Where the phones sleep

The activity

Every phone in the house charges overnight in one place outside the bedrooms, on a rule agreed with your teenager. Yours goes there first.

What it is for. Research links having a phone in the bedroom at night with shorter and poorer sleep. Phones can keep a teenager alert, push bedtime later and wake her with messages. A rule the whole family keeps, and that she has helped to make, is fairer and easier for her to keep to.

• The first step. Raise it on an ordinary day, not after a late night: “I think we’d all sleep better if the phones slept in the hall. What would make that work for you?”

Safety. Some teenagers need a phone overnight: a young carer, or a teenager whose glucose monitor or other medical app alarms through her phone. Agree those exceptions in advance.

When to get help. If she is still sleeping badly with the phone out of her room, is exhausted during the day, or seems low or anxious, talk to your GP. If she tells you, or you find out, that someone is frightening, pressuring, grooming or hurting her, online or off, stay calm, don’t blame her, thank her if she has told you, and don’t promise to keep it secret. If there is a sexual image of a child on her phone, leave everything as it is: don’t look further, copy, screenshot, forward or delete anything. Act that day, using the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page. If you think someone is grooming or exploiting her, or she talks about hurting herself or not wanting to be alive, act that day in the same way.

The other four steps, and your part in it, are in the library.

It goes with

• Screen Time. For parents who have lost the argument about screen hours, and suspect it was never quite the right argument to have.
• What Screen Time Actually Is. For parents who feel they have lost the argument about screens.

The first chapter you open here is free to read in full.

Free on this subject

• Sleep. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.
• Screen time. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.