Six tips to stop devices taking over your teen’s life

Trying to keep a grip on teen device usage is the source of frustration and constant battles in many families, writes Dr Judith Locke. These tips show where parents should be drawing the line.

Remember you were happy to get on your bike and ride many blocks to your friend’s place to see them? Or you spent two hours on the phone at night talking about the things you didn’t discuss that day at school with your best friend?

Kids wanting to stay in touch with their friends is nothing new. But now, potential interactions are literally in their pocket, 24/7.

MORE FROM DR JUDITH LOCKE: Kids need to fail. And parents need to let them

If there is one problem that consistently comes up in my sessions with parents is their exasperation with their teen’s phone use.

So how do you ensure the device doesn’t take over their life? Here’s a few tips.

Introduce a smart phone only when your child has shown sufficient maturity

Only give permission for new rights when they demonstrate new responsibilities.

For your child to even get access to a smart phone they need to show maturity in undertaking additional responsibilities, such as now cooking some meals or cleaning the bathrooms.

They should undertake these responsibilities consistently and without reminder for at least a few months before they are rewarded with a phone.

In this, you’re not just doing this to put the purchase off a little (although that’s an added bonus).

The reason you are doing this it to check how responsible your child is. If they can’t stop the fun things in their life to do what they need to do to earn a phone, then they are not mature enough yet to have one. Ideally, those added responsibilities should continue for you to pay for their phone plan, or it’s back to the landline for them.

Monitor their usage

In the first few weeks or months of them owning a phone, you can introduce a contract where you can check how much time they have spent on their phone via an app or the phone’s built in features. There’s nothing wrong with them needing to adhere to agreed amounts of time on different apps or losing the right to the phone for a day or two.

RELATED: How to win the screen time battle with kids

No phones in cars

Your child being in a car usually means you are doing them the kindness of taking them from point A to point B. That you allow them to be on their phone as you do that, particularly if they have headphones on, means you have turned into an Uber driver (and worse still, an unpaid Uber driver).

In busy lives, car rides help you to reconnect with your child in general conversation and chats about each other’s lives. To facilitate this, don’t allow them to be on their phone in the car.

Use car journeys to connect, not spend time on phones. Picture: iStock

Have this ‘no using phones in the car’ rule for everyone, including their friends.

Driving their mates helps you to get to know them. Indeed, sometimes you interact best with your child in the presence of their peers. So make sure they are talking and not swiping in the car. (Bonus will be that you probably won’t be asked as often to drive their buddies home from late-night parties!)

Have whole-family, phone-free times

Research shows us that the presence of a phone impacts your enjoyment of a situation. Just putting your phone on a table, makes you consider your company less entertaining than if you did not have the device in your eyesight. So don’t allow anyone to use phones during activities you are connecting as a family, such as dinnertime.

RELATED: No iPad, no TV, two happy kids. Here’s how I did it

No phones in bedroom

Nothing good comes from a phone in a bedroom at night when your child should be sleeping. No dream can compete with the immediate excitement of Candy Crush or the ping of a text message. So take away temptation and insist all phones are handed in prior to bedtime.

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Phones should enhance, not reduce, communication with loved ones. Don’t feel guilty that you insist your child has a healthy relationship with their phone.

Have your whole family practise self-restraint with phones and screens and have a few rules when using them. One might be not allowing two screens on, such as the TV on while checking their phone. Another is never using them when walking, to make sure they don’t walk into traffic by mistake. (Yes, I’m talking to you too.)

Be a good role model in all of this. Like a lot of things, your child watches you and how you behave with your phone.

Even in your child’s younger years, you may be subtlety encouraging future bad habits.

Dr Locke did her PhD at Queensland University of Technology on the changes in parenting and is now a visiting Fellow at QUT doing ongoing research on modern parenting, child and parent wellbeing and school environments.

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Originally published as Six tips to stop devices taking over your teen’s life