Heavy use and real compulsion look almost identical from the outside, and they need completely different responses. This page is how to tell which one you are looking at, and what to do about each.
One thing worth knowing before any of it. These products are built by teams of people whose whole job is to make them hard to put down, and they are good enough at it that most adults cannot manage it either. Nothing on this page is a verdict on your parenting, and none of it assumes willpower is the missing ingredient — in a child or in you.
What follows: the signals that separate heavy use from compulsion, the things worth doing this week, and where to get help that costs nothing.
Hours are the wrong measure. Two hours building something and two hours scrolling are not the same event, and the American Academy of Pediatrics stepped away from hour limits in February 2026 for exactly that reason. What matters is what happens when it stops.
The signals that actually matter
Not the amount. These:
Distress out of all proportion when it ends. Not annoyance — every child is annoyed. Panic, rage, or a collapse that lasts.
Secrecy and lying about it. Hidden devices, second accounts, deleted history, saying they were not on it when they were.
Giving up things they used to love. The sport, the instrument, the friend they always saw. This one is the clearest.
Being unable to stop after saying they want to. This is the definition of compulsion, and a child who says it about themselves is telling you something important.
Night use. Waking to check, or using the device after waking in the night. In the ABCD study of 10,280 adolescents, using a device after waking in the night carried the highest association with trouble sleeping of any behaviour measured.
What to do this week
1. Take the devices out of the bedroom, tonight, for everyone in the house. The JAMA Pediatrics meta-analysis of 125,198 children found that a device merely present in the room — not being used — still raised the odds of inadequate sleep, poor sleep quality and daytime sleepiness. One charging station, in the kitchen. This is the single highest-value change available to you and it takes one evening.
2. Do not confiscate as your opening move. Confiscation ends this evening's incident and teaches your child to hide the next one. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
3. Ask what they actually do on there. Curious, not prosecutorial. Some of it is genuinely good, and a parent who cannot admit that has already lost the argument.
4. Say the true thing. “These things are built by professionals to be hard to put down, and I find it hard too.” That is an alliance. “You are on that thing too much” is a fight you win tonight and lose permanently.
5. Do your own detox first, and let them see it. Children calibrate to what is modelled, not what is instructed. The course here is free, and having done it yourself is the most persuasive argument you will ever have.
If it is worse than that
If what you are looking at is genuine compulsion — the distress, the secrecy, the withdrawal from everything else — then screen-time advice will not touch it, and you are not going to fix it with a rule about weekends.
The help directory lists the free twelve-step fellowships that run meetings online every single day, the family-facing groups, and the clinical options. Media Addicts Anonymous and ITAA both cost nothing and neither asks anything of you.
And if the trouble is a person rather than a habit — someone contacting your child, or threatening them — go straight to the sextortion page. It moves in hours, not weeks, and there are specific things to do and not do.
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.
Last updated 9 August 2026. This page is checked and corrected as new research comes out. If you spot something out of date or wrong, tell me and I will fix it.