What Screen Time Actually Is

The parent has, by half past five on a Tuesday, said the word phone in a tone of voice she did not, at any earlier point in her life, plan to use. The child at the kitchen table is twelve and has the device tilted, the way they all tilt it, just below the edge of the table. She has been asked to put it down for supper. She has put it down. She has picked it up. The pasta is on the hob. The parent is listening to herself say, in a voice that belongs to someone older and crosser than she is, that this is the last time, that the phone will be confiscated, that she has had enough.

She has, in fact, had enough. She has been having enough for about two years. The device the child had at nine is not the device she has at twelve, and the device at fifteen will be different again. Every upgrade resets the argument.

We see this conversation, in some version, in the great majority of parents with a child older than nine. The dynamic is consistent. The parent has started to feel she is losing an argument she did not choose to enter and is not allowed to leave, and that the loss is, somehow, her fault.