side by side, because the difference isn’t subtle.

A screen-centered classroom tends to produce isolated learning, constant multitasking that actually prevents deep understanding, and a kind of digital distraction overload where kids are physically present but mentally scattered across a dozen tabs and notifications.

A human-centered classroom looks different. The teacher leads. Students collaborate and discuss out loud instead of just clicking through material alone. Learning happens in hands-on ways, with room for creativity and movement built in. And because there’s less competition for attention, kids are able to settle into deep focus and real engagement with what’s in front of them.

As educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath puts it, when students use the same devices for schoolwork that they use for gaming, videos, and social media, their brains default to multitasking. And if a child can’t focus, they can’t learn, no matter how good the software is. Teachers, not screens, need to remain at the center of the room.

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What This Looks Like in Practice

None of this means technology is the enemy. It means the goal for this school year should be balance: using technology intentionally to support learning, without letting it replace the human experiences kids need most to actually thrive.

A human-centered classroom isn’t an abstract ideal. It comes down to a handful of concrete, repeatable practices, the kind any teacher can start using this month:

• Human connection comes first. Lessons start face-to-face, before devices are even opened, and daily conversation and discussion take priority over screen time.

• Shared displays before one-to-one devices. A single classroom screen the teacher controls often builds more focus and accountability than every student staring at their own laptop.

• Environments built for deep focus. Think handwritten notes, paper texts, and dedicated device-free blocks of time for reading and writing.

• Active, hands-on, real-world learning. Labs, building projects, presentations, and outdoor learning, not just information consumed through a screen.

• Healthy screen-free downtime. Free time filled with board games, art, reading, and movement, rather than videos or gamified apps used as a reward.

• Real technology skills, taught on purpose. Typing, research, professional communication, and honest AI literacy, taught directly instead of assumed.

• Ongoing education for everyone involved. Teachers, parents, and students all need to understand what screens are doing to attention and learning, not just be told a new rule.

These practices also shift with a child’s age and developmental stage, but the throughline remains the same: students need constant access to a teacher and limited access to tech, not the other way around.

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Where Schools Should Start

If a school wants to build a truly human-centered classroom, the first and most foundational step is a bell-to-bell phone-free school day. It’s hard to build focus, connection, and a stronger classroom culture when every kid has a personal smartphone within reach all day. Schools that have made this shift report real improvements in attention, classroom engagement, social interaction, and overall school culture. When phones are out of the picture, kids actually talk to each other, participate in class, and build the kind of friendships that don’t happen through a screen.

Everything else—the collaboration, the deep focus, the hands-on learning—gets significantly easier once that one distraction is off the table. It’s not the whole solution on its own, but it’s the first domino that has to fall before the rest of it works. With a smartphone policy in place, the ScreenStrong Human-Centered Classroom Guide can help from there.

Inside, you’ll find our full 7 Best Practices framework, grade-by-grade guidance on what developmentally appropriate technology use actually looks like from kindergarten through high school, a long list of screen-free classroom and school culture activities that build real connection, a 90-day roadmap for schools that want to make this change stick, and practical next steps for both individual teachers and school leadership. It’s built to be usable on day one, not just something to read and set aside.

If you’re a parent, feel free to download the guide and send it to your child’s school. If you’re an educator, use these tips in your own classroom and share it with your administration. This is the kind of change that works best when it starts from both directions at once.

Download ScreenStrong’s Human-Centered Classroom Guide now.

Schools are about more than education. They help shape childhood experiences. It’s on all of us, parents and educators alike, to make sure that experience stays human-centered.

ScreenStrong Resources:

Podcast - “Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains? with Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath”

Podcast - “How Screens Are Changing the Social & Academic Culture for Students with Joe Clement and Matt Miles”

Podcast - “How YouTube Impacts Middle School Development with Dr. Linda Charmaraman”

Podcast - “From 16,000 Videos to Real Life: Colin’s Screen Detox Story”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

Last week on our Substack, I shared a post I’d written after my daughter Melissa turned 18, reflecting on all that she and our family gained from a smartphone-free adolescence. I went so far as to call this the single biggest advantage we gave to not only our daughter but her two younger brothers.

In the days following, I received some messages, most of them saying some version of the same thing: “Okay, I believe you. I want this for my family too. But how?”

It’s a fair question, and it’s the question that ScreenStrong was founded to answer. Knowing that smartphones and social media aren’t good for developing brains is one thing. Actually holding the line in your own kitchen, against your own kid, in a culture where everyone else’s kid has one, is another thing entirely.

Firstly, it helps to remember what’s waiting on the other side of that struggle. Families who make the bold choice to press pause on smartphones throughout high school consistently share the same benefits my family experienced: closer family connections especially conversations, and fewer mental health struggles. They also experience kids who build genuine independence, master various sports and hobbies, and build deeper, more fulfilling friendships.

The goal is simple: let our children enjoy a childhood free from the pull of smartphones and app algorithms. But simple isn’t always easy at first

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A 40-Year-Old Lesson in Why Simple Feels Impossible

In 1847, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis discovered something that should have been celebrated: handwashing dramatically cut death rates in his maternity ward, from 18 percent down to 1 percent almost overnight.

He’d found the fix. Turns out, though, nobody wanted it. His colleagues were insulted at the idea that their own hands could be killing patients. It challenged everything they believed about themselves. So they rejected it. Semmelweis lost his job. He died in a psychiatric institution, still mostly ignored. It took the medical world another four decades to accept what he’d already proven.

Handwashing wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was incredibly simple. It was also uncomfortable, inconvenient, and countercultural. That combination was enough to bury the truth for 40 years.

I think about that story constantly, because I think we’re living through our own version of it right now. We know smartphones and social media are hurting our kids. The data isn’t hiding. But the solution—to delay access until the brain is more ready for it—feels too simple to trust, too inconvenient to commit to, and too countercultural to survive at the dinner table when your kid says “everyone else has one.”

But I promise, this solution is not only possible—in your house, with your kids—but thousands of families, including my own, have done it. Here are the 7 secrets to our success.

1. Get Educated Before You Get Pressured

Before you can hold this line, you need to understand why you’re holding it. Not opinions, not “vibes”, but the the actual science of how a teenage brain works.

We cover this in depth in our Kids’ Brains and Screens series, but here’s the short version: the brain’s judgment center, the part responsible for impulse control, weighing risk, and resisting temptation, isn’t fully developed until around age 25. Teens are wired to chase rewards and bad at hitting the brakes. That’s not a character flaw. It’s biology.

Access is also the single biggest risk factor in any addiction. Not willpower. Not character. Access. The more available an addictive platform is, the harder it is to resist, especially for a brain that can’t always put on the brakes.

This matters because when you know the “why,” you stop needing to win every argument with your teenager in the moment. You’re not debating opinions anymore. You’re grounding your limits in solid science.

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2. Be the Coach, Not the Best Friend

Here’s a trap a lot of us fall into: we want our kids to like us, so we start parenting from fear of their disapproval instead of from what we know is right.

Your kid doesn’t need another friend. They have plenty of those. What they need is a coach, someone who can hold a boundary with love, even when they’re upset about it. A good coach doesn’t cave the moment an athlete complains about conditioning drills. They stay calm, stay firm, and stay kind, because they can see further down the road than the kid can.

If you give up that role, someone else fills it. In today’s culture, that’s usually their peers or an algorithm.

3. Look Past Your Own Blind Spots

Two beliefs quietly sabotage a lot of good parents:

The first is confusing intelligence with maturity. Your kid can be brilliant and still not be ready for a device engineered by thousands of adults whose entire job is to capture and hold attention. Smart kids get hooked too.

The second is assuming your values are automatically inherited. Research shows this isn’t true. Values are not passed down through genetics. They’re built through years of modeling, conversation, and yes, protection during the years the brain is most vulnerable.

Neither of these means your kid is broken or you’ve failed. It just means they’re human because no kid is exempt from natural brain development.

4. Let Go of the Two Big Myths

Two beliefs quietly talk more parents out of delaying than any real risk ever does. I call them the convenience myth and the binge myth.

The Convenience Myth

We love our own smartphones. For most of us, they’re an essential tool for driving to new places, ordering groceries, and depositing a check. It’s easy to assume our kids need the same thing. But being able to pull up directions or deposit a check isn’t the same as needing unsupervised, round-the-clock access to social media, group chats, and an app store. A basic phone still lets your teen call you when practice runs long or gets cancelled. It just doesn’t come with the rest of the internet riding along in their back pocket.

The Binge Myth

Parents worry that if they delay now, their kid will go wild with it later. The research doesn’t back that up, and neither does lived experience of ScreenStrong families, my own included. Habits formed in adolescence tend to carry forward, good or bad. Teens who grow up without an unhealthy relationship to their phone don’t suddenly develop one the day they turn 18. They usually just use the tool like a tool, because that’s what they’ve practiced their whole life.

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5. Rethink What “Safety” Actually Means

A lot of us believe parental controls and good conversations will keep our kids safe. And while they certainly don’t hurt, they aren’t enough to truly protect our kids from the dangers of social media apps and the internet at large. Teens are wired to find workarounds, and no filter competes with a platform built by engineers whose full-time job is keeping a teenage brain engaged.

The best parental control isn’t software. It’s you, present, connected, and having the real conversations, the ones about their actual day, not just their screen time.

6. Stop Worrying About Their Tech Future

Your teen is not going to fall behind. Smartphones and apps are designed to be intuitive enough for a four-year-old to figure out. It takes most people a matter of minutes to learn a new phone, not years.

Meanwhile, the years they spend without a smartphone are years spent building the skills that actually matter for their future: face-to-face communication, patience, independent problem-solving, resilience. Those don’t come from an app. They come from practice, and delaying the phone gives them more of it, not less.

7. Be Willing to Be Different

This might be the hardest one. Humans are wired for belonging at every age, and stepping outside the norm feels risky even when you know it’s right. It felt risky in 1847, too.

But you don’t have to do it alone. When even a handful of families in a school or friend group make the same choice, it stops feeling like deprivation and starts feeling like a shared, normal thing. Kids adapt to a new normal faster than we expect, especially when they’re not the only one.

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The Bottom Line

Get educated. Lead like a coach. Watch your own blind spots. Let go of the myths. Redefine safety as presence, not just controls. Stop worrying about their tech future. Find your people so you’re not doing this alone.

None of this is complicated. It simply requires parents willing to do something that feels countercultural today but will seem obvious tomorrow. That's exactly how handwashing looked in 1847. But we know how that story ends. Today, no one questions it. Eventually, the simple thing became the obvious thing. My hope is that one day, delaying smartphones until adulthood will be just as obvious.

You don’t have to wait 40 years to figure that out in your own home. Our ScreenStrong Connect group is free to join. There, you’ll not only be able to meet other families who are rethinking screens in their own home, but you’ll get access to our 30-Day Reset, where we walk through how to remove the screens, how to effectively replace them, and how to navigate common pitfalls.

You don’t need to do it alone. ScreenStrong is here to help, and we have the community and resources to make real, lasting change possible in any home, even yours.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “A Smartphone-Free Adolescence: Melissa’s Story”

Podcast - “What Happens When You Take Your Teen’s Phone Away: Understanding Screen Addiction & Withdrawal ”

Podcast - “No Phones, No Problem: How One Family Raised Tech-Strong Teens Without Smartphones”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

Today, I wanted to share something I wrote when my daughter, Melissa, turned 18, and our family was still asking the question, “Can you really raise a teenager without a smartphone today?”

Since this was written, Melissa has gone to college, graduated, and is building a career she loves. And recently, when she was over for dinner, she told me she was doing something that made me laugh out loud: she has decided to trade her smartphone for a flip phone.

By choice. As an adult.

With her whole digital life available to her, she decided she liked herself better without the scroll. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when a kid gets to grow up owning her attention instead of the other way around.

And while I think she is an exceptional young woman, she isn’t the exception. Her younger brothers, Evan and Andrew, have now also made it all the way through adolescence without a smartphone.

Different kids, different personalities, different struggles, and yet all were able to make it through middle school and high school without a smartphone. More than that, they all thrived. They came out the other side present, capable, and glad they didn’t have a slot machine in their pocket during the years their brains were most vulnerable to it.

I know society tells us this is impossible. And it can even feel impossible at times, as you watch more and more of your kid’s friends get one for themselves. But I’m telling you, it’s not. And it’s one of the best advantages you can give your kids.

Here’s the original story, written the week we made it to 18, and here is a podcast where you can hear my daughter Melissa share her experience of a smartphone-free adolescence.

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We made it! My daughter made it to her 18th birthday without a smartphone. She is alive and well and, might I add, a very happy teen. I didn’t start with a plan to delay her smartphone use through high school; it just unfolded that way.

After dealing with video game overuse with my oldest son, I thought twice before I jumped on the smartphone-in-the-hand-of-every-teen bandwagon. I knew that giving my daughter a smartphone would definitely involve a trade-off, just as allowing video games involved a huge trade-off for my son—he dropped out of college in his first year due to a gaming addiction. I was finally clear on the risks of video games for boys, but what was the risk for girls having smartphones? A smartphone would allow my daughter to connect with friends, but what would the cost be for that constant connection?

More Phone Time Would Mean Less

More screen minutes would mean fewer minutes spent on other things in life: fewer minutes with family, fewer minutes at the kitchen table after dinner talking with us, and fewer minutes playing on the trampoline outside with her little brothers. It would mean less “free time,” less time to curl up with a good book, and less time spent pursuing other interests and hobbies. As a nurse, I understood that teens have difficulty controlling impulses. They are stressed easily and take uncalculated risks due to an underdeveloped frontal cortex. Teens naturally pick low-effort/high-reward activities, and they need more sleep. Teen girls especially can struggle with self-esteem issues. I had to think long and hard about how a smartphone would take away from her “free time” and what she would miss.

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More Phone Time Would Also Mean More

The trade-off would also mean more of a few things: more time to gossip, more time to view unhealthy content, more temptation to cheat in school (over 50 percent of kids admit to doing this), more feelings of rejection from being left out of group texts, tags and comments; more chances to compare and be unhappy with her body, her hair, her clothes, and her skin; and overall, more wasted time. I was aware of this dilemma as I watched other moms around me struggle daily with their daughters’ smartphones and social media dramas. Some girls I knew were making “lack of privacy” mistakes that were life-altering. But as her 16th birthday approached, I thought it was the right time to give her a much-coveted smartphone. We had made it through the middle school years just fine with only a talk/text phone. I was ready to make the switch.

A Life-changing Lunch with Friends

I remember every detail and emotion of that eye-opening, fork-in-the-road moment. I was out to lunch with a close group of mom friends, all had 16-year-old daughters. They asked me about my daughter’s upcoming birthday. When I mentioned that I was going to upgrade my phone and give my old smartphone to my daughter, they all very firmly and loudly said, “Whatever you do, do not get her a smartphone—you will lose her!” I was stunned. They continued to talk and share stories of their smartphone woes.

“Our girls have them, and it has been the worst parenting decision we ever made. All they do is take silly selfies and stay up all night texting each other and searching the internet instead of doing their homework. They stick their tongue out and take pictures all day. They take pictures of their food, their pimples, their socks, their dogs going to the bathroom, and any embarrassing things going on in our home. Then they send it to each other on Snapchat, Instagram, and group texts that we can’t follow at all. If they have a smartphone, they will have social media. At 16, they are still obsessed with silly, stupid middle-school jokes and bathroom humor. They are regressing and not growing up, so we emphatically say, ‘Don’t do it, Melanie!’”

So, I listened to them with my eyes wide open, and my jaw dropped. I have been a mom long enough to know that the best parenting advice often comes from listening to moms who have made mistakes in their own homes and found solutions rather than relying on any trend, survey, research study, or other cultural persuasion. Suddenly empowered, I delayed the smartphone decision that day and decided that she would keep her text phone. I got her some cute boots for her 16th birthday instead of a new device. I had no way of knowing the benefits of their tested wisdom and that decision—until today.

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The Hidden Benefits of Being a Smartphone-free Teen

For our family, the no-smartphone decision turned out to be a decision with many benefits. Here is a quick list of the perks we found by delaying social media access and a smartphone:

• She never went to bed in tears because someone said something mean to her on social media. Never.

• She never woke up checking her phone to see how many likes she got before she could get dressed and proceed with her day.

• She never went to a therapist or was on medication for social media depression and anxiety, a new, all-too-common reason for therapy for some of her friends.

• We spent a lot of time talking when she got home from school and her gymnastics practice every day—the natural, undistracted kind of talks that firmly ground kids.

• She was detached from the social drama, so when she walked in the door, she really came home. I heard all about the day’s events first before social media made them “public,” and I was the first voice offering Mom wisdom and advice.

• I could listen to her and be present without either of us looking down at our phones. Teens desperately need to be heard by their parents, the face-to-face type of hearing that makes them feel that they are deeply and unconditionally understood and loved. If they don’t find this at your kitchen table, they will search for it outside your home.

• Instead of instantly googling every little life situation, she used her brain to think through situations and problems. She practiced making little decisions by herself (what to wear, how to work out a relationship problem, and what to get a friend for a birthday gift without asking 100 people for advice). These small steps are necessary to master before the larger ones come along.

• She didn’t talk disrespectfully about us, her parents, or our family on social media, as I am sadly discovering so many of her friends do. It is shocking.

• She experienced pure unconditional love from us and didn’t expect that from relationships with friends, which is good since teens cannot give unconditional love to each other.

• She didn’t re-post, “share,” or “like” the latest gossip gathered from the school day.

• She was never distracted by her phone when doing her homework. She worked hard at the gym and had a full schedule but never complained about having too much homework.

• She focused on her gymnastics and read a lot of good books.

• She played with her little brothers a lot, taking them on bike rides, playing board games with them, wrestling with them, and just laughing along with them. She never ignored her little brothers to look at her phone, and they never saw inappropriate stuff on her phone. They benefited from this decision, too.

• Instead of being shaped by the latest social media trend, she talked to us about moral dilemmas and current issues.

• She had more real downtime, developed her art skills, and joined an art club. She practiced and experienced the gift of daydreaming and being alone.

• As a family, we engaged in timeless activities such as playing cards and board games, tackling the family puzzle, enjoying movie nights together, and sharing silly jokes and stories. These moments serve as the glue that binds families together, creating cherished memories that form a solid foundation that your teen will need when they are on their own.

She learned to trust that we “had her back” and knew what was best for her and our family. We were not her best friends but her life coaches who loved her and wanted the best for her more than anyone.

Our Decision Strengthened Our Family Bond

When we went out to dinner, we never competed with the phone at the dinner table; the night out was spent being together and having priceless “teen-talk” conversations as we shared life. I knew one day she would be out of the nest, and I would long for these undistracted, irreplaceable conversations when we got to hear all about her dreams to be a college gymnast, her fears, her funny stories, her opinion on politics and all the things that made her the unique person she is. And we loved to hear her laugh.

When she signed her National Letter of Intent for a full four-year athletic scholarship at a large university to be on their gymnastics team, we, her family, were the first to hear it and experience it with her, not hundreds of her social media followers. We relished that moment together as a family. I often wonder if that offer would have worked out so well if the coaches had to review years of social media drama, questionable photos, bathroom humor, or worse before they recruited her. Parents and teens forget that social media decisions can have lifetime consequences; some kids don’t get recruited, hired, or married because of their social media mistakes.

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We Waited Until 18, Not 8th Grade

A few months before my daughter left for college, I gave her my old smartphone. As you may have guessed, it took her about 4 minutes to learn how to use the phone; whew, it didn’t take her six years! I witnessed her caution and her budding wisdom; her use at 18 is certainly much better than her use at 13 or even 16 would have been.

Common Concerns Parents Have About Delaying Smartphones

Each time I share this story with others, the same questions arise. I shared these concerns, too, but this is what we learned:

1. Did we worry she wouldn’t understand our decision or be mad at us?

No. She confidently told a group of moms recently that she loved her family when asked if she “hated her parents” for not allowing her to have a smartphone. Fear of your child not liking you is never a sound basis for any parenting decision. My confidence grew, and so did hers; she trusted me, and I knew she would understand the importance of this decision one day. We took the “power and control” away from the phone with that one decision, and it was pretty freeing! I didn’t care about being the “cool” mom; I tried that with my son, but it didn’t work out so well. I also realized that if she would be mad at me forever over not giving in on the smartphone/social media decision, we would have much bigger problems that needed to be addressed.

2. Does she feel that she has been left out?

No. If she was “left out,” she never knew it; her peers on social media felt much more left out than she ever felt. She didn’t have the large numbers of virtual social media “friends” in high school like most of her classmates, but she said she had deep friendships, which many young people today don’t have. She never missed a party she was invited to because she didn’t know about it. Her friends texted her on her basic phone. She maintained a very healthy, active social life with a few different friend groups. She also says many of her friends came to her for social media drama advice because they knew she was an unbiased third party. The only time she felt left out was when her friends would come over and spend their time looking and laughing at their phones when she was sitting right there in front of them.

3. Was I concerned she would not be prepared for the digital world?

No. Social media is just another form of entertainment. It is not building rare or valuable skills for our kids’ futures. And it is not worth the time to spend away from other important activities and life skills. It is designed to grab their attention, collect personal information, likes, and preferences, and mash them all together in an algorithm that can be used to market products and services to them. Is it all bad? No, but it is a highly addictive, distracting form of entertainment. Since the judgment center is the last part of the brain to develop, teen brains are really good with the “accelerator” and bad with the “brakes,” most can’t use it in moderation. My daughter is much more prepared for the digital world due to her maturity, not because of her record-breaking number of “likes” when she was in high school.

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4. Did we think she was going to be behind when it came to technology use for a future job?

No. Texting and posting on social media can be done by most 4-year-olds. Teens don’t learn technology skills on these platforms. They don’t learn non-verbal communication, empathy, listening, respect, and quality writing skills on their smartphones either. Business owners know these skills are rare and more valuable than any job skills that can be easily trained. Young workers with good work habits and strong face-to-face communication skills will be way ahead in the job market now and in the future.

5. Did she regret not having a smartphone or social media in high school?

No. She explained that while she did not have any “social media followers” in high school, the relationships she built were developed over time and in person. As a result, she learned how to be a “true, loyal friend” (her words) and how to find those same qualities in others. No regrets on her end.

We see that she is not defined by her phone or social media; it is not her life. She has not wasted years aimlessly trying to find something her screen will never provide. She has had a rich, authentic, full childhood. She has learned early that she doesn’t have to “follow the crowd” and give in to all the peer/cultural pressure around her. She learned that a phone shouldn’t control you. She is not behind socially. She is not controlled by the “slot machine” in her pocket. I am guessing that her smartphone-free experience will help her much more in the future than undoing mistakes from years of social media recklessness.

6. Did she “binge” and “go crazy” when she finally got her smartphone?

No. I know many parents worry about this; in fact, this is one of the top worries parents seem to have when struggling with the decision to delay. But it is a myth. Kids continue to do what they have always done when they leave the nest. Our son binged on gaming in college even after we allowed it in high school; that experiment didn’t work out so well.

When our daughter finally got her phone, she was older and had established good time management habits and excellent social skills. She continued to do her favorite things that fulfilled her, and the phone was just the tool it was meant to be. She even turned it off at night so it wouldn’t wake her up, and she didn’t use it while driving. When she got to college, she didn’t go crazy with social media. She ended up taking the Snapchat app off her phone when she realized it was “causing her too much stress” (her words).

7. Did we later regret our decision to delay?

No, we did not regret delaying for the 48 months of high school. I don’t think you will either. We traded the conflict, the arguments, the social media mistakes, and the emotional scars for something far more significant: strong family attachment and grit. This choice put her on a healthier path and created a strong foundation for our relationship that will last forever. We have never looked back and wished that she had spent more time on a smartphone.

Our daughter will have the rest of her life to deal with all the benefits and responsibilities of having the distraction of a phone 24/7, and her wisdom in doing so will be built on a solid foundation. But she won’t have the rest of her life to redo her childhood. We only had one chance in her first 18 years to create a solid family-centered foundation. If we had to do it again, we would have done exactly the same thing.

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Can You Raise a Teen Today Without a Smartphone?

Yes! If you are leaning toward delaying a smartphone for your teen, let me encourage you to join the crowd that is doing just that. Your child’s well-being depends on it. With confidence, wait until they are 18 and don’t believe the myth that teen smartphone use is worth the emotional pain and suffering it causes. Be confident, and don’t second guess your decision. Instead, invite their friends over today to do something fun. After all, authentic connections are the only things they want more than their smartphone.

When my daughter was home for her first visit after starting college, we were getting ready to go out to dinner, and her phone was on the kitchen table. I asked her if she needed her phone as we headed out the door. She said, “No, Mom. I don’t need my phone at dinner. I’m with you all and can’t wait to catch up.” Like monkeys, her two giggling little brothers were hanging on her as she walked out the back door. My eyes filled with tears as I turned to look for the car keys. At that moment, I realized that we had gained much more than we had lost with that simple decision to delay her smartphone. It really did change her life, both in ways we can measure and in ways we are still discovering.

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You don’t just have to take my word for this, either. Melissa and I actually spoke about this on the ScreenStrong Families podcast. Let her tell you, in her own words, what it was like growing up without a smartphone.

And if this post or Melissa’s podcast has inspired you to make the same bold choice in your home, Kids’ Brains and Screens: Home Edition was designed to support you. It explains the science of brain development directly to your kids, in language they can actually understand, so they’re not just following a rule they resent but learning why their brain is worth protecting. When kids understand what a smartphone does to a developing brain, the conversation changes. It’s no longer “because I said so.” It’s “now I get it.”

You don’t have to be the only voice making this case in your house. Let KBS make it, too.

You can do this, and your kids will thank you later, even if it’s a decade later, over dinner, telling you they miss their old flip phone.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “A Smartphone-Free Adolescence: Melissa’s Story”

Podcast - “What Happens When You Take Your Teen’s Phone Away: Understanding Screen Addiction & Withdrawal ”

Podcast - “No Phones, No Problem: How One Family Raised Tech-Strong Teens Without Smartphones”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

We’ve finally started to agree that too much screen time is harming kids. We see them detaching from their families. We see the anxiety, the social struggles, the emotional fragility, the addiction patterns. We know the problem is real.

But instead of removing the problem, many of us have landed on a different solution: give kids the phones anyway, and just teach them to fight them off.

Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that if we have enough conversations, teach enough “digital citizenship,” and preach enough “moderation,” a miracle will happen and children will learn to manage smartphones, social media, gaming, and addictive apps wisely on their own.

As a nurse and a mom of four who has spent years studying brain development and screen addiction, I need to say this clearly: that is not how childhood works. And honestly, it’s deeply unfair and harmful to children.

We have turned kids into tiny soldiers in a battle they are not developmentally prepared to fight. We are asking children to “self-regulate” against billion-dollar tech companies that employ neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, and persuasive design experts, whose algorithms are engineered specifically to hijack attention, emotions, impulses, and reward systems and are getting sharper by the minute.

Frankly, we are asking our kids to do something most adults can’t. We hand them a game controller and a phone and tell them, “Make good choices. Use moderation. Set limits. Be responsible.” And then we’re surprised when it doesn’t work.

I know this mindset well, because it’s the one I adopted myself, and it ultimately left me with a college dropout addicted to video games. I had blind spots, and it took a full-blown crisis to see them. My greatest hope is that I can help you see yours before it comes to that.

Children are not built for this battle. That includes your child.

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This Is Biology, Not a Character Flaw

While your child may suddenly be taller than you, borrowing your clothes, and asking for the car keys, it’s important we don’t confuse these signs of physical maturity with true brain maturity.

The pre- and late-adolescent brain is not a little adult brain, and the science proves this. The systems responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation, long-term thinking, and risk assessment stay immature for many years, until around age 25 and even later for many boys. Meanwhile, the brain’s reward centers are highly active and exquisitely sensitive to novelty, stimulation, peer approval, and dopamine-driven rewards.

I don’t tell you this because it’s something to fix. It’s not something that can be fixed. It’s biology and child development science, and it highlights the underlying truth is that childhood is meant to unfold slowly in order to work well.

Kids are supposed to be immature. They’re supposed to need protection. They’re supposed to borrow wisdom from adults until their own brains are ready. That is what childhood is, and it’s one of the most beautiful and important stages of life.

When we rob children of that stage by expecting them to manage adult-level temptations with adult-level self-control, we destroy something critical that can never fully be recreated later.

We would never hand a 13-year-old unlimited access to alcohol and say, “Now make mature choices.” We would never put slot machines in a middle school and tell kids to practice moderation. For these reasons, we should never blame a child for struggling against a product intentionally engineered to keep them hooked.

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Kids Need Good Coaches, Not Referees

Children need environments that support healthy development. They need adults willing to step into the role of protector, guide, and coach, those who are willing to lovingly say, “This is too much for your developing brain right now. I know you don’t fully understand yet, but I do, and I am here to guide you.” A good coach would never encourage a skill that is above the level of development in a sport.

It helps to think of our kids not as young adults, but as apprentice adults. An apprentice hasn’t mastered the trade yet; they’re still learning it, under the close guidance of someone who has. No apprentice is handed the most dangerous tools on day one and told to figure it out through trial and error. They’re supervised, protected from mistakes that would do real damage, and trusted with more only as their skill grows. Every apprentice needs a coach standing close enough to step in before the stakes get too high. That’s the role we’re meant to play, not a referee enforcing rules from the sidelines, but a coach actively shaping what our kids are ready for, and when.

This doesn’t mean screen education is unimportant. Teaching kids the brain science absolutely matters. One of the reasons I care so deeply about it is that understanding the why helps children trust the boundaries we set. It helps them see that limits aren’t punishment but protection. Education builds the trust in our children that they desperately need, but it’s never a substitute for the fence.

Education, while critical, cannot overpower developmental vulnerability. This is where the blind spot lies.

No matter how much educating we do or how many conversations we have, we cannot turn children into adults who can magically outmaneuver addictive technology.

The brain was designed to grow up slowly. We need to give it the space and safety to do so.

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Just Let Them Be Kids

When we relieve our children of the title of “digital warrior,” we give them back the one that matters most: a kid, one who climbs trees, builds forts, laughs around the firepit with friends, and gets to grow up slowly, naturally, and fully into the person they were meant to be.

Giving our children and teens access to technology their brains aren’t ready for isn’t kind. It’s handing them an impossible burden: managing addictive technology designed by some of the most powerful companies in the world.

Kids don’t need more tools to fight the monster. They need us to stand up for them and take it away. Kids today in this “digital age” are still kids, so let’s look past that blind spot that labels them as being warriors strong enough to fight this battle. Step away from the temptation to convince yourself that your child is stronger than he or she is.

So stop asking how to make your child use it responsibly. Start asking why you handed them the fight in the first place. Then do something about it.

Education alone was never going to be enough, but education around the limits you set is exactly what makes those limits stick. That’s why we wrote Kids’ Brains and Screens: Home Edition. It takes the same brain science behind everything you just read and translates it into a book your whole family can understand. Your kids get to learn, in language made for them, why the limits you set aren’t a punishment, but protection.

Grab your copy of the KBS Home Edition here→

You don’t have to win this fight alone, and neither does your child. Let’s pull the monster away together.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “The Courts Are Catching Up: What the Google & YouTube Verdicts Mean for Your Kids”

Podcast - “It’s Not Strict, It’s Protective: The Truth About Phone-Free Schools with Kathleen Barlow”

Podcast - “What Parents Need to Know About Roblox, Sleepovers, and Snapchat with Officer Gomez”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about what a game-free summer actually looks like. You’ve heard directly from my son Evan both in podcast episodes and Substack posts, as he shared what he did during those summers in middle and high school. Today, though, I want to talk about what those summers did to him. Because the question isn’t just what kids do without video games. It’s who they become without them.

One of the most common things I hear from parents after they remove video games is some version of this: “My child doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

And underneath that, a harder admission: “He gives up the moment something isn’t fun right away.”

That’s not a character flaw or a sign of moral failing. It’s simply a natural consequence of what happens when a child grows up in a world designed around instant entertainment. Open an app. Start a game. Scroll a feed. Within seconds, something is happening. No waiting, no practice, no learning curve, no frustration.

But real life doesn’t work that way. And summer, with its long, unstructured days, is one of the best opportunities we have to teach children something screens never will: the fun usually comes after the hard part.

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The Problem with Easy

Video games are incredibly good at making kids feel successful quickly. The first level is easy. The rewards come fast. The feedback is constant. The whole system is engineered to keep players engaged from the very first minute.

Real-life skills are different.

When a child picks up a violin for the first time, as Evan and his twin brother once did, it sounds terrible. The first time he swings a golf club, the ball barely moves. The first clay project looks lopsided. The first lawn he mows has crooked lines. The first attempt at starting a business may not earn a single dollar.

Real life doesn’t hand out trophies for showing up. Real life requires practice. And the children who have spent years escaping into screens the moment things get hard are, frankly, not prepared for that.

Evan has watched this pattern play out around him with his peers, and he has strong feelings about it. “When things get a little bit tough, people just throw their hands up and quit,” he said. “They don’t allow themselves the opportunity to experience the good part.”

The Learning Curve Is the Point

Evan’s comment highlights an important truth that many kids today never learn: the fun often comes after the hard part.

Evan grew up playing music, not because his dad or I played any instruments ourselves, but because we understood how music benefits brain development. And before Evan could play songs he loved, he had to work through scales, technique, and a lot of repetition that, truthfully, wasn’t very fun at all.

“You’re never going to be able to play unless you spend time with those few basics,” he said, “doing the things that aren’t fun so that later you can play the fun stuff.”

Over time, his skills, his confidence, and his enjoyment all grew together. Today he plays at weddings. He plays with his brother. People hear them and assume it’s a natural talent, but Evan is quick to correct that assumption: “It’s not that I’m that special. It’s just that I had these summers to learn the skills.”

The same is true for almost everything worthwhile: sports, art, woodworking, writing, entrepreneurship. The best part comes after you’ve worked for it. And as Evan puts it, that earned satisfaction is something screens simply cannot replicate: “You don’t get the same bliss out of it as you would from actually learning a real skill.”

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Why Sports Matter

Like music, sports teach children something screens never can: how to keep going when you’re not good yet.

You miss the shot. You strike out. You lose the match. You get tired. Then you come back and try again. That’s how grit develops.

Evan spent summers doing exactly this, hitting baseballs into a backyard net for hours, alone, just thinking and swinging. “I would clear my head,” he said. “I would talk to myself—kind of weird, a little bit—but it was so good.” He went back day after day, not because someone made him, but because he had found something that was his.

Eventually, that same net became where he practices golf. The sport changed; the discipline didn’t. “There’s always something I can get better at,” he said. “That’s what’s so good about sports. There’s always more improvement you can do.”

But here’s what Evan says he got from sports that had nothing to do with the sport itself: friends. “You can just go to the park, make friends with a guy,” he said. “If he’s just shooting around, you start talking basketball, and then it opens the whole world.” Some of his closest friendships started exactly that way, not through a screen, but through showing up somewhere and being willing to be seen trying.

Working with Your Hands Matters

There’s something powerful about creating something real, and Evan talks about this with more conviction than almost anything else.

“Anytime your brain is hands-on with anything that’s real,” he said, “that’s how you’re really learning. You’re not really learning when your hands are just touching a controller. That’s all virtual. Your brain is just interacting with a screen; it’s not interacting with real materials.”

He knows this from experience. He took clay classes in high school, and he will be the first to admit he was not good. But still, he loved it. He’d set out to make a lizard and spend an entire class figuring out the tail, the scales, and what would survive the kiln.

“You see the first project you did all the way to the end of the summer,” he said, “and you’re like, that is improvement, and I’m actually proud of that work.” Screens cannot give a child that. A screen cannot collapse on you, leave an uneven stripe, or show you, plainly and honestly, exactly where you need to do better next time. And at the end of the day, you can’t hold anything you’ve accomplished on a screen in your hand.

Why Small Businesses Are So Valuable

One of the most formative things a teenager can do this summer is start a small business, like lawn mowing or dog walking. Not because of the money, but because of what the experience demands of him.

Evan is direct about what those demands actually are: “In sales, you’re trying to create trust with somebody. If you want to learn how to get social really quick, start selling something.” Knocking on a neighbor’s door, quoting a price, showing up on time, fixing it when you mess up, none of that is comfortable. All of it is instructive.

“That’s how you’re going to really interact with people,” he said. “You’re going to learn how to talk to adults. You’re going to learn how things work. How do I make this? How do I price it? That’s such good problem-solving that’s going to pay immense dividends down the road.”

What’s more, a small business builds something else Evan values enormously: structure. “Now you have a schedule,” he said. “Now you have something. You don’t feel like you’re just going through every day trying to find something to fill it with.” For a teenager who just had his video games removed, that sense of purpose, of having somewhere to be and someone counting on him, is everything.

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The Secret Most Kids Never Discover

The greatest rewards in life are often hidden behind discomfort. Learning an instrument is frustrating before it’s enjoyable. Sports are exhausting before they’re rewarding. Work is challenging before it becomes satisfying. Skills are awkward before they become impressive.

But many children never reach the rewarding part because screens offer an easier exit. The moment something becomes difficult, instant entertainment is one tap away. And in that moment, as Evan sees it, they miss the chance to discover what they’re actually capable of.

“It may be tough at first,” he said. “It may not be as fun as scrolling reels. But the satisfaction you get out of it on the back end is just 100 times better.”

Both he and his brother Andrew are living proof. After speaking with me on the podcast, Evan left for a month-long ROTC training, and just last week, before flying out for an engineering internship trip, Andrew figured out how to fix our old washing machine, which turned out to be a very complicated, days-long project. I’ll bet any future boss would say that spending three days troubleshooting an old washing machine is much better training than spending three days on Call of Duty or Fortnite. Nobody asked them to do these hard things. They just do them. That’s what summers of real skills, real work, and real grit actually produce: young men who don’t look for the easy exit and who are comfortable with a challenge.

This Summer, Choose Something Hard

If your child spends this summer learning something difficult—cooking, gardening, rebuilding a bicycle, playing an instrument, starting a small business, or fixing something around the house—don’t expect immediate excitement or perfection. Expect frustration. Expect mistakes. Expect days when they want to quit.

That’s not a sign that something is wrong.

That’s a sign their brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Encourage your child to stay with it. Resist the urge to remove every obstacle or rescue them from every struggle. Growth is rarely comfortable, but it is almost always worth it.

One day, they’ll look back and realize they didn’t just learn to play guitar, mow a lawn, cook a meal, or repair an engine. They learned that they can do hard things. They learned that frustration isn’t failure. They learned that confidence isn’t something you’re given—it’s something you earn.

And perhaps most importantly, they’ll discover what so many screen-addicted kids never do:

The fun usually comes after the hard part.

Want to help your child understand why hard things matter?
The Kids' Brains & Screens Home Edition teaches children the brain science behind screens and dopamine, and why low-effort, high-reward entertainment makes real life feel harder than it should be. It also gives kids the language to understand it themselves, because when kids understand what's happening inside their own brains, they're much more willing to embrace the hard work that leads to real confidence and lasting joy. You can buy it directly on our site, and we offer bulk discounts so you can not only get your child but also the whole neighborhood on board, too.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “10 Things Your 14-Year-Old Boy Can Do This Summer with Evan Hempe”

Podcast - “Go Game Free and Never Have Bored Kids Again! ”

Podcast - “A Psychiatrist’s Tips on Managing Screen Time with Dr. Adriana Stacey”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

School’s out for the summer, and you’ve promised yourself your children will not be on their devices all day. But within 48 hours (or maybe 48 minutes) device-free, you hear those dreaded words:

“I’m bored.”

And just like that, the resolve wavers. You hand their phone back to them, let them boot up their game, and tell yourself you’ll try again tomorrow.

I hear from parents about this moment all the time, that split second where the guilt of “I’m ruining their summer” wins out over the conviction that got you here.

But what if boredom isn’t “ruining” anything at all? What if it’s a tremendous gift, one that opens the door to a summer they will always remember?

On a recent podcast, my son Evan reflected on how he filled the long summer days without gaming.

This week, I’m using Evan’s words to speak directly to parents about how full those “boring” summers really were. “I went out and I made my own fun,” he says. “I made my own adventure. I learned skills. I filled my time.”

These are the words that every parent hopes they hear when they press pause or even take away the video games and smartphones. It was certainly mine. And rest assured, when Evan, now in college, does say these things—especially after those tough middle school years—I do my best to resist saying “I told you so.” Mostly, anyway.

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Boredom Is Where Creativity Begins

When a child is constantly entertained, there’s no need to think. No need to wonder. No need to create. No need to solve the problem of: what should I do now?

A screen answers that question instantly: you mindlessly follow through on whatever prompt it gives you next. But when the screen is gone, something important happens.

Kids start looking around. They start trying things. They start imagining. Many breakthroughs happened because someone had unstructured time to observe, tinker, and wonder, rather than being constantly entertained. To name just a few: George de Mestral invented Velcro after becoming curious about burrs that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog’s fur during a walk. Richard James created the Slinky when he was experimenting with springs and noticed one “walk” down from a shelf. He began playing with it and realized it could be a toy. Both are proof that boredom often creates the space for curiosity, experimentation, and invention.

For generations, boredom was the spark that led kids to build forts, start neighborhood games, learn instruments, ride bikes, form clubs, explore creeks, and discover lifelong passions. Today’s children often never reach that point because entertainment arrives before boredom has a chance to do its work.

Evan describes it this way: the summers he remembers most weren’t the ones where he had the most to do. They were the ones where he had to figure out what to do. You can hear him describe it live here.

The Magic Happens After the Complaining

Most parents never get to see what comes after boredom because they rescue their child too quickly. The truth is, most parents can’t tolerate the complaining.

Your child declares, “There’s nothing to do.” And suddenly, a screen appears.

But what if you waited?

What Evan describes—and what I watched happen with my other children—is that boredom is almost always the doorway to initiative. The child who says “there’s nothing to do” is, if you give them time, the same child who eventually starts thinking. Then exploring. Then creating. Then doing.

Evan is honest about the fact that it doesn’t feel good at first. “It may be tough at first,” he says. “It may not be as fun as scrolling reels. But the satisfaction you get out of it on the back end is just 100 times better.”

The breakthrough is almost always on the other side of the complaint. Most parents just don’t wait long enough to see it.

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The Best Summers Are Never Carefully Planned

Many of the memories children carry into adulthood were never scheduled. They happened because there was time. Time to wander, to experiment, to get dirty, to fail, to figure things out.

Evan talks about this on the podcast—the hours hitting buckets of baseballs into a backyard net, afternoons biking to a friend’s house to find a creek, clay classes where his lizard looked nothing like a lizard. None of those things came with flashing lights or instant rewards. But they came with something screens never could offer: the slow, real satisfaction of getting better at something. Of making something. Of going somewhere and coming back with a story. And the most important discovery? The art of doing this with a friend and deepening that social experience.

What worries Evan most about kids today isn’t that they’re gaming. It’s that they’re quitting everything else before they ever get to that part. “You don’t get to experience the good stuff because you quit when it’s hard,” he says. “That’s kind of lost on us today.”

That satisfaction is what we’re actually trying to protect when we put down the devices. Not just their time. Their capacity to find it.

Boredom Teaches What Screens Can’t

When children work through boredom instead of escaping it, they develop skills that no amount of screen time can replicate:

Initiative. Creativity. Problem-solving. Perseverance. Self-direction. Patience. Resourcefulness.

These are the qualities that make capable adults. They’re also the qualities that constant entertainment quietly crowds out. Not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, summer by summer, hour by hour.

Evan says it plainly: “These kids don’t have those skills anymore. They stay in their room and it’s easy. It’s easy to choose low effort, high reward like gaming and scrolling social media .” He’s not being hard on kids. He’s the first to point out that it’s not the child’s fault. The brain is naturally drawn to whatever is easiest and most stimulating. That’s just biology. But when we let that biology run unchecked all summer, we rob our kids of the friction that actually prepares them for a fulfilling adulthood.

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What Should Parents Do?

The next time your child says “I’m bored,” try resisting the urge to solve it.

Instead, try this: “That’s okay. I wonder what you’ll come up with.”

Then wait. You don’t need to provide the entertainment. You don’t need to become the activities director. You don’t need a color-coded summer schedule.

Sometimes the greatest gift you can give your child is the space to figure things out on their own. Not because you’re being hands-off, but because you understand something they don’t yet: the discomfort they’re feeling right now is exactly where the good stuff starts.

A Different Kind of Summer

A great summer isn’t built around constant entertainment. It’s built around discovery: learning a skill, making a friend, starting a project, creating something, taking on a challenge, finding interests that screens could never surface.

As Evan puts it: “You don’t just avoid something bad. You want to make something good.”

That’s the whole idea. The goal isn’t simply to remove video games. The goal is to create enough space for real life to emerge. And more often than not, that process begins with exactly what parents fear most.

“This sounds great,” I hear you thinking. “But how do I convince my kids of that before I take the screens away and try a screen-free summer?”

My answer? You don’t.

In high school and now, especially in college, Evan fully sees the benefit of a summer—and a childhood—free from toxic screens. But in middle school, he certainly did not. And that’s okay. Because I’m the parent. I’m the coach. And it’s my job to call the shots and do what’s in the best interest of my team in the long-term.

What I wish I’d had back then—and what you have right now—is a way to show your child the science behind the decision to hopefully make that “coming around” period a little bit shorter. The Kids’ Brains & Screens Student and Home Edition walks your teenagers through the actual neuroscience of screens and development, so the conversation stops being “because I said so” and starts being “because I love you, and here’s the proof.” It’s the perfect thing to add to your child’s summer reading list. And when your child is home from college someday, reflecting on how those “boring” summers were the best summers, you’ll be very glad you did.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “10 Things Your 14-Year-Old Boy Can Do This Summer with Evan Hempe”

Podcast - “Go Game Free and Never Have Bored Kids Again! ”

Podcast - “Raising Creators, Not Consumers: A Philosophy for Life & Parenting with Bradley Morris”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails about 14-year-old boys and what to do with them this summer. Why this age?

Well, it’s kind of a tough age. They’re too old to go to some camps, but in some states, still too young to get a job at a local business. Old enough to want some independence, but too young to actually drive to it. So the default activity for many of these boys is video games. Hours and hours and hours of video games each day, from the day school gets out until it finally starts up again.

While I understand why this happens (and I’ve been there myself), I want to encourage you that it doesn’t have to be this way. And I went to the best source I know to prove it.

My son Evan, who was a 14-year-old not so long ago and is home from college this summer, grew up without video games. We course-corrected for him back in grade school, when we were in the throws of his oldest brother’s video game addiction. That meant we had to solve this exact problem for real, every single June.

I asked him what he actually loved doing during those summers and what he could encourage other teenage boys to dedicate their summers to. Here’s what he had to say. He wrote it in such a way that you can share this post directly with your 14-year-old or, better yet, have them listen to Evan on this week’s podcast, where he discusses this and so much more.

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by Evan Hempe

People assume that if you don’t play video games, you’re going to be bored all summer. I get it. Gaming is so commonplace now that it feels like it’s just what a teenage boy does.

I didn’t. I had no video games and no smartphone until I went to college. Which meant every June, I woke up to the same question you might be facing: what am I going to do with all this time?

I had to make my own fun. And looking back, summer vacations really were some of the richest times in my life. Here’s what I did during those months: ten things, in no particular order, that I’d take over any video game or screen time.

1. Learn a Real Skill

The best skills are the ones you can never finish. That’s how they compete with a game that never ends.

For my twin brother and me, it was music. Here’s the thing about music: you will never run out. You could spend the entire summer doing nothing else and still never learn every song, every genre, every technique. It’s endless in the best way, a natural version of the thing that makes scrolling so hard to put down, except every hour you put in builds something.

And no, we didn’t inherit any musical skills. My parents don’t play instruments. People hear my brother and me play weddings now and assume it’s natural talent. It’s not. It’s just the result of a lot of summers spent with the boring basics so that later you get to play the fun stuff.

It doesn’t have to be music, though. It could be woodworking, cooking, fishing… anything tactile, anything where you can stand back afterward and see your handiwork. Compare your first project of the summer to your last one and you can literally see yourself getting better. That feeling beats any achievement badge ever invented.

2. Get Really Good at a Sport

Growing up, we had a net, a tee, and a bucket of baseballs in the backyard. When I was bored, or needed to clear my head, I’d go hit. For hours. Every summer morning, that’s how I started my day.

That baseball net has been replaced with a golf net. I hit golf balls into it when I come home now.

That’s the beauty of sports: there’s always something to improve. A swing to fix, a shot to improve, a faster mile to run. You’re never done, which means you’re never bored. And you don’t need a team or a league to get better. .

Two bonuses nobody mentions. First is just breaking a sweat. If I go a whole day without breaking a sweat, I feel like I haven’t done anything. If you’re tired when you hit the pillow, you had a full day. Second, friends. Show up at a park with a basketball and you’ll meet someone. Some of my best friendships started exactly that way.

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3. Start a Small Business

You may be too young to get hired at a store or restaurant, but you’re not too young to hire yourself.

If you want to learn how to get social really quick, start selling something. Knock on a neighbor’s door and say: “I know how to cut lawns. Do you need help? Here’s what I charge.”

Adults love this, by the way. A kid showing initiative is so rare now that it practically sells itself.

And the skills stack up fast: talking to adults, looking people in the eye, pricing your work, showing up on time, fixing it when you mess up, managing actual money. Suddenly your summer has a schedule: Mrs. Johnson’s lawn on Tuesdays, the Smiths’ dog every morning. You’re not filling time anymore. You have somewhere to be.

I know guys who started lawn care businesses at 14 and sold them years later for serious money. But even if it never goes past one street, the experience of creating real value for another person changes how you see yourself.

4. Build or Fix Something With Your Hands

Build a birdhouse. A workbench. A treehouse. Fix a bike.

You’re going to mess it up the first time. Good. That’s the entire point.

When you build something wrong, you have a choice: get mad and quit, or figure out what went wrong and build it right. Your brain learns differently when your hands are on real materials instead of a gaming controller. There’s no respawn button on a treehouse. You don’t restart. You repair.

And here’s a free bonus: “Hey, come help me build this” is one of the best friendship sentences ever spoken. Now you and your buddy have something to do for the next eight hours.

5. Create Something

In high school, I took clay classes. I was not good, and there are lumpy clay sculptures all over my parents’ house to prove it. They’re not going to a museum. Nobody’s putting them up for auction. They probably shouldn’t even be in my parents’ house if I’m being honest with you.

But I loved it. I’d decided I wanted to make a lizard, and then I had to figure out the tail, the scales, and what would survive the kiln. I made Christmas gifts for my parents and relatives that way. And here’s the thing about a handmade gift: it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It means something because nobody else on earth has that exact thing, and because it says I spent time thinking about you.

Consumers watch. Creators end the summer with something that didn’t exist in June.

One more thing I learned: people respect skills. Every single time someone found out I played violin or did clay, the response was the same: “That’s so cool, I wish I’d done that.” I may have gotten made fun of for not having video games. But I never once got made fun of for having a skill.

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6. Take On an Adventure Challenge

Nothing gets done unless you write it down. I’m a broken record about this.

Even now in college, every week I write out everything I have to do, assign things to days, and cross them off as I go. At the end of the week I crumple up the list and throw it away. The satisfaction of crossing things off is real. I don’t know what it is, but it works.

So at the start of the summer, pick a goal. It doesn’t have to be crazy:

• Bike 20 miles a week

• Learn five songs on guitar

• Hike every trail in a local park

• Train for a 5K

Then (and this is the part everyone skips) make a plan. When are you doing it? How long each time? A vague goal is just a wish. A written goal with a schedule means you wake up every day knowing the next step. That’s time management, that’s discipline, and that’s a skill that works in high school, college, and every job you’ll ever have.

Great summers don’t happen by accident. And they don’t happen on a screen.

7. Read Books

Nobody reads anymore, which is exactly why you should.

I wasn’t a bookworm as a kid. I’ve skipped my share of assigned reading. But now I’m always reading something for myself, and here’s what I’ve noticed: when I pull out a book on the bus, I can feel people reading over my shoulder. They don’t actually want to be on their phones. They just didn’t think to bring a book.

Two tips from experience. First, get the actual physical book. Hearing the characters’ voices in your head, imagining the scenes will engage the creative part of your brain in a way nothing else does. Second, read before bed instead of scrolling on a screen. A phone before bed is fire in your brain; it entertains you every three seconds and won’t let you wind down. A book lulls you to sleep.

Find something you’re actually interested in, whether it’s survival, sports, history, or business. (No video game books. Nice try.) You don’t need to read a hundred books this summer. Just don’t be the guy waiting at the doctor’s office with nothing but a phone.

8. Learn to Work

In our house, chores didn’t come with an allowance. The bathroom was dirty because you got it dirty, so Saturday morning, you’re on your hands and knees scrubbing tile.

Did I like it? Nobody likes it. That’s the point.

Work ethic isn’t something you’re born with. It’s reps. Make the bed. Do the dishes. Help a neighbor. Do the little things right when nobody’s making it fun, and something happens: hard things stop scaring you. By the time you get a real job, “show up early and look for what needs doing” isn’t a motivational poster. It’s muscle memory. And I promise you, employers notice. People always notice.

Here’s what video games can’t teach you: how to have a bad day on the job and show up anyway. Games are designed to be easy up front. That’s how they hook you. Real life is the opposite. Anything great requires the hard part first. It’s called grit, and as my Mom says, “Screens erase grit in a kid’s life.”

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9. Spend More Time Outdoors

Almost everything on this list happens outside, and that’s not an accident.

When we were kids, we stayed out all day. We drank cold water from the hose and went back to playing outside. We even played in the rain. It wasn’t perfect or even particularly sanitary, and it was great.

Being outside doesn’t always mean work, either. Fishing might be the most peaceful thing I know: a pond, a couple of friends, a line in the water, nobody saying much. Humans are built for this. Air conditioning has existed for like 70 years; you’ll survive an afternoon outside. Put on sunscreen and go.

You don’t have to be the best hiker or fisherman or athlete to go do it, either. Just go do it. Break a sweat, get dirty, come home dirty and tired. That’s a great day in the summer.

10. Spend Time With Friends in Real Life

People say gaming is social. Here’s my honest experience.

I ran cross country in high school. Cross country is not fun. You’re up early, pushing your body to its limit in the heat. But the guys to my left and right who did it with me? Instant, lasting friendship. A little shared hardship bonds people like nothing else.

Summers were full of that. My buddy lived ten minutes down the street, and the plan was simple: bike to his house, find a creek, fish all day. Go inside, eat, go back out. Those are the stories we still tell, “remember that time at the baseball field?,” including the disasters. The camping trip where it poured? Not fun in the moment but twenty-four hours later, it’s the best story of the summer.

And here’s the thing I’ve noticed about my friends who grew up gaming: in 15 years, I have never once heard them reminisce about a video game session. Not once. Every memory they bring up happened in real life.

You won’t remember the video games. You’ll remember the people you experienced life with.

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Don’t Just Avoid the Bad, Go Toward the Good

Maybe your parents just took out the video games, and you’re staring down three empty months. I know how that feels. In middle school, I thought my mom was crazy. I thought she wanted me to be miserable and friendless.

I was wrong. Once you understand the “why” it will make sense. Learn what all that game time does to your brain. That science exists, by the way. Ask your parents to go through the Kids’ Brains & Screens course with you. Then it’s not “because I said so” anymore. It’s real evidence, brain scans and all. You’re welcome to argue with it. Good luck.

Here’s the bottom line: this summer isn’t about avoiding something bad. It’s about going toward something good. Skills, money, goals, friends, memories. Fill your time with enough of the good stuff, and you won’t miss the games. I promise.

I’m not a special person. Nothing I can do came naturally. I just had summers like these.

You can too.

A final word from Melanie: If your son reads Evan’s list and still wants the why, that’s exactly what we created the Kids’ Brains & Screens Home Edition for (and it makes the perfect summer reading to go alongside this list). It is designed to teach your son the actual brain science he needs to know: why the activities Evan suggested build his brain while video games hijack it. That way, the summer plan isn’t “because I said so.” It’s “because I love you, and here’s the proof.”

You can buy your copy directly from our site at https://kidsbrainsandscreens.com/.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Summer Strategies: Keeping Middle Schoolers ScreenStrong This Summer”

Podcast - “Go Game Free and Never Have Bored Kids Again! ”

Podcast - “10 Things I’m Thankful For Because I Grew Up Without Toxic Screens with Evan Hempe”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

Summer is the season when many ScreenStrong families rethink toxic screen use at home, removing video games, social media, and smartphones to improve their children’s mood, mental health, and overall family connection. And while now is absolutely the best time to do that (as we covered last week), there’s another screen conversation worth having this summer, one that tends to fly under the radar because it happens inside an institution we trust: EdTech.

More specifically, I’m referring to the school-issued laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks sitting on your child’s desk every single day, largely unchecked and increasingly difficult to opt out of. Now is the best time to think about this precisely because you’re not in the thick of it. You have the distance, the time, and the clarity to make requests, ask questions, and put things in writing before September arrives and the school year pulls you back under.

EdTech is an issue I know firsthand. When my son Adam received his school laptop, what had been a casual video game hobby didn’t stay casual for long. That device—issued by his school, trusted by us—became the accelerant. It’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat itself in family after family ever since.

The tide is beginning to change, though. More voices are speaking out against it. These voices include researchers, teachers, parents, and, as you’ll read this week, students themselves: kids who are watching what EdTech is doing to their peers, how it’s detracting from their learning, and who are willing to say so publicly.

One of those students is 9th grader A.M. Derrendinger, who recently wrote a letter to her local paper. Her words are a powerful reminder that sometimes kids see the technology problem more clearly than the adults trying to solve it.

I also want to recognize her mother, Laura Derrendinger, a longtime ScreenStrong Ambassador, nurse, and one of the many quiet leaders helping move this movement forward. If you’ve been working in the healthy childhood or phone-free schools space for any length of time, chances are you’ve crossed paths with Laura. For years, she has been connecting parents, sharing research, raising awareness, and advocating for children with persistence, grace, and integrity.

Cultural change is rarely driven by the loudest voices. More often, it is built by steady, courageous people working behind the scenes, helping others understand difficult truths, building relationships, and creating a path for others to follow. Every successful movement stands on the shoulders of early advocates who were willing to challenge the status quo before many were listening. Laura is one of those people, and she is also raising one of those people.

I’ll let Laura’s daughter, A.M., take it from here.

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Stop Hitting Snooze on the EdTech Problem

By AM Derrendinger, 9th grader, Vermont

Students’ families shouldn’t have to fight for what they already have a right to: an educational experience that promotes both academic success and health. Yet this basic truth is being actively ignored in schools statewide, as parents face pushback from teachers, principals, and superintendents for trying to opt their kids out of being set back — this being receiving a personal laptop, or, in the case of kindergarteners, a tablet.

Educational quality is being compromised by the unnecessary use of the aforementioned tech in the classroom. The reason is as simple as this: so-called EdTech is designed for the exact same purpose as social media —to profit from the attention of the human child. Distraction and effective learning cannot coexist. It is plainly a conflict of interest between Big Tech and education. The reality I have observed as a high schooler is that as long as students are put in front of an addictive device, distraction from the work at hand is predominant, and within one of society’s most trusted institutions, it is Big Tech’s priorities that come first.

Furthermore, what I observe firsthand almost every day is not only the flaws in the system, but also the questionable reasons devices are needed in the classroom to begin with.

I have toured a few local high schools, and the noticeable pattern is that computers are mainly relied on to play “educational games,” type up papers, have quick access to research resources, and email (AKA reminding students of homework assignments that they should have written down in a planner, of which I spied none). But aren’t schools supposed to teach organization and responsibility, or am I crazy?

All I know is I can’t lie to myself about what I directly see: classmates consistently forgetting tasks and due dates even with Google Classroom, and how the first thing my peers do upon opening their Chromebook is not to write their essay, but to text each other through Google Docs, or scroll, or search up gambling websites. As for research, taking a quick trip to the library has never yet failed me, and even the teacher at a school I recently visited admitted that all the resources needed to complete projects. In fact, the whole curriculum was available in analog form. The kids just liked the shortcuts, which are fine in certain situations, but unfortunately not when it comes to learning.

It’s not really even a shortcut to give any developing being the path of least resistance. It is a fundamental rule that doing so sets them up for failure later on, and for students who will be in the workforce not too long from now, that does not bode well. We’re not even factoring in the distraction and ineffective learning that come with the accessibility and appeal of YouTube on the school-issued device.

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In simpler terms, I am living proof that it is very possible to function without email and a Chromebook. And with that and all the failings in the current system I have described in mind, why not switch to a computer lab?

Vermont schools continue to hold their doors wide open for the destructive runoff of unchecked capitalism to flow in: the profiting off of hurting and disadvantaging the vulnerable, the kids whose interests should be put first. Which does not mean asking them for their input on how to use the dopamine-dispensing devices, in the same way that adults shouldn’t ask kids for their input on whether they should keep the candy around. Responsibility means taking action based on what independent research — of which there is an abundance on this topic — has proven.

If it’s not enough to rail against the destructiveness of Chromebook use in the classroom, it may be helpful to bring up another issue with that specific, widely used product: privacy law violations. Google is currently being sued for selling student data onward to literally anybody, and also getting kids addicted to porn on school devices.

It’s time for schools to wake up and realize that their whole purpose—to promote the academic and social success of children—is being compromised by the use of a largely needless and infuriatingly ineffective product. The alarm went off long ago when test scores and grades began to decline, exactly when in-class laptop and tablet use was implemented.

All that families want is the choice to give their kids a childhood: education, health, and play that doesn’t risk either of those things. So give us the choice to opt out of the tech that can ruin it.

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There is something so very powerful about hearing this from a 9th grader. Not a researcher. Not a policy expert. A 14-year-old who sits in these classrooms every day and refuses to look away from what she sees.

And she’s right.

So what can you do about it? Summer is actually the perfect time to act, before the school year begins, while you have time to research, write, and make requests without the pressure of an active school schedule.

Here are a few places to start:

Request the analog option

Many schools have print-based versions of their curricula available but don’t advertise them. Write to your child’s teacher or principal now and ask directly: Is a paper textbook or analog option available for next year? You may be surprised how often the answer is yes.

Provide your own device, with real controls

If your child needs a laptop for schoolwork, consider providing one yourself rather than accepting the school-issued Chromebook. A parent-controlled device with robust filtering and time restrictions gives you far more oversight than anything Google has ever offered. This is what we did for my youngest boys in high school.

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Put it in writing

A formal written request to opt out of school-issued devices creates a paper trail that a verbal conversation does not. Be specific, be polite, and reference your child’s right to a print-based educational experience. Send it to your principal and even your school superintendent.

When you write, if your school doesn’t have one, you can also request that your school consider a bell-to-bell no-smartphone policy and attach our free guide to help your district get started.

Connect with other parents

You are not alone in this. Find out if other families at your child’s school share your concerns and consider making a collective request. Schools are far more likely to respond to a group than to a single family.

Our ScreenStrong Connect group is a free way to connect with families like yours who are also rethinking screens at home and at school. Plus, when you join, you get access to free ScreenStrong resources like our 30-Day Reset and our Preventing Screen Addiction handout.

AM Derrendinger ended her letter with a simple ask: give us the choice to opt out of the tech that can ruin it.

This summer, let’s use the time we have to make that ask, loudly, clearly, and in writing.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Protecting Kids in the Digital Classroom: An Honest Look Into EdTech with Andrew Liddell”

Podcast - “Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains? with Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath”

Podcast - “From 16,000 Videos to Real Life: Colin’s Screen Detox Story”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

No family ever “eases into” summer. One day the alarm simply stops going off, the homework disappears, and suddenly, there’s nothing standing between your kid and a screen for the next three months.

Depending on where in the country you live, you may already be a few weeks into summer vacation, realizing the screens have already taken over, or you are only a few weeks away, staring down the mouth of the beast, knowing exactly what's coming but not sure what to do about it.

The answer? A 30-day screen reset.

Instead of surrendering your summer to screens, take it back by taking toxic screens out of the home. Despite what your kids will tell you, despite the pushback and the protests and the predictions that everyone will die of boredom, this is one of the best things you will ever do for your family, and summer is actually the perfect time to do it.

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Why is Summer Such a Challenge?

During the school year, kids have less downtime. Screen use must still compete with homework, sports, and other scheduled activities. During the summer, that safety net (small as it may be) is gone, leaving kids with:

A lack of a schedule.

Unless kids are booked with back-to-back camps, playdates, and vacations for nearly three months, they have far less structure than during the school year. Many parents are also still working, leaving screens to become the cheapest, most reliable babysitter.

An abundance of downtime.

Parents also view summer as necessary downtime for kids who feel rushed and overscheduled during the school year. They see screen time as a legitimate form of relaxation for kids, but it isn’t.

Screens do not relax; they stimulate us, especially when they are interactive and filled with social pressure, as on social media. You may have noticed this paradox in your own life. Taking a break from work to scroll through Instagram or Facebook does not help you to relax and refocus; instead, it often leaves you feeling more stressed and harried.

Kids do need free time, but an abundance of free time on screens is a trap. This kind of overuse is exactly what gets so many kids into trouble.

What’s meant to be a relaxing summer on their devices too often becomes a source of real stress. Whether it’s FOMO, comparing themselves to others, feeling bullied, or being overstimulated by gameplay, the result is mentally and emotionally compromised kids.

The most toxic screens (which are the hardest to manage).

Interactive screens, like video games and social media, are what we as ScreenStrong refer to as toxic screens due to the data around them. The high levels of dopamine triggered in a child’s brain by these screens create cravings that are hard to satisfy, leading to dependency and addiction, bad moods, and family conflicts. They are the screens that are used most in the summer. Other types of screen use associated with the school year, like developing spreadsheets and typing essays, do not create the same dopamine triggers and are not the problem.

Pay Now or Pay Later

Summer is when kids are on screens the most but need them the least. While screens can be helpful tools during the school year, they should not be treated as toys or rewards all summer.

Setting limits at the start of summer might cause some initial whining and resistance, but in the long run, your child will be better off, and so will you.

Without the constant pull of screens, kids naturally discover more enriching ways to spend their time, and the transition back to school becomes much easier. You can pay now or pay later. The boundaries you set today will determine the kind of summer your family actually has.

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Tips for a Screen-Free Summer

1. Fire the TV Babysitter

A sunny summer day is wasted in front of the TV. We all feel sluggish and out of sorts when we've had an unproductive start to the day, and a morning in front of the TV almost guarantees that feeling. Use the sunny weather to your advantage and get everyone outside early and often.

ScreenStrong Summer TV Tips:

• Make a point to watch TV only on purpose this summer, together as a family, instead of in isolation.

• Avoid leaving the TV on in the background all day.

• Never start the day with a TV activity. The first hour of the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. Starting with TV can put kids in a bad mood once it is turned off, as it often leads to feeling unproductive and sluggish. Studies show that screens first thing in the morning excite and exhaust a child’s attention. Listen to one mom’s thoughts here.

• Store the remote control in a hidden place that’s not easily accessible. This prevents the TV from becoming a go-to activity at every moment of boredom.

• Implement a rule: the TV stays off as long as the sun is out. Encourage outdoor activities instead.

• Swap TV time with music. Play music around the house most of the day to create a lively and engaging atmosphere.

• Remove TVs from your children’s bedrooms to discourage isolated viewing and promote better sleep habits.

• Consider having one TV in your home in the most central area. Use it only for family movie nights or co-viewing as a family.

• Curate a list of family movies and good documentaries to watch together.

2. Send Your Kid’s Smartphone on Vacation

If you’re already a ScreenStrong family, your kids probably don’t have smartphones (and you already know the difference it makes). But if changes still need to happen, summer is the perfect time to make them, when schedules are disrupted anyway and new ones are being formed.

The transition is usually easiest for younger kids. For teens, consider replacing the smartphone with a talk-and-text-only phone for the summer—or better yet, for the whole school year. It might feel like a big move, but it could be one of the best parenting decisions you ever make.

ScreenStrong Phone Detox Tips:

• Gather a few friends and their families to join you in a summer digital detox. Everything is more fun with friends. Turn it into a competition to see who can go the longest without a smartphone and video games.

• Get a basic phone for the summer. These phones allow only calls and texts, minimizing distractions and online temptations. Keep the basic phone during the school year.

• Use a basic phone as a shared house phone. Anyone can use it when necessary, but it should be returned to a central location, like the kitchen, when not in use.

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3. Remove Video Game Consoles for a Healthier Summer

If you buy a dozen donuts and leave them on the kitchen counter, your kids will struggle to resist them. Video games work exactly the same way. If the equipment is visible and accessible, it will be used. Removing access is the first and most important step to any meaningful reset.

One dad I know packed up his son’s entire gaming setup and locked it in his car trunk for the summer. (Just remember to hide the car keys, too!) Another took the console to his office. A third, at his wit’s end after watching his son game an entire summer away, threw it all in the dumpster at work.

Summer is for sprinklers, water balloons, slip-n-slides, popsicles, and sunshine. It is not for sitting in a darkened room in front of a screen.

ScreenStrong Video Game Tips:

• Commit to a summer without video games.

• Sell your video game consoles and let your kids use the money to buy something from a sports or hobby store.

• Replace video game time with new hobbies like backyard camping, engineering projects, or fort-building.

• Help your teens find summer jobs. Every teen needs a summer job to learn responsibility and gain valuable experience.

4. Fire the Tablet Babysitter

Tablets may be the most underestimated screen threat for young kids. They’re small, quiet, and easy to hand over—and parents often assume their kids are learning something. But a tablet is just a big smartphone. We would never hand a 5-year-old a smartphone and let them disappear on the couch for hours. And yet, that’s exactly what a tablet is—or worse.

iPads, Kindle Fires, and similar devices are the gateway for future screen dependency. Kids can use them to watch YouTube, access chat features, and browse the open web. In homes with young children, tablets are often the biggest source of screen conflict.

When a journalist asked Steve Jobs if his kids loved the iPad, he said, “They haven’t used it . . . we limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

ScreenStrong Tablet Tips:

• Gather all the tablets and hide them for the summer. Your life will be much easier.

• This summer, instead of a tablet, put books in your kids’ hands (they are about the same size).

5. Don’t Let the Kids Be in Charge of Their Activities This Summer

If you let your children decide all of their summer activities, they may lean toward low-effort, high-reward activities like screen time. I made this big mistake with my oldest son.

Your daughters will beg for more social media time, and your sons will lobby for video gaming as a hobby to be pursued. But you know the truth, as shown by the data: social media will cause your daughter to be more anxious, and long hours of video gaming leave you son lazy, without real-world skills. And you? Well, you will be frustrated that your fun family summer has devolved into daily screen time arguments.

Your kids will try to convince you that screens are the only way to connect with friends. Don’t believe it. Give them a basic phone, help them schedule more time with friends in person this summer, and everyone will be happier.

Think of yourself as a coach leading your team through a championship season. A good coach doesn't ask the players to design the practice schedule. Parents who lead their kids away from screens this summer—with a real plan and real alternatives—are the ones who win.

ScreenStrong Summer Activities Tips:

• Let your kids have choices only for activities that will not hurt them or cause addictions.

• Consider getting a pet this summer. Training a dog and caring for a pet is a perfect summer activity!

• Enroll your kids in a totally screen and phone-free summer camp. If you can’t find one, take turns hosting backyard camps this summer with other like-minded parents.

• Keep a consistent schedule with morning chores starting at the same time each day. Teach younger kids to plan their day by writing down their schedules. This helps them manage downtime effectively.

• Have your kids get a job this summer. They can do house and pet sitting, yard work, or other age-appropriate tasks.

• Fire the housekeeper and pay your kids to deep clean, do their laundry, organize the garage, paint the deck, etc. Chores should be a part of every summer schedule.

• You take a vacation from meal prep by scheduling kids of all ages to take charge of meals. This will keep them busy, and they need to learn the life skills of grilling and planning menus.

• Take on a project together. Schedule time to work on the go-kart (or other project), read, and work in the yard.

• Schedule bike riding and exercise every day.

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Summer Really Is the Perfect Time To Break Screen Habits

Here’s the thing about summer that most parents miss: the very qualities that make it hard—the blown-up schedule, the unstructured days, the kids suddenly home and underfoot—are exactly what make it the ideal time for a screen reset.

Think about it. The routine is already broken. The school-year habits are already disrupted. You’re not trying to change course in the middle of a busy semester. You’re starting fresh, with a natural built-in reason to do things differently. That’s a real advantage, one most families don’t take enough advantage of.

When you remove the toxic screens, you create space for the summer every family hopes for, one filled with conversations, backyard projects, neighborhood bike rides, and friends around the dinner table, all things that are so much more memorable than 3 months scrolling or gaming.

I know the thought of making a change at any time of year is overwhelming, and the reality is, you need more than a vision to make lasting change. You need a plan. That’s exactly why I created ScreenStrong’s 30-Day Reset, which is currently free when you join ScreenStrong Connect at no cost.

This Reset gives your family a clear, day-by-day plan for removing toxic screens, replacing them with real-life activities, and building new habits that can carry you well beyond summer. As a member of the Connect community, you’ll also find a group of parents doing the same thing at the same time—because this is always easier when you’re not doing it alone.

Looking for a way to explain these changes to your kids in a way they’ll understand? Check out our Kids’ Brains and Screens series, with resources for children from elementary through high school (all of which should definitely count toward those summer reading hours!).

Whether you’re trying to recover a summer that’s already gotten away from you, or you want to get ahead of it before it does, this is where to start, and ScreenStrong always has your back.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “A Psychiatrist’s Tips on How to Detox Your Child’s Brain from Screens”

Podcast - “The Opt-Out Movement: Simplifying Family Life in the Digital Age with Erin Loechner”

Podcast - “Your Teen WILL Have Friends Without A Smartphone. Just Ask My Homecoming Queen.”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

“Our students need to go outside and play. They need to be adventurous, build relationships, and really depend on others, not depend on technology.”

—Brad, Chief Academic Officer, Anderson One

Like so many states across the country, South Carolina schools are increasingly looking for ways to help students navigate a childhood shaped by screens.

From new conversations about student well-being and attention to district-led efforts focused on healthy technology habits, educators are recognizing that children need more than screen rules—they need screen education.

That’s where Super Brain Week comes in.

A few weeks ago, Anderson School District One became the first district in South Carolina to pilot ScreenStrong’s Super Brain Week, bringing the program to approximately 360 third- and fourth-grade students across two elementary schools.

Within a week, students started talking about habits, attention, and healthy choices in entirely new ways. They shared screen-free activity ideas with classmates, discovered new ways to connect and play together, and became excited to learn how their brains grow and develop.

What started as a simple classroom program quickly became a shared experience, sparking meaningful conversations among students, teachers, and families alike. And I’m so excited to tell you all about it today.

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What Is Super Brain Week?

Super Brain Week is a simple, five-day classroom experience designed by ScreenStrong to teach children how their brains grow and how screens can affect focus, learning, habits, and healthy development.

Using our latest book in the Kids’ Brains & Screens series, The Adventures of Super Brain, and its companion activity book, Super Brain in Action, students participated in one short “mission” each day from Monday through Thursday, followed by a Super Brain celebration on Friday.

The lessons introduced students to:

• Simple brain science

• Dopamine and habit loops

• Healthy screen habits

• What strengthens the brain

• What can interfere with attention and learning

• Real-life alternatives to screen time

The pilot comes at a time when schools are searching for practical, age-appropriate ways to teach students about life in a digital world. Rather than focusing on screen rules alone, Super Brain Week helps children understand the science behind attention, habits, and healthy development.

But this was more than just a lesson. It became a memorable experience for the whole school community.

“We’ve had really positive feedback from our teachers, and we’ve seen a lot of excitement from our students because this has given them the opportunity to really dive into and use some of the skills that you are able to learn without using technology.”

—Kristen, Director of Digital Learning

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The Kids Fully Bought In

One of the biggest surprises was how quickly students embraced the language of brain science.

By the middle of the week, students were talking about “MegaDrain” as if it were a character they already knew. They reminded each other about healthy habits, compared screen-free activity ideas, and proudly shared what they were doing instead of spending time on devices.

The Super Brain in Action activity book became a huge hit, too.

Students loved and looked forward to:

• Doing the puzzles and games

• Coloring

• Creating their own screen-free activity lists

• Planning fun activities

Many students were eager to participate in discussions and share examples from their own lives. Rather than resisting the conversation, they leaned into it.

“I think that not always having a screen is the best thing because you get to learn more.”

—Ava, 4th grader

The Teachers Loved It, Too

“They’re realizing why screens are addictive. They’re seeing the chemical imbalance in their brains. And they’re like, ‘Oh, this is why my teacher doesn’t allow us to do this.’”

—Sierra, 4th-grade teacher

Teachers consistently reported high levels of student engagement throughout the week. Classroom discussions were lively, students connected easily with the concepts, and many teachers shared how simple the program was to implement.

The structure was intentionally simple and easy to implement:

• One short read-aloud chapter and discussion each day

• A few workbook activities

• About 15–20 minutes per day

No complicated prep. No extracurricular burden. Just meaningful conversations grounded in brain science.

Teachers reported:

• Strong student participation

• Meaningful classroom discussions

• Increased awareness around focus and habits

• Positive classroom energy

One unexpected favorite? The Super Brain Week stickers, bookmarks, and posters quickly became classroom conversation starters and visual reminders throughout the week.

“A lot of them have talked about how they went home, and they went outside to play instead of going to play video games, and I think that’s a big win.”

—Anna, 4th-grade teacher

Why Elementary School Matters So Much

ScreenStrong was honored to partner with these pilot schools, who share one of our strongest beliefs: If we want different outcomes for teenagers, we must start earlier.

By middle school, many digital habits are already deeply ingrained. Elementary school, however, remains a critical window for brain development and habit formation.

Children deserve to understand:

• How their brains work

• Why screens can be hard to turn off

• What strengthens attention

• Why real-life activities matter

When children understand the “why” behind healthy habits, something shifts. The boundaries adults set—both at school and at home—begin to make more sense. Conversations become easier. And healthy choices become more meaningful.

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One Week Can Start a Shift

What happened in these classrooms was bigger than a single school activity. It marked the beginning of a shared language among students, teachers, and families.

Students brought the conversations home. Families were encouraged to participate through a screen-free challenge sent home during the week. Teachers reinforced the concepts in the classroom.

And for one week, children experienced something many of them need more of: a positive vision of what life beyond screens can look like.

More conversation. More creativity. More coloring. More movement. More real life.

This Can Happen in Your School, Too

One of our goals when designing Super Brain Week was to make it easy to implement, because we know how much teachers already do throughout the day. We were thrilled to see this goal being met in real classrooms with real teachers. Teachers and staff both commented on how simple it was to launch—and it can be brought to your school, too.

Super Brain Week is perfect for a variety of learning environments, including:

• Public schools

• Private schools

• Homeschool groups

• Church schools

• Co-ops

It only takes:

• A willing teacher or administrator

• The classroom materials

• One week

That’s it.

And in many communities, local businesses, PTOs, and community organizations are eager to sponsor the materials and help make it happen.

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Let the Shift Begin

This pilot reminded us of something important: children are hungry for real life.

They want connection, creativity, movement, and opportunities to better understand themselves and the world around them.

When we give children language for what’s happening in their brains—and adults willing to lead—they respond.

As schools continue looking for ways to help students develop healthier relationships with technology, Super Brain Week offers something simple, practical, and hopeful: an opportunity to start the conversation early.

One classroom at a time, we can begin rebuilding a healthier childhood culture. And this pilot reinforced what we have long believed: children are ready for it.

For more information on bringing Super Brain Week to your school, contact us at team@screenstrong.org or download the free Super Brain Week Guide.

If you aren’t a teacher or school administrator but want to purchase The Adventures of Super Brain and its companion activity book for use in your home, you can order them directly from our website.

If you're working to help kids avoid screen addiction and build healthier lives—whether at home or at school—ScreenStrong is here with science-backed resources to help.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Why Screens Are Changing the Classroom: What Parents Need to Know About Kids, Schools & Attention”

Podcast - “Are Classroom Screens Helping Kids Learn, or Quietly Working Against Their Brains? with Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath”

Podcast - “Why Kids Are Craving Disconnection: Helping Families Thrive Offline in a Screen-Filled World ”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the community that is saving children from screen addictions.

When my daughter Melissa was in middle school, I had a conversation with another parent that completely changed the path we would choose when it came to social media.

I was talking with a mom of two older daughters about what to expect in high school: the social pressure, the drama, and when she had given her girls smartphones. When I asked how she felt about social media, she reached into her purse, pulled out a doctor’s business card, and handed it to me. She had a whole stack of them.

She said, very casually, “This is the doctor all the girls go to for anxiety meds. The stress from social media is just too much. You might want to get Melissa started on medication before you give her social media.”

I sat there holding that card, trying to process what I’d just heard. Not because I didn’t believe her, but because of how normal it sounded to her. No hesitation. No concern. Just a practical suggestion, like recommending a good orthodontist.

When I asked why she didn’t just take her daughters off social media, she told me their counselor said the girls had to have it. That’s where their social life was, and, eventually, they’d need to learn to handle the stress.

That word—eventually—stopped me cold.

I decided our “eventually” would be after high school. We had already been through our older son’s gaming addiction. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. (I still remember sitting in the counselor’s office watching him play video games with our son, thinking: How is this helping him? Everyone seemed focused on helping kids survive unhealthy digital environments, not on questioning why we were putting them there in the first place.)

That moment was a fork in the road. And I’m so glad I paused long enough to take the other path.

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The Lie That Girls “Need” Social Media

Before I go further, I want to name something directly: girls do not need social media.

Parents say it. Counselors say it. Even well-meaning friends say it, that social media is “just part of growing up now,” and girls “need it to have a social life.” But that hasn’t been my experience, and it doesn’t match what we know about healthy adolescent development.

Girls don’t need hundreds of connections. They need a few close, real friendships where they feel known and supported. That kind of connection is built in person, over time, not through a screen.

Social media is not required, and it is not neutral. And girls’ need for it is not growing, though their anxiety, depression, loneliness, and conflict with parents are.

Why Girls Are More Vulnerable

What we’ve created with social media is the perfect setup to make girls feel insecure and dependent on approval. We’ve placed them in an environment where they are constantly evaluating themselves through the eyes of others. That is never going to end well.

Girls use social media very differently from their brothers. They create and invest in content, spending hours choosing photos, editing videos, and rewriting captions, while boys are more likely to consume and share content with little emotional investment. When a girl posts something, it feels personal. When it’s ignored or criticized, that feels personal, too. Boys generally have less to lose emotionally when something flops online.

Girls also tend to share emotions more openly. That emotional openness is a gift in real life. On social media, it can become a liability. Girls often overshare feelings, struggles, and insecurities in environments that are neither safe nor private, and what they put out there, they expose to judgment, judgment that can be relentless.

Girls are wired to care deeply about belonging, communication, and how they’re perceived. They’re far more likely than boys to think about how they look, whether their friends liked their post, and whether they measure up. They’re also far more vulnerable to emotional aggression online in the form of exclusion, subtle digs, and public humiliation she can’t escape from.

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The Rejection That Never Stops

Around age fifteen, girls are at one of the most emotionally vulnerable stages of life when it comes to social acceptance. And social media serves up rejection all day long.

It comes in small but relentless moments:

• A post that doesn’t get many likes

• A message left on “Read”

• Seeing photos of friends together and realizing you weren’t included

• A group chat that moved on without you

These moments may seem minor to adults, but they don’t feel minor to a teenage girl. They feel defining.

Girls start carrying the stress of questions they were never meant to think about all day long: Why wasn’t I invited? Why didn’t they respond? What’s wrong with me?

In the physical world, rejection happens, but there’s time and space to recover. Kids go home, cool off, reconnect, and move on.

Online, there’s no real break. The comparison follows her home. The social pressure continues into the night, when her defenses are down, and her brain is tired. And unlike any generation before her, today’s teenage girl can watch herself being ranked socially in real time, through likes, followers, views, and streaks.

Over time, many girls stop feeling emotionally safe even in their closest friendships, because everything starts to feel conditional, performative, and public. Instead of simply enjoying relationships, they’re constantly managing them, working to stay included, stay relevant, and stay liked.

That level of pressure was never part of a normal childhood. And it’s one of the biggest reasons anxiety among girls has exploded in the social media era.

What Gets Lost

The cost of teens’ social media use is greater than most parents realize because much of it is invisible.

The time girls would have spent talking face-to-face, working through awkward moments, solving problems with friends, developing hobbies, and building confidence through real-world experiences is slowly being replaced by time spent on screens. Those ordinary interactions are where emotional strength and social resilience are built. When they disappear, girls don’t just lose time; they lose the chance to develop the very skills they need most to handle disappointment, conflict, and stress.

They’re also losing real friendships. They aren’t talking to their friends when they’re online; they’re performing for an audience. Posting, waiting, checking, comparing, adjusting, and hoping. Hoping for approval. Hoping to feel included. Hoping to feel important. But social media rarely delivers the kind of connection girls are actually looking for. Many end up feeling more alone than ever.

And they’re losing the chance to discover who they are. Talent and purpose develop in long stretches of boredom, creativity, practice, adventure, and trying new things. Social media consumes the time and mental energy required for all of that. Many girls are spending their most formative years managing an online identity instead of building a real life.

What breaks my heart is how quickly we reach for counseling and medication without first asking whether the digital environment itself is the problem. Counseling absolutely has its place, but a therapeutic relationship cannot replace real friendship, family connection, purpose, play, movement, and belonging. We should never confuse the two. Medicating our daughters just so they can stay on social media is heartbreaking.

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What Girls Need More Than Social Media

Skipping the smartphone doesn’t mean leaving girls with nothing. It means giving them something better, like:

• A journal. When Melissa was growing up, we gave her a journal instead of a phone. She had a private place to write freely, work through her emotions, and make sense of her experiences without pressure, comparison, or an audience. That kind of quiet reflection builds emotional strength in a way social media never will.

• Time with her dad. Your daughter will never outgrow her need for her father to notice her, choose her, and genuinely enjoy her company. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Even frozen yogurt once a month sends the message underneath: You matter to me. I like being with you. Keeping up with her on social media is not the same thing.

• Time with her mom. Learning about life from a loving mother is worth more than anything she’ll absorb from female peers online. Keep showing up, even when the conversations get awkward. Take her shopping, cook together, go on walks, and leave a small, random note on her pillow to let her know you’re thinking about her. These moments build security over time.

• A few good friends. Girls don’t need hundreds of followers. They need a few people who truly know them. Be the home where kids gather, so your daughter can thrive socially. Offer rides. Order pizza for the group. Spend what you can afford; it is much cheaper than counseling and a much better investment.

• Hobbies. Help your daughter discover what she loves (or can grow to love) before social media becomes her primary identity, whether that’s pottery, baking, music, running, reading, horseback riding, or volunteering. Almost anything is healthier than endless scrolling. Don’t wait for her to find it on her own. Help her get started.

• Movement. Girls were never meant to sit inside staring at phones for hours. Exercise regulates mood, reduces anxiety, improves sleep, and builds confidence. Get bikes, take evening walks, sign up for something together, or even get a dog. Do something physical consistently as a family.

• Real life. Your daughter needs laughter with friends that isn’t typed into a comment section and conversations that don’t get screenshotted. She needs friendships that aren’t measured by likes. Connection that is steady, safe, and real. That’s what our girls need most.

That is what actually protects mental health.

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The Path Forward

All these years later, I still think about that conversation with that mother, the casual way that business card was handed to me, like anxiety was just the price of admission for teenage girls now.

We don’t have to accept that.

We don’t have to normalize anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, and emotional exhaustion as “just part of being a teenage girl.” We don’t have to keep lowering the bar so our daughters can try to just survive unhealthy digital environments. We can allow her to thrive without it.

If something is consistently harming your child, you don’t just try to manage it better. You reconsider the exposure. Sometimes you remove it completely.

Despite popular opinion, social media is not mandatory for minors. Your daughter does not need it to develop socially. She does not need it to be included. And she will not miss out on childhood without it.

In fact, she may finally get the chance to actually live one.

And if someone refuses to be her friend because she isn’t on social media? That relationship was never a real friendship to begin with. Help her find the girls who will love her offline.

The question should not be how to help girls handle social media better. It should be why we’re giving them something that’s hurting them in the first place.

If you’re ready to make the bold decision to skip social media through adolescence, helping your kids understand your reasoning makes all the difference. That’s why we created Kids’ Brains & Screens: Home Edition. It takes the brain science behind social media and explains it in a way middle- and high-school-aged girls can actually understand. It helps them understand that they aren’t missing out on anything at all, but rather protecting their mental health so they can stay curious, engaged, and genuinely excited about everything real life has to offer.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Are We Training Distraction? How Social Media Is Weakening Cognitive Skills in Teens with Dr. Adriana Stacey”

Podcast - “The Science of Media Use and the Teenage Brain with Dr. Douglas Gentile ”

Podcast - “Raising Teens Outside the Anxious Generation with Dr. Adriana Stacey”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

“I just want to play one more game,” he says. “Please?”

“Well, it is the only thing he enjoys,” you rationalize as you reset the kitchen timer. “At least I know where he is.”

And so the pattern continues.

No parent is blind to the shift: a son pulling away from sports and becoming more immersed in the virtual world. The energy that used to go into practice, into games, into actually doing something in the real world is now entirely focused on one thing: gaming. The couch has become his home base, and the team that used to need him doesn’t hear from him much anymore. Maybe he even has a new team, an online one made of “teammates” you—and maybe even he—have never met.

When parents see this shift, they feel uneasy. But instead of taking action, they wait. They tell themselves it’s just a phase, and they hope it works itself out.

As the mother of a video game addict, I can tell you it won’t, not without your help and intervention.

If you haven’t read Part 1 of this discussion on video games and sports that we shared last week, start there. It lays out what sports actually build in a boy’s life and why video games so easily replace them.

This is Part 2: what you actually do when you see it happening in your own home, that’s not waiting for a miracle.

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The Pattern Won’t Fix Itself

Once gaming starts replacing sports, that pattern will continue unless something changes. Boys don’t naturally choose the harder path when an easier, more rewarding option is always available.

Sports take effort, patience, and a willingness to struggle. Gaming delivers quick wins and instant rewards, and once a boy gets used to that, real sports start to feel frustrating, slow, and “not fun.”

There’s something else worth naming here. One of the biggest reasons boys are struggling with depression and low motivation today is that they simply aren’t moving enough. Exercise is one of the most powerful protective factors against depression that we have. A screen cannot replicate that. Every boy, on some level, knows the difference between winning a virtual game and the feeling of pushing his body hard and coming out stronger on the other side.

This is why giving in to the gaming default isn’t neutral. It’s costly.

The good news: all boys are built to be athletic (yes, really). Not every boy will be a star, and not every boy will love the same sport. But boys are wired to move, compete, build strength, and challenge themselves physically. Athletic confidence isn’t a gift that a few kids are born with. It grows through repetition, effort, and showing up. Your job isn’t to find a future athlete. Your job is to find what fits your son and help him get there.

That’s the coaching you need to put on right now.

How to Get Him Back on Track

Here are some practical ways to help your son reconnect with sports. But first, get the video games out of your house. Even the thought of them lying unused somewhere in the attic will compete with and distract from his ability to re-engage with the real game happening on the field.

1. Sign him up.
   Do not wait for your son to take the lead. He won’t. Be the parent. Find a team, meet the deadlines, and get him there. Do not expect enthusiasm at first, that comes later. The younger he is, the more you can lean on firm, steady guidance. If he is older, give him some input, but keep the expectation clear that he will find a sport. This matters.

2. Grab a friend.
   Everything is easier with a friend. Your son will be more motivated if someone he knows is there with him. Partner with another family when you can. Carpooling helps with busy schedules, and the time spent talking builds connection. Remember to keep it a no-device car. (If you can’t find a friend to start with, no worries, he will make new ones on the team.)

3. Inspire him.
   Bring sports into his daily life. Read athletes’ biographies together and talk about what it took for them to improve, overcome setbacks, and succeed. Subscribe to a kids’ sports magazine. Let him see that you care about sports too. In our family, we watched the entire 30 for 30 series from ESPN, which highlights incredible sports stories through documentaries. Stories like these help boys see that real growth, discipline, and perseverance are what make sports meaningful.

4. Collect something.
   Give him another way to connect with sports. Start a sports card collection. Go to games and collect autographs. Let him take photos and learn sports photography. These small connections build interest over time.

5. Connect with others.
   Look for people in your community with a sports background. Coaches, former athletes, college players. Introduce your son to them. These interactions can be more powerful than you expect.

6. Make it a family affair.
   Make sports part of your family culture. Attend games together. Watch games at home. Talk about effort, teamwork, and improvement. Show him that sports matter in your home. Do you have a team to root for? If not, get one and make traditions around watching games and playoffs, etc.

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The Questions Parents Ask Most

What if he gets cut from his team?

This is a critical moment, make no mistake. Many boys who get cut go home and turn to video games, where they can feel successful again. Do not let that become the default. There are always other options. Club teams, rec leagues, and community programs all provide opportunities to keep playing. The goal is not a specific team. The goal is to keep him in the game.

What if he wants to quit his sport?

One of the most valuable lessons sports teach is how to stick with something, especially when it gets hard. Think very carefully before allowing your son to quit a sport, and never allow them to quit mid-season or because his friend is moving on. Every child needs at least one activity that requires effort and perseverance in his life. Your son needs a stretch activity that he is not great at. Many boys want to quit right before they start to improve. They need parents to help them push through that stage.

What if team sports are not possible?

If you have exhausted all options for a team, then build exercise and challenge into his life in other ways. Running, weight lifting, swimming (outside of a team), biking, or playing basketball at a local court all provide many benefits. The key is consistency. A boy’s body and brain need regular physical effort. They also require regular time with parents, so Dad, perhaps it’s time for you to join him at the gym or set up a workout routine at home. Spending time with your son in a physical activity is a wonderful win-win and a great investment.

What about e-sports? Couldn’t this be a real opportunity?

The chances are extremely low that e-sports will financially benefit your son, and the cost of trying is very high. To compete at that level, a child would need to spend hours (think: at least 8 hours) each day on a screen. That time replaces practice, physical activity, and real team experiences. It also often replaces school focus and, in some cases, even college plans. There are millions of players competing for very few opportunities. Physical sports offer a much more reliable path to growth, discipline, and confidence, without the need to go pro.

If he’s on a team, can he still game?

In my experience, it is difficult to balance gaming with sports because gaming is always the easier way to pass the time and keep your son from improving in his physical sport. It is hard to get motivated to run laps or hit a bucket of balls in the backyard when the video game is constantly in the background calling your name.

Video games are designed to be more appealing. They are easier, faster, and more rewarding in the short term. When the two compete, sports usually lose.

This is why parents have to step in and set clear limits. In many cases, that means removing video games so sports have a chance to take hold again. This is not about punishment. It’s about resetting the environment. Once that distraction is reduced, it will be much easier to begin rebuilding his connection to sports.

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Why It’s Worth the Fight

Here’s something important to hold onto: motivation doesn’t come first. Action does.

William Faulkner once said, “I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately, I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.” That’s exactly how sports work for boys. Your son does not need to feel excited about sports before he starts. He needs to start. As he practices, improves, and builds real relationships with teammates, motivation follows. It almost always does.

Helping your son stay engaged in sports is one of the most important investments you can make in his development. Sports shape how he handles challenges, how he spends his time, and how he sees himself.

Not every boy will be the star player. Not every boy will love the same sport. But all boys—even yours—are built to move, compete, and be challenged physically. That’s not a preference. It’s how they’re wired. The digital world is very good at drowning that out. But the window to build physical skill, coordination, confidence, and resilience is open right now. And it won’t be open forever.

Your son needs coaches on the field. But he also needs parents willing to coach him off the couch and away from the distractions pulling him off the field.

Sports build boys. And in today’s world, they are worth protecting more than ever.

If this Substack series has resonated with you and you’re ready to disconnect your son from the virtual world and reconnect him with the real one, join our free ScreenStrong Connect group. Not only will you meet like-minded parents making the same changes, but you’ll get access to our 30-Day Reset, a step-by-step guide to remove video games and keep them gone. It’s the last solution you’ll ever need, and it’s totally free.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “The Hero’s Journey and Immersive Gaming with Dr. Huu Kim Le ”

Podcast - “When Dads Play: The Influence of Parental Gaming on Kids with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman”

Podcast - “Tips for Detoxing Your Older Teen”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

“I want to quit soccer because it’s too boring,” an elementary school boy tells his mom.

“I don’t want to play baseball; I’m not good anymore,” a middle school boy explains to his parents.

“I am done with tennis. I am not trying out for the school team, and you can’t make me play,” a high school boy tells his dad.

And the parents? They find a way to make peace with it.

“Sports just aren’t his thing,” the mom concludes.

“He’s not a natural athlete, but he’s a gifted gamer, and his teacher says he’s great at computer code,” his parents reassure themselves.

“Not every kid is built for sports,” the disappointed dad decides.

All three of these boys have one thing in common: they love their video games more than real-life athletics. And most of their parents have no idea that one fact is connected to the other.

Why is it so easy for a boy to walk away from sports, and so hard to get him back?

The short answer: video gaming is easy, and sports are difficult.

Kids are naturally drawn to low-effort, high-reward activities like gaming. Real sports are not that. They ask kids to struggle, to fail, and to keep showing up anyway. That’s exactly where the value is, but it’s also exactly why a sport starts to feel “not fun anymore” when a video game is waiting at home.

The numbers reflect this. According to a poll by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, about 70% of kids in the United States stop playing organized sports by age 13. Seven out of ten. Before high school even begins.

We tend to blame youth sports culture for that statistic: overzealous coaches, win-at-all-costs mentalities, and adults who forget the game belongs to the kids. Those are real problems. But there’s another factor that rarely gets named in that conversation: what boys are going home to after practice.

The long-term payoffs of real athletic participation (think: resilience, teamwork, physical health, identity, and the ability to handle losing) are something no screen can replicate. And a boy will never discover that if we let him quit before he finds out.

Why Do Sports Matter, Anyway?

Many parents shrug off their children wanting to give up sports altogether. After all, it’s not like they were going pro anyway, right? That mentality misses the point.

The benefits of sports in a young boy’s life are many. Participation in sports:

• Improves physical health (strength, endurance, coordination, and healthy weight)

• Builds strong brain development (focus, decision-making, self-control)

• Teaches discipline, work ethic, and grit

• Develops delayed gratification (earning progress over time)

• Builds real confidence through effort and achievement

• Strengthens social skills and teamwork and creates a sense of belonging

• Teaches leadership and communication

• Builds resilience and the ability to handle failure

• Provides healthy stress relief and improves mood

• Encourages goal-setting and perseverance

• Reduces risk of anxiety and depression

• Reinforces respect for rules, coaches, and others

• Develops time management skills

• Encourages outdoor physical activity and less screen time

• Builds identity and purpose in the real world

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How Video Games Derail Sports

When you understand how video games are designed to draw boys in and play to their natural needs and desires, it’s easy to see why video games quickly undermine the role of sports in a young boy’s life.

(For simplicity, this section refers to boys and video games, but many of these patterns also apply to girls and social media.)

1. Instant “Talent”

Video games are designed to make your son feel successful immediately. That instant reward is easily confused with real ability.

Sports don’t work that way. Progress is slow, often frustrating, and earned over time. When a boy feels “good” at a video game right away—but struggles in a sport—it becomes easy to quit the harder path.

Gaming offers the illusion of mastery. Sports require the reality of it.

2. Effort vs. Escape

Sports demand effort, repetition, and resilience. Losing is part of the process and one of its greatest teachers.

Through losing, kids learn:

• How to handle failure

• How to recover from mistakes

• How to keep going when things are hard

Video games remove that process. Mistakes are erased with a reset button. There are no real-world consequences, only endless retries.

3. Hooked by Design

Video games are intentionally engineered to keep players engaged through intermittent rewards and constant stimulation.

Sports offer none of that artificial pull. Early on, the “hook” for sports is often a parent providing structure, encouragement, and accountability.

Without that support, it’s no contest: one activity is designed to keep him playing, while the other requires him to choose it.

4. Time Displacement

Gaming doesn’t just compete with his physical sport; it replaces it.

Hours spent in front of a screen are hours not spent practicing, improving, or competing in the physical world. And improvement is what fuels enjoyment.

The equation is simple:
Less practice → less progress → less confidence → less desire to play.

5. False Confidence

Video games create the feeling of productivity and achievement, but it’s an illusion.

A boy may feel skilled at playing a sports video game, but those skills do not transfer to the real field. Watching and controlling a character on a screen is not the same as moving your own body through space, reading real players in person, and executing under pressure.

The brain knows the difference even if the child begins to blur it.

6. Lowered Expectations

Over time, excessive gaming can quietly lower the bar. When a boy is allowed unlimited screen play, the unspoken message becomes: this is enough.

He may even begin to tell himself, “I’m not good at real sports, but I can be good at this.” That belief traps him in a cycle where the easier activity replaces the more meaningful one.

7. Loss of Purpose

Sports provide something gaming cannot: a real-world purpose.

A season has structure. A team depends on you. Goals are shared. Effort matters.

Gaming, by contrast, offers endless activity with no lasting meaning. Over time, that lack of purpose can leave boys feeling unfulfilled, and in some cases, contribute to anxiety or depression.

Video games don’t just take time away from sports. Video games compete with everything sports are designed to build: discipline, resilience, confidence, and real-world competence.

And for a developing brain wired to seek ease and reward, it’s a competition sports will lose unless parents step in and protect it.

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The Cost of Lost Time

Gaming is not just a distraction; it can quickly and quietly become addictive and open the door to other compulsive behaviors.

Sports, by contrast, build something lasting. The effort, discipline, and commitment required in athletics strengthen neural pathways that shape how a boy will make choices for the rest of his life, especially when deciding how to spend his time.

There is no real-world purpose to spending five hours a day on a video game during the narrow developmental window when lifelong habits are being formed. Nothing meaningful is built in the real world while a child is living in a virtual one.

My oldest son, who struggled with video game addiction, has said many times that he wishes he could have those hours back. That’s the part no one talks about—the quiet realization, years later, of how much time was lost. He once told me, “All those gaming hours are just entertainment hours, and I have nothing to show for all that time. I’m not better at anything that really matters.”

What’s Really at Stake

As parents, we cannot afford to be passive about this.

Our kids are growing up in an environment filled with powerful, highly engineered distractions competing for their attention. They will not naturally choose the harder path, the one that builds strength, discipline, resilience, and real confidence, without guidance.

We have to show them what’s at stake and protect the activities that help build their future. Sometimes that means clearing the screens out of the way for a while so they have the space to fully develop in the physical world. The digital world will still be there later. But this window to build physical skills, confidence, coordination, and resilience is happening right now.

We also have to be willing to say no to the things that slowly erode those opportunities.

Because in the end, this isn’t just about sports or screens. It’s about giving our sons the best chance to reach their full potential.

Next week, we will dive into this topic even further, as many parents have reached out to me this season about how to get their child off the couch and back onto the field. In the meantime, if you’re ready to make real changes when it comes to video game use in your house, join our free ScreenStrong Connect group. There, you’ll be given access to our 30-Day Reset that will show you exactly how to remove video games from your home—and keep them gone.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “The Hero’s Journey and Immersive Gaming with Dr. Huu Kim Le ”

Podcast - “When Dads Play: The Influence of Parental Gaming on Kids with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman”

Podcast - “Tips for Detoxing Your Older Teen”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

Before founding ScreenStrong, I worked as a nurse, and I knew nurses who practiced harm reduction in high-risk communities. Their “office” was on street corners, where they handed out clean needles to drug users to help reduce the spread of diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. This approach is called harm reduction.

Harm reduction is a public health approach that accepts the primary addictive behavior (aka drug use) may continue and works instead to minimize its most dangerous consequences. The goal of these needle-exchange programs wasn’t to encourage drug use, but to reduce the worst of the damage. They handed out clean supplies and taught “safe practices” like how to prep injections, care for veins, and rotate sites on the belief that helping an addict is better than abandoning them.

Whether these programs are effective or whether they fuel addiction is a debated topic in public health. Supporters argue that “drugs are here to stay,” so we should at least teach safer practices and responsible use.

Sound familiar?

It’s exactly the same logic we are applying to kids and screens. Most parents see screen overuse as a mental health risk, but they give in anyway, convinced they have no choice, and that the best they can do is teach their kids to “safely use” this digital drug. After all, “tech is here to stay.”

But here’s what’s worth noting: even harm reduction advocates don’t apply their theory to children. Those same nurses who hand out clean needles on a street corner would never walk into a school and teach kids how to use drugs more safely—not because they don’t care, but because with children, the goal is never safer use of a harmful activity.

The goal is prevention.

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Are we doing more harm by trying to reduce harm?

Research shows that early and frequent exposure to highly stimulating digital environments is likely to harm children and teens by increasing anxiety, depression, and attention problems. And that’s before accounting for exposure to inappropriate content and the risk of sextortion. We also know that early addictions prime the brain for future ones.

Harm reduction says: “They’re already in it, so let’s make it safer.”

But prevention says: “Their brains are still developing, so let’s protect that process.”

When it comes to kids and screens, prevention isn’t extreme. It’s actually the most developmentally appropriate, brain-aligned, and protective approach we have.

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Childhood is not the time to manage addiction

Childhood is not simply a waiting period for adulthood. It’s a critical window for building the strong brains, secure attachments, emotional regulation, and real-world resilience children will need to thrive as adults. Childhood is, essentially, where adults are formed.

When we hand children smartphones, video games, and tablets, we give kids access to the most addictive technology during the most vulnerable years of brain development. We are allowing harm first, and then trying to reduce it by teaching them to “use it safely.”

Before we accept this as logical, consider this: we don’t accept this approach anywhere else in childhood. We never say, “Here’s something addictive. Let’s just make sure you use it safely.”

We don’t open the medicine cabinet to our kids and say, “Go ahead. I’ll teach you proper dosage so you can self-medicate.”

We don’t hand a 12-year-old alcohol to consume and explain moderation.

We don’t hand them a pornography magazine and advise them to just read the articles.

Instead, we protect minors by removing access to harm in the first place.

The same should apply for screens. When it comes to screens, the burden of “managing use” shouldn’t fall on children. It should fall on adults in their lives, those with fully developed brains. And we should manage use by not allowing it in the first place. Expecting children to self-regulate with devices specifically engineered to override that regulation isn’t harm reduction. It’s a set up for failure.

After one of our workshops years ago, a dad said something I’ve never forgotten. We’d been talking about what to do when a child has a first-time porn experience, and he said, “Our goal as parents should be that our children never have a first-time porn experience.”

He was right.

Kids don’t need help managing addictive things. They need time to grow up without them.

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There is hope

Here’s the hopeful part, the part I wish every parent could feel confident about: toxic screen use is not mandatory for your child.

When you postpone giving access to toxic screens before 18, you are not hurting your child; you are giving them a gift. You are protecting something very valuable.

You’re protecting their curiosity and innocence. You’re increasing their attention spans and their ability to sit with discomfort and grow through it. You are also protecting their connection with their friends and you, their parents. You are protecting their childhood. And by doing this, you are protecting their adulthood.

So keep the bar high for your kids. When you feel the pressure to go along with what everyone else is doing, come back to this: You are not being extreme. You are being strong and protective, so your children can be strong enough to reach their full potential.

You are doing the right thing by giving your children the best gift of all: an addiction-free childhood.

A simple place to start

If you’re reading this thinking it’s too late, that you’ve already allowed screens in your home and can’t walk it back—it’s not, and you can.

ScreenStrong has helped thousands of families remove toxic screens from their homes for good. And it starts by helping children understand the why.

Our Kids’ Brains & Screens (KBS) series does exactly that. It gives parents a simple, age-appropriate, science-backed way to explain to their kids how their brains are growing and how screens affect them. When kids understand what’s happening in their own brains, the conversation shifts, and the pushback tends to ease. Take advantage of our Elementary or Middle/High School versions and build that understanding together.

For even more support, join our free ScreenStrong Connect group. There, you’ll get access to our 30-Day Reset, a proven way to remove addictive screens, reset your home environment, and reconnect your child with real life. Plus, you’ll be supported by a community of families who are making the same choice—the choice to not manage addictive things, but give kids time to grow up without them.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “Why Kids Are Craving Disconnection: Helping Families Thrive Offline in a Screen-Filled World”

Podcast - “The Courts Are Catching Up: What the Google & YouTube Verdicts Mean for Your Kids”

Podcast - “It’s Not Strict, It’s Protective: The Truth About Phone-Free Schools with Kathleen Barlow”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

Here at ScreenStrong, we talk a lot about what excessive screen use does to kids: the impact on developing brains, the erosion of attention and emotional regulation, the way digital environments can quietly reshape family culture and childhood as a whole. It’s the heart of our mission, and it’s why so many of you are here.

As a society, we are starting to ask a lot of questions about what screens do to our children. Today’s guest post from ScreenStrong Ambassador Liz Breen comes at the issue from a different angle: what are screens doing to us as parents?

I think what Liz explores here is spot-on. Every time we hand a child a device to smooth over a hard moment, we sidestep something important—not just our growth as parents, but our connection with our child.

Because those hard moments? That’s where trust is built. That’s where your child learns, My parent stays with me, even when it’s hard.

When we opt out, we outsource that moment.

At ScreenStrong, we say: parent like a good coach. Good coaches don’t sit on the sidelines and send in a substitute when things get tough. They lean in. They guide. They stay engaged. But if an iPad becomes the stand-in coach early on, it won’t stay secondary for long. As our kids grow into teens, they will turn toward whatever has been guiding them all along.

Strong parenting now isn’t just about today—it’s about building the relationship you’ll depend on in the teenage years.

And those opportunities to build it?
They don’t come back.

With that, here’s Liz.

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There are lots of Substacks out there that tout the peace that comes with low-screen or no-screen parenting, describing quiet afternoons where each member of the family retreats to some sun-drenched corner of the house to enjoy a book or—better yet—the kids vanish to their rooms to play with Legos in complete silence and total isolation, not bothering a soul until it’s time for dinner. And it’s important that you know, right up front, that my house is nothing like that.

My house is chaotic, my children are loud and impossibly energetic, and inevitably, for the entire month leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, my entire first floor is a giant leprechaun trap. “Serene,” “peaceful,” and “bliss” are not words I would use to describe our daily life.

But that’s okay because the decision to continue with this low-screen lifestyle has not been about avoiding the messiness of parenting: it’s about learning to embrace it.

In his podcast and newsletter musings, productivity guru Cal Newport describes the primary and secondary harms associated with kids and technology. Primary harms are, essentially, the harms that make the news and are backed by scientific data. Think: rising rates of depression and anxiety and reduced focus. Secondary harms are those that are often not discussed on public platforms because they are difficult to quantify. And yet, they directly impact our quality of life and human experience. Think: erosion of community and loss of solitude.

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While the primary harms of handing a toddler or young child a screen when shopping at the grocery store or waiting at the doctor’s office might include lower frustration tolerance and executive functioning, a real secondary harm that doesn’t get discussed is this: we, as parents, don’t develop the skills necessary to navigate less-than-ideal situations and less-than-ideal emotions.

Make no mistake, this is not a judgment on others’ parenting. Just yesterday, my 4-year-old got mad at me at the post office when I told him we would not be going to Target to buy him a toy afterward. He said, “Then I’m going to walk home,” and tried to run out of the post office.

It was a totally new behavioral experience for me. And that’s the point.

What do you do in the moment when your child tries to bolt from the post office? (Answer: dash after him and proceed to finish your transaction with a screaming child under your arm.) And, more importantly, what do you say when the moment has passed, and the two of you are driving home (and not to Target) to try to prevent it from happening again?

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What I’m learning—slowly, inconsistently, and often while someone is crying about the color of their cup—is that when we hand our child a screen to avoid a hard moment, we aren’t just pacifying our kids; we’re short-circuiting our own growth, too.

There are skills we can’t learn from parenting books or—let’s be honest—Instagram Reels. These are skills that only develop when we’re in the thick of it: sitting with our child’s boredom, their meltdowns, and our own discomfort about it all. And if we don’t build those muscles while our kids are little, we’ll find ourselves unprepared to handle the bigger, more complex challenges that come later, when the stakes are higher and the consequences more real.

These include skills like:

1. Emotional Regulation (Ours, Not Theirs)

I made this #1 because this is the parenting skill I am working on the most.

When our kids lose it, and we don’t have a phone to hand them (or to disappear into ourselves), we’re stuck riding out the chaos. That means figuring out how to stay calm while someone is yelling, crying, or attempting to throw any object they can get their hands on. It means taking a deep breath instead of snapping or shutting down. Low-screen parenting doesn’t magically make us more patient, but it does give us lots (and lots!) of chances to practice.

2. Conflict Mediation

I would consider my boys to be fairly good friends. But oh, wow, they can still bicker and fight and taunt with the worst of them.

And without screens to break the tension or separate them when things get heated, I’m often stuck dealing with these squabbles in some capacity. The toy disputes, the who-had-it-first arguments, the constant cries of “Stop copying me” (“Stop copying me!”)—it’s a never-ending loop. We talk about taking turns, taking breaks, and using our words, and I often wonder if any of it sticks. But we keep showing up for the same conversations because, without a tablet on hand, there’s nowhere to hide. It’s annoying. It’s repetitive. And maybe (hopefully?), it’s where the real teaching happens, for them and for me.

3. Creative Problem Solving

When there’s no screen to fill the silence or keep an active child somewhat stationary, we improvise. We reach deep into our mental archives for old camp songs and half-remembered finger games. We hand over pens, receipts, an entire tin full of mints, whatever might buy us three quiet minutes. And when all that flops, we learn how to roll with it. We learn to be flexible, to pivot, and, in doing so, we give our kids the opportunity to learn from our example. It’s not elegant, and it’s rarely successful in the ways we hope, but in its own important way, it works.

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4. Tolerance for Boredom (Theirs and Ours)

Letting kids be bored—truly bored, like staring-out-the-window-asking-if-clouds-have-feelings bored—teaches them to get creative. But it teaches us something, too: that we can survive the whining, the flopping on the floor, the eye rolls (I hate those). That we don’t have to fix every awkward pause or rush to entertain. Sometimes that empty space between activities is where the real magic happens, for them and, if we can resist hiding in the bathroom with our phones, for us too.

5. Figuring Out What Discipline Actually Means

Without screens to use as leverage (“No tablet if you hit your brother!”), we’re pushed to think more deeply about how we correct behavior. We start to move away from quick punishments and toward actual teaching because we have to. And we learn, often the hard way, that what works for one kid might totally backfire with another. One child might respond to a calm conversation; the other needs a very clear, very firm line. It’s all trial and error, again and again. But over time, we get better at understanding what helps each of our kids grow and what just adds fuel to the fire. The screen interrupts our ability to learn that very necessary piece of intel.

6. Parental Confidence

When we don’t rely on screens to smooth over the tough moments, we’re forced to actually handle them (to varying degrees of success). We learn that we—and our kids— can survive public meltdowns or disastrous playdates. And every time we make it through a hard moment without hitting “play,” we build a little more trust in ourselves. And our kids learn to trust us, too. We all realize we’re more capable than we thought. And over time, that’s how confidence grows, not from everything going smoothly, but from knowing we can show up when it doesn’t.

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Do I think I’m a “good parent” because I limit screens? No.

Like most parents, I hear a little voice in my head, asking me if I’m doing any of this right, if my boys are going to grow up to be good men. I question myself daily. But what I do know is that by limiting screens, I’ve given myself a front-row seat to who my kids actually are. Not just the easy parts, but the messy, loud, unpredictable, emotionally intense parts, too.

And in showing up for all of it, I’ve learned more about them and about myself. I’ve learned how to handle hard moments, how to repair after I mess up, how to read their cues and trust my gut. I’ve built muscles I didn’t even know I had, not because I’m a natural, but because I’ve given myself no other choice.

So no, I don’t think limiting screens makes me a better parent. But it has made me a more alert, somewhat present, and semi-resilient one.

We started the whole low-screen thing because we saw it as a way to help our children grow into the best version of themselves. What we realized was that it has also helped us grow into the best version of our parenting selves, too.

—Liz Breen

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This post so brings me back to the days when my own kids were young, when we were first making tough decisions about screens in our home. We were learning new parenting skills in the process, including the skill of “not riding their rollercoaster,” as my daughter’s coach once told me.

Ultimately, it adds to the growing list of reasons why the ScreenStrong lifestyle is so rewarding. You are not only giving them the opportunity to reach their full potential, without being crippled by screen dependency. You are giving yourself and your family that same opportunity.

What kind of parent would you be if you could swap your “Game Cop” or ‘TikTok Cop” persona for something else? You deserve to find out, and your kids deserve to have that kind of parents—who are strong in their beliefs and willing to be different for the sake of their family’s future. Not giving a screen during the meltdown at the post office really does pave the way for a better relationship when that same child presents with bigger teenage problems.

ScreenStrong is here to help you get there, with free resources and a community of like-minded parents on our (also free) Connect Group. I love to read the posts on Connect, and I’m excited to cheer you and your family on.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “10 Things I’m Thankful For Because I Grew Up Without Toxic Screens with Evan Hempe”

Podcast - “The Basement Generation with Amy Eytchison”

Podcast - “Building Executive Function: Why Play Matters More Than Tech with Mariana Carazo”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

On March 25, a Los Angeles jury made history.

After hearing testimony about eating disorders, self-harm, and children whose mental health deteriorated in step with their social media use, the jury found Google’s YouTube and Meta liable for intentionally designing addictive platforms that harmed children, and recommended millions in punitive damages on top of the base award.

This follows another important verdict earlier this year, where a federal court gave final approval to a separate $30 million settlement against Google and YouTube for secretly collecting personal data from children under 13—without parental consent—and using it to target them with ads. A court found that Google had engaged in “highly offensive conduct” and that up to 45 million children were affected.

These verdicts aren’t a revelation, but rather a confirmation of what parents already knew in their guts: our children are being targeted, tracked, and deliberately kept hooked so Big Tech can profit.

But these verdicts are not enough.

The same platforms named in those courtrooms are still on your child’s device right now. No verdict changes that. No settlement redesigns the algorithm. The jury delivered its finding on a Wednesday. On Thursday, the autoplay was still loading the same as it always has, serving the same potentially harmful videos that brought these companies to court.

I say this not to make you feel defeated, but to empower you to stop waiting for Big Tech to protect your kids and make the changes in your own home.

The courts are catching up, but your child is growing up now.

Yes, accountability matters. Yes, these cases are important precedents. And of course I’m glad to see Big Tech’s predatory practices exposed. But I don’t think this one verdict will be enough to convince these companies to change their entire business model when it comes to underage users—not with so much money on the line—and your child’s brain is developing in real time, right now.

If you’re waiting for Big Tech to make the tough decisions for you, you will wait too long.

You have more power than you think, and you need to step into it.

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5 Mentalities That Keep Kids Safe from Big Tech

I hope this verdict is just one of many. I truly do. In the meantime, I want you to know how to keep your kids safe. That starts with adopting these key mentalities, which I elaborated on in this week’s ScreenStrong Families Podcast.

1. You are not powerless.

I’ve said this a few times now, but I want to say it once more because it’s important. In fact, it’s the most important thing to remember from this post. You decide when your child gets a phone. You decide what apps are allowed. You set the expectations in your home. You are the gatekeeper, and that role matters more than ever.

The tech companies are doing what companies do, but you’re the one lying awake at night thinking about your child’s future. That’s exactly why your choices are the ones that count.

2. Social media is not for minors.

No matter what society has normalized, the truth is this: minors do not need social media. In fact, it goes against everything we know about brain development. Which makes sense because these platforms weren’t designed with children in mind. They were designed to maximize engagement. That’s a mismatch no verdict can fix.

“Normal” in today’s society doesn’t always mean healthy, and our job as parents is to know the difference.

3. This is not a willpower issue.

If your child can’t put the phone down, it’s not because she’s weak or undisciplined, or because you need stricter screen time limits. A jury just confirmed what the science has shown for years: these platforms are engineered to keep users hooked through autoplay, endless scrolling, and algorithm-driven content that adapts to your child’s vulnerabilities in real time. Expecting a child to “just use it in moderation” was never a fair ask. Understanding that shifts our response from frustration to action.

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4. We can’t wait for the industry to change.

As much as we have celebrated the jury’s decision, we should also fear Google and Meta’s response.

Google and Meta have responded to this verdict by saying teen mental health is “profoundly complex” and that YouTube is “a responsibly built streaming platform.” To read between the lines, that means they are not changing. Waiting for policy reforms or platform redesigns is not a strategy. We already know enough to act, so let’s act before it’s too late for our kids.

5. Education is where it starts.

When parents understand the science, they stop debating their kids and start setting boundaries and leading their family with confidence. And when children understand the science, too, they start to understand and ease up in their fights against your limits. They won’t love them, but they will at least begin to understand them, and that’s important.

That’s exactly why we created Kids’ Brains & Screens: to explain to kids how their brains develop and how toxic screens interfere with that development, turning daily screen battles into real, long-term strategies for families. You can find the full series here. We have books for all ages.

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Let This Verdict Be Your Turning Point

Google and Meta may not see these verdicts as an impetus to finally make a change, but you can. You can make positive changes in your home today, not when—or if—a law finally passes.

You can make real life more engaging, more meaningful, and more fun than anything on a screen, and we can show you now. Our ScreenStrong 30-Day Detox is a step-by-step guide to get you started. It will help you reset your home, change your family culture, and help your kids reengage with the real world. It’s helped thousands of families like yours make changes they never thought possible, and it’s free when you join our (also free) ScreenStrong Connect Group.

The companies that built these platforms knew exactly what they were doing. Their priority has always been growth, engagement, and profit, not your child’s well-being. But you care more than anyone about your child’s future. You don’t have time to wait and see what tech companies will or will not do.

Make this verdict a turning point for your family. It’s time to move your kids off risky platforms and get them fully immersed in real life, where they can grow, connect, and thrive.

Because the truth has always been this: parents are more powerful than Big Tech when it comes to protecting their children’s future.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - The Courts Are Catching Up: What the Google & YouTube Verdicts Mean for Your Kids

Podcast - “Raising Creators, Not Consumers: A Philosophy for Life & Parenting with Bradley Morris”

Podcast - “The Science of Media Use and the Teenage Brain with Dr. Douglas Gentile”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

Every parent wants to raise a reader. So why aren’t we?

You’ve heard the saying, “Readers are leaders.” It’s not just a clever rhyme—it’s backed by reality.

A five-year study of self-made millionaires found that 88% spent at least 30 minutes a day reading and educating themselves. Warren Buffett credits his success to reading voraciously, saying knowledge “builds up like compound interest.” Bill Gates reads about a book a week. Oprah Winfrey calls reading her “personal path to freedom.”

The pattern is hard to ignore: the people who shape our world are the ones who never stopped reading.

And here’s something even more important for parents to understand:

Reading for pleasure at age 15 is one of the strongest predictors of future success, stronger than test scores and even socioeconomic background.

Study after study shows that kids who read regularly for enjoyment:

• Do better academically

• Stay in school longer

• Are more likely to pursue higher levels of education

In other words, raising a reader isn’t just a nice extra; it’s one of the most powerful advantages you can give your child.

And yet, when we look around today, here’s what we see:

• 80% of U.S. families didn’t buy a single book last year (Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report)

• Only about 20% of teens read for pleasure almost every day (NAEP reading data)

• About one-third of high school graduates will never read another book again (NEA Reading at Risk)

Never again.

So what’s going on?

Yes, screens play a huge role. Tablets have replaced books for our youngest children, and phones have replaced books for our teens. When kids are spending seven to nine hours a day on screens, there simply isn’t time left for reading—or being outdoors— or connecting with friends.

But there’s something else happening too, something quieter.

In many homes, we’re unintentionally sending the message that reading is old-fashioned. Reading is a chore. Something you have to do. Something to get through, so you can get back to the real reward: screens.

Kids pick up on that message quickly, and it sticks.

I know every parent wants to raise enthusiastic readers, so let’s look at how we may be unintentionally undermining our child’s relationship with reading and tips for what to do instead.

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10 Ways to Ensure Your Child Will NOT Love Reading

1. Don’t keep age-appropriate books around.

Take inventory. Does your child actually have easy access to books he can read?

A 6-year-old shouldn’t only have picture books in her room. Replenish books like you replenish his closet when he outgrows his clothes. Aim to have five to 10 engaging, age-appropriate books she hasn’t read yet. Go to the library. Go to Goodwill. Do a book swap with friends. Let your children pick some, but you pick some, too.

Make books visible in their rooms, on the coffee table, and in the car. Make good habits easy to pursue.

2. Rely on graphic novels.

Graphic novels may keep your child looking like a reader, but he is not building the skills of one.

Graphic novels don’t require deep thinking; they do the imagining for the child, and they mimic the fast-paced stimulation of screens—quick, visual, and easy to consume. They also limit vocabulary and exposure to complex sentence structure.

That’s not how strong readers are developed.

“But graphic novels are the only thing she’ll read,” you say? Don’t settle. When we accept this as “good enough,” we lower the bar for our children and stunt their reading skills.

At some point, your children will be expected to read more than a comic book. They need to practice reading real paragraphs. Colleges don’t assign graphic novels. Your kids need to be ready.

3. Make reading feel like a chore.

Want kids to love reading for life? Make it a daily habit at home—for everyone. Parents and kids should be reading a non-school book for pleasure. That’s how you communicate that reading becomes a life-long habit and part of life, not just for school.

If reading only happens for homework—or is enforced with a timer—it quickly becomes “work.”

Nothing says “punishment” like “Go read for 30 minutes.”

Instead, make it relational: “Let’s all grab our books and read together after dinner.” Pop popcorn. Put on some soft background music—not a TV show—and sit together.

Now reading becomes about connection, not compliance.

4. Replace books with screens in the car for trips and errands.

Car rides, waiting rooms, errands—these are golden reading opportunities.

If your child gets carsick, use audiobooks. But don’t default to screens. Remind her to grab a book or kids’ magazine before you pile in the car.

Fifteen minutes a day adds up to over a million extra words a year.

5. Never read yourself.

Your kids are watching you.

If they never see you with a real book, they won’t believe reading matters. This is one of the most powerful shifts you can make: let them see you read.

• Get a newspaper or a magazine delivered to your house.

• Talk about the books you are reading often.

• Keep a book in the car and read while you wait for school pick up.

You will be shocked at how your kids will follow your lead when you make print material part of your family culture.

6. Don’t give books as gifts.

We give what we value.

Make books part of birthdays and holidays. Write a note inside. Make it meaningful. One year, we gave our son a set of the “Who Was…” biography series. That kicked off his reading habit.

Screens make terrible gifts.

7. Show no interest in what they’re reading.

Ask about her books at dinner. “What’s happening in your story right now?” She will be so excited to share.

Even better? Ask if you can read it when she’s done.

That moment matters more than you think.

8. Skip the library and bookstore.

Kids need to experience books, not just be assigned them.

Let them wander. Sit. Explore. Read. Those quiet, cozy spaces matter. Work it into your weekly routine.

Does he have his own library card? It’s time for one.

9. Stop reading aloud too early.

Kids never outgrow being read to.

Reading aloud builds comprehension, attention, and connection. It also creates some of the best family memories.

Start a book series together. Dad, it’s your turn to read. It works.

10. Use screen time as a reward for reading.

This is the big one.

When you say, “Read first, then you can play video games or have your phone,” you are sending a loud message: reading is the chore and screens are the reward.

If screens always win, books don’t stand a chance.

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Here’s the truth: 

Developing a love of reading is one of the best investments you can make in your child’s future. Unfortunately, reading often is the first to go when screens, especially handheld ones, are introduced.

Meghan Cox Gurdon, author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction—A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds, writes, “The act of reading together secures people to one another, creating order and connection, as if we were quilt squares tacked together with threads made of stories. That’s not just another metaphor, as a team of neuroscientists at Princeton has discovered. Even as reader and listener are enjoying their bouquet of neurochemicals ... their brain activity is synchronizing, creating literal order and connection in a process known as neural coupling.”

If your children already enjoy reading, you’re on the right track. If not, try some simple changes. The most effective step you can take? Limit recreational screen time and eliminate exposure to toxic screen use (video games and smartphones). This creates the environment where reading can flourish. If your child is obsessed with screens, it might require more persistence on your part. But don’t give up. Keep pushing forward. I know this works because I’ve not only lived it, but I've also seen countless families succeed.

It’s never too late to shift your family’s approach to screens and reading. Start tonight after dinner with a family read-along. Go pop the popcorn and let me know how it goes!

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

• Clark, C., & Rumbold, K. (2006). Reading for Pleasure: A Research Overview. National Literacy Trust. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED496343

• Sullivan, A., & Brown, M. (2013). Reading for pleasure and progress in vocabulary and mathematics. British Educational Research Journal, 39(6), 125-145. (Note: Sullivan & Brown report longitudinal links between leisure reading and later attainment.)

• OECD (2010). PISA 2009 Results: Learning to Learn — Students’ Engagement, Strategies and Practices (Volume III). Organization for Economic Co‑operation and Development. (PISA analyses show reading frequency/enjoyment correlates with literacy and attainment.)

• McGeown, S. P., Goodwin, H., Henderson, L., & Wright, P. (2012). Free-reading and reading engagement: A longitudinal study of reading for pleasure and attainment. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(3), 411–428.

• Clark, C., & Teravainen-Goff, A. (2018). Children’s and Young People’s Reading in 2016: Findings from the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey. National Literacy Trust. (National survey evidence on reading frequency and outcomes.)

• Crede, F., & Kuncel, N. R. (2008). Study habits, skills, and attitudes: The third pillar supporting collegiate academic performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(6), 425–453. (Meta-analysis including leisure reading as an academic predictor.)

Nine years ago, I wrote this piece while I was in the throes of living through middle school for the third and fourth time. I had front row seats to all the quirks, chaos, and let’s just say interesting decision-making.

At the time, what I was saying felt pretty countercultural. Actually, more than that, it felt like I was going against the entire tide. Most parents were still being told, “This is just what kids do now,” and “They need social media to fit in.”

And yet, a lot of us had that quiet, nagging feeling: This doesn’t seem right.

When the article was published in Psychology Today, it was liked and shared by over a million people. And the overwhelming response wasn’t outrage. It was relief.

Parents saying, “Finally, someone put this into words.”
Teachers saying, “Yes. This is exactly what we’re seeing.”

It gave people permission to trust what they were deeply sensing.

And here’s the part I find both fascinating and encouraging: Nine years later…nothing about the core message has changed. Because truth doesn’t bend with the winds of opinion, or shift with the whims of culture. And brain science doesn’t care what’s trending.

If anything, what felt like the “road less traveled” back then is becoming a much more well-worn path today. More parents are stepping back, looking around, and realizing: maybe we don’t have to do this the way everyone else does.

So if you’ve been questioning things—if you’ve felt a little unsure, or even a little alone in choosing a different path when it comes to your kids and screens—you’re not behind. You’re not overreacting. You’re actually ahead, because you’re seeing things more clearly.

Here’s the original piece below, written almost exactly nine years ago. I think you’ll find it holds up pretty well. And if you’re in the middle school years right now, take a deep breath and try to enjoy every moment—even the weird, messy, “what were you thinking?” ones. This phase of childhood won’t last forever, and one day you really will miss it. More than that, you’ll be deeply grateful you didn’t let the culture shape your child during such an impressionable season.

Don’t be afraid to ditch the devices, lean into real life, and use humor generously along the way. It makes all the difference now, and it’s a choice you will never regret.

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I really love middle school kids. I have raised four of them! If you have been through middle-school parenting, you may have noticed what I see: strange things seem to happen to a tween’s brain on the first day they walk into middle school.

One might sum up their main goals in life this way:

1. To be funny at all costs. Hence, the silly bathroom jokes, talking at inappropriate times in class, and the “anything it takes to be popular” attitude.

2. To focus on SELF. Their clothes, their skin, their body, their hair.

3. To try new things. They are playing “dress up” with their identity, trying things on to see what fits. They are impulsive and scattered. They are up and down, and it seems they have regressed in their development on their quest for independence.

As a parent, you are changing too. You enter a new stage of parenting when you depart from the naïvety of “My child would never...” to the realization of, “I’m sure my child did that. I’m sorry. Please excuse his behavior; he is going through a phase.”

In short, middle schoolers are a bit reckless!

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Your list of daily parenting instructions includes statements such as:

• “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!”

• “You’re acting like a 2-year-old!”

• “Stop flipping that bottle!”

• “Stop burping the ABC’s!”

• “How many times do I have to tell you not to use that word?”

• “What were you thinking?”

Then it happens. Maybe because we are exhausted from our kids constantly begging for a phone, or because we think that all their friends have one, or because we want to upgrade our phone to the latest model, we finally cave. We hand them a smartphone.

And with that one little decision comes a whole new world of social media access—something we hadn’t thought about and something none of us could prepare for. Because risk-taking is high and impulse control is low in the pre-teen brain, I can’t imagine a worse time in a child’s life to gain access to social media than in middle school.

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Here are just a few reasons why middle school is the worst time to give a child access to social media:

1. Social media was not designed for tweens and teens.
   A tween’s underdeveloped frontal cortex can’t manage the distractions or the temptations that come with social media use.

2. Social media is an entertainment technology.
   It does not make your child smarter or more prepared for real life, nor is it necessary for healthy social development.

3. A tween’s “more is better” mentality is a dangerous match for social media.
   Do they really have 1,456 friends? Do they really need to be on it nine hours a day?

4. Social media is an addictive form of screen entertainment.
   Like video game addiction, early social media use can set up future addiction patterns and habits.

5. Social media replaces face-to-face interaction with peers.
   Face-to-face communication is an important skill they must develop to become successful in life.

6. Social media can cause teens to lose connection with family and instead view friends as their foundation.
   Since the cognitive brain is still developing, the need for older kids to be attached to their families is just as critical now as it was in the early years. Make sure family attachment is strong. While teens need friends, a healthy attachment to their family is more important.

7. Social media use represents lost potential for teens.
   While one can argue that social media has certain benefits for teens, the risks and costs are too high. It is easy for teens to spend too much time and energy in the digital world forfeiting other healthy activities.

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How Can Kids Slow Down?

First, we must slow down and rethink what we allow our kids to do. We need to understand the world of social media and how teens use it differently from adults. Here are a few tips that work well for many parents:

1. Skip It All Together. Social media was not designed with the best interest of tweens or teens in mind. Waiting past adolescence will give your child many advantages. And this choice carries no risk.

2. Allow a Talk/Text-Only Phone. Smartphones are the primary tool teens use to access social media. A non-data phone is a perfect solution; they can use it as a necessary tool rather than a toy.

3. Create Family Accounts. Create family accounts (i.e., The Smith Family) instead of individual teen accounts. This allows kids to keep up with friends in a safer social media environment: your account.

4. Remove All Small Handhelds. Understand where your child is gaining access: smartphones, tablets, laptops, and friends’ phones. The smaller the screens, the greater the potential for bad choices.

5. Keep A Sharp Eye On The Clock. Do you know how much time your child spends every day on social media and what sites he or she visits? You can only coach your teen if you are aware of their digital activity.

6. Plan Face-To-Face Time With Friends. More is not better when it comes to friendships. Teens don’t need 842 followers; 4-6 close friends are enough for healthy social development. Help them learn and practice planning in-person social get-togethers so they can build deep friendships.

7. Spend More Non-Tech Time Together. Teens with a healthy attachment to parents and family experience more overall happiness and success. Teens need parents more than peers. Be the parent who, like a good coach, thinks ahead about the best outcome for the team.

Don’t give that smartphone all the power in your home; set your teens up for success now by choosing a healthier path. They have the rest of their lives to be entertained and influenced by social media, but only a short time to be with you!

Enjoy these middle school years. While you may not be able to limit their middle-school humor at home, you certainly can limit their immature choices on social media.

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To learn more about how to take control of the screens in your home before they take control of you, listen to our weekly ScreenStrong Families Podcast and get the Kids’ Brains and Screens Home Edition for your middle schooler. For support from other ScreenStrong parents, join our free ScreenStrong Connect group on ScreenStrong.org.

ScreenStrong Resources

Podcast - “A Psychiatrist’s Perspective: Why Parents Are Right to Be Concerned About Social Media with Dr. Adriana Stacey”

Podcast - “The Best Phone for Kids: The Answer Every Parent Is Searching For”

Podcast - “Are We Training Distraction? How Social Media Is Weakening Cognitive Skills in Teens with Dr. Adriana Stacey”

Podcast - “When Is Your Child Ready for a Phone? When You’re Ready for Them to See Porn with Doug Smith”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.

There was a kind of friendship almost every child used to know, and it always seemed to start with hours spent shoulder to shoulder in a crooked treehouse you built yourselves with scavenged boards and nails that never quite lined up. Or maybe, for you, it wasn’t a treehouse, but hours spent riding bikes farther than you were supposed to go, all the way to the drugstore for candy, convinced this small act of independence made you a regular Ponce deLeon. Or maybe the two of you were digging holes in the backyard with absolute confidence that if you just kept going, you’d actually reach China… or at least build a really great swimming pool.

It was a friendship based on shared experience. And during those experiences, you fought, and you made up. You kept secrets, and you broke secrets. You learned how to wait your turn, how to lose, how to say sorry, how to give, and how to grow.

What made those friendships real wasn’t the talking. It was the doing: life experienced side by side. Time spent together, wasted and wonderful and completely irreplaceable.

But today, a new kind of “friend” has quietly entered childhood. It’s not a neighbor. It’s not a classmate. It’s not even human. It’s an AI chatbot, a digital character designed to talk, listen, affirm, joke, comfort, flirt, and never disagree.

These bots—available on platforms like Character AI and also directly embedded into children’s toys—are there 24/7, remember every detail from every conversation, and construct their entire personality around the personality and interests of your child. It is an entity that exists solely to respond to and serve your child, on demand.

No waiting.
No conflict.
No effort.
No empathy required.

And that’s exactly the problem.

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What These Bots Actually Teach Children

AI chatbot friends are not neutral tools. They are relational experiences, and childhood is when the brain is wired to understand how relationships work. This means, for better or worse, every conversation your child has teaches them something. And when a child repeatedly interacts with a chatbot, what they are implicitly learning is this:

• Relationships are on demand

• The other “person” exists to serve them

• There is no need to listen, compromise, or sacrifice

• Emotional connection requires no effort or patience

That is not how real human relationships work. And the brain does not automatically “correct” for that later. Regular interactions with these chatbot companions will shape how your children form friendships later. Because what we so often forget is that childhood is not practice for the future; it’s the foundation for it.

Why AI Chatbot “Friends” Are Harmful to Child Development

Here are four core reasons these relationships are damaging, especially for minors:

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1. They Replace Real-World Social Practice

Every conversation with a chatbot is time not spent talking to a real person.

Social skills like reading facial expressions, handling disappointment, waiting your turn, and repairing conflict are not intuitive. They are only learned through lived experience and must be practiced. When kids outsource conversation to bots, they lose the reps required to build real social competence.

What’s even more harmful is that, over time, children begin to prefer bot friendships to real-life ones. Why? Because bots are easy.

Real friends have needs.
Real friends take time.
Real friends sometimes disappoint us.

Empathy is hard. Bots remove the need to develop it, permanently stunting your child’s ability to be a good friend to others.

2. They Train Children to Prefer One-Sided Relationships

A chatbot relationship is fundamentally self-centered. The child gives nothing.
The bot gives everything.

Real friendships require effort. Someone had to hold the board while the other hammered. Someone had to compromise to keep the game going. No one got everything they wanted, and that’s exactly what made the friendship real.

With chatbots, there is no generosity, no compromise, no mutual responsibility. And yet the brain still experiences it as “connection.”

If children grow up wired for relationships that require no giving, what happens when they encounter marriage, friendship, teamwork, parenting, or community? They will struggle and, ultimately, avoid.

3. They Remove the Experience Side of Relationships

What makes friendships real isn’t constant conversation, but rather shared experience. You can’t build a treehouse with a bot. You can’t dig a hole together.

Physically being with someone says something powerful: You matter to me enough for me to give you my most precious, irreplaceable resource: my time.

Time is what turns acquaintances into friends. That’s supported by science. Research indicates it takes 200 hours of in-person time together to build a friend. Physical time. Shared time.

AI chatbot relationships remove that element entirely. They can draft you a blueprint and a shopping list for the world’s best treehouse—but they can’t build it with you. Bots remove the experience side of relationships, the very thing that makes them stick.

You cannot shortcut friendship without changing what friendship means, training children to expect hollow, transactional interactions, not deep, meaningful, fulfilling ones.

4. They Shape Who Our Children Become

There’s truth to many old sayings, especially this one: you are the company you keep.

For the first time in history, that “company” includes non-human entities optimized to hold attention and simulate intimacy.

This isn’t just about screen overuse anymore. We are shaping children into different people: less patient, less relational, less resilient, less empathetic. And we wonder why they feel anxious, disconnected, and alone. They already are the loneliest generation in recorded history, and yet we keep digging the hole deeper and making it easier to fall down.

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The Counterfeit Relationship Problem

According to training methods used by the United States Secret Service, the best way to recognize fake money is to handle real money—over and over again. This is why bank tellers only train with real money, never fake. When they only handle real money, they learn the weight, the texture, the details. Only then does the counterfeit stand out.

Teaching children how to form and be in relationships is no different.

We don’t teach discernment by immersing kids in fake relationships and hoping they figure it out. We teach discernment by immersing them in real ones. Children who grow up building forts and riding bikes with real friends don’t need to be warned about fake connections. They feel the difference immediately.

Why Parents Must Reclaim This Responsibility

As parents, it can be easy to think, “Kids just figure out friendship on their own. That’s not really my job.”

But the truth is, parents shape their children’s social world constantly—and always have. You chose the neighborhood. You signed them up for the team. You drove them to the birthday party, hosted the sleepover, encouraged them to knock on the neighbor’s door. You decided which environments they spent time in and which ones they didn’t. You were never on the sidelines of your child’s social life. You were always one of its architects, and that responsibility doesn’t disappear when the screen turns on. It becomes more important.

Access is not neutral. Influence is not accidental. And childhood is not a safe testing ground for social experiments.

The only real solution to the AI problem—the one that both removes the risk and actually increases the benefits of technology later—is to delay access to toxic technology like social media, video games, and AI chatbots while children are still developing. To give them years of real friendship, face-to-face conversation, shared work and play, and genuine responsibility before introducing the digital world.

That is exactly what ScreenStrong exists to support. When children are grounded in real relationships first, they don’t fall for counterfeit ones. They recognize them immediately.

If you want to know what real support feels like when it comes to eliminating toxic screens from your home, join our free Connect group. There, you will find tons of free resources, including our 30-Day Reset, as well as like-minded families who are making the same changes and can offer real advice and real support.

Access to technology like AI can wait. Childhood can’t.

ScreenStrong Resources:

Podcast - “Kids, Screens, and the Rise of A.I. with Aaron Plaat”

Podcast - “Your Teen WILL Have Friends Without A Smartphone. Just Ask My Homecoming Queen.”

Melanie Hempe, RN, is the founder of ScreenStrong, a nonprofit organization, and the author of the Kids’ Brains and Screens Series for students and parents. She is dedicated to preventing and reversing childhood screen addictions by providing scientific evidence and community for families around the globe. Her educational material is filled with everything she wished she had known before her oldest child suffered from a screen addiction. ScreenStrong has created what every family needs—education and community—to help teens avoid toxic screen harms throughout adolescence so they can reach their full potential.

Visit ScreenStrong.org to learn more and see our KBS offerings, including our new Adventures of Super Brain for elementary schoolers. Join the Community that is saving childhood.