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Over the last week, I have been thinking very hard on this topic since it’s something that’s close to my heart these days. BB is always on a smart device, either his phone or laptop from the time he wakes up until he has to be pushed to keep them aside and go to bed. I have already tried some techniques, which I will elaborate below, but that was not enough, I needed some more ammunition to get him to concentrate on school work and not just play games on his devices. So here’s a summary of what I found.

BB and GG belong to a generation who are digital natives and they have not lived a life where they didn’t have access to the internet or didn’t have a life which was not online. So it does become slightly difficult to get them to draw a line between the real and virtual worlds. This is a generation, who after coming back from school, start speaking to their friends online, those friends whom they just saw as little as a few minutes back!

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After reading up on what I, as a parent can do, I have come to the conclusion that unless the teen is very mature, there’s not much we can do. All we can do is keep reiterating and hope it ends someplace inside their head and they are able to understand what we are trying to say to them.

Some of the things I have already implemented include bedtimes not later than 10 pm for both of them, especially during a school night, the charging of their mobile phones outside their rooms (actually my room so I know they don’t use their phone later), no laptops or other electronic devices inside their room after bedtime and also have installed a smartphone locking app in their phones. I use OurPact, which, when I first downloaded it more than two years back, I could use on both phones from my phone. I understand that these days only one child phone can be monitored from a parent’s phone using the free version. The children are not allowed to remove OurPact from their phones and the penalty for doing so will mean that phone privileges are revoked.

What else can I do?

I am going to try to get them to keep their phones aside for a fixed amount of time, starting from 15 minutes initially and then going up. They are used to keeping their phones switched off in school, so I am hoping this should not be too difficult for them.

Another thing I am going to implement is making them keep their phones in a drawer when they are doing school work and studying. This may be slightly difficult to implement (because I have already tried this), but I am going to continue to keep trying. They have songs downloaded on their phones, but still, want to access YouTube to listen to music.

I am still looking for solutions which I can, as a parent implement to cut down on my children’s smart device usage. Do you have any innovative and out of the box ideas that I can use? Please do comment below so I can implement them!