‘This is terrible! Life is measurably worse than it was before’

Zoe Williams

There is a glaring asymmetry in the way we talk about screen time: from the moment a child is born, there will be someone, somewhere, ready with research about what phone exposure does to their development.

More hours on a phone are linked to obesity, hyperactivity, depression; toddlers with more screen time have less back and forth with their parents, which affects their vocabulary; teenagers are the same but the stakes are higher, with studies finding more screen time associated with more suicidal ideation. An extremely dense parliamentary report on the impacts of screens, published last year, mentions parents mainly in the context of our bovine incomprehension, the children’s commissioner for England emphasising that “parental education on managing screen time must also be improved in order to see a tangible impact”.

Which is all mad, right? There must be two people, at least, in that room where the toddler is playing on their phone instead of learning new words. Whatever the family composition, that depressed teenager must have learned their phone habits from somewhere. Adults get off scot-free in the discourse, our screen use assumed to have settled at a mature and reasonable level, which in no way affects our family lives. Thurston, my 17-year-old son, thinks this is ridiculous. He thinks my screen use is worse than either his or his sister’s.

Louise Bazalgette, the deputy director at Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good, put together a post-Covid report on screens, starting from a child development perspective. “Children need positive, focused interactions with their parents, singing, talking, playing together, that’s what supports child development,” she said. “Screens are invading every element of all our lives.”

So can I lead my children by example and let my son set limits for me? Here goes.

My screen time status quo
Daily average: 5h 33m
Total weekly screen time: 38h 51m
Social media time: 15h 5m

Top 3 apps
WhatsApp: 7h 15m
Bluesky: 5h 50m
Wordpuzzling (Hardle, Phrazle, Wordle): 1h 47m

The conversation
Thurston guesstimates, correctly, that I spend about five hours a day on my phone. It could be a guess, or it could be some spooky thing he does, because he has form in this area. He can find me wherever I am, despite the fact that I’ve turned off location sharing, precisely because I don’t want my family to find me wherever I am. Sometimes he texts to tell me how much battery I have left, for the sole purpose of freaking me out. Once, trying to get into my Betfred account, he imported all my passwords on to his computer.

When I tell him he will be able to set me screen time limits, he says: “You should be able to get down to two hours a day. That seems reasonable.” I ask whether this would be limited app-by-app, and he says, “No, I think if I gave you an hour on WhatsApp and an hour on Bluesky you would manage your time very badly.” This experiment has already had a catastrophic impact on the flow of authority in our relationship … he has all of it, and I have none – and we haven’t even begun.

The experiment
Day 1 I’m in bed, pre-emptively reading an article in the old-fashioned way – on paper. I’m trying to preserve my screen time for later, when I may want to see what the Staffordshire bull terriers of Instagram are up to. The article is making me angry. No, it doesn’t matter what it was about (the Labour party). What do you do when something annoys you that isn’t on your phone, I wonder?

Now I have the answer. You put it down, and you stare out of a window, and think about where it all went wrong. This is terrible! Life is measurably worse than it was before, when I would have just dropped the thought and had a go on a game like Stick Hero.

“Parenting is stressful and challenging and parents have a lot of things they need to do,” Bazalgette says. “It’s really important not to be harsh and judgmental.” It’s also important not to blame the children for everything, given that they’re both still asleep.

Day 3 I hit my hard screen time limit before I even get out of bed, which is plain ridiculous. What am I going to do now, go back to sleep? I petition Thurston, and he agrees to take my puzzling apps out of the equation, since it turns out that was how I’d burned through two hours. I still have a lot of day to kill, though, before the new rules kick in, so I make some idle chit-chat, starting with what he thinks of my typical screen use, and he says, “It’s incredibly insufferable.”

“In what way?”

“Mainly your inability to respond to the outside world, when your phone is in your hand.”

“Anything else?”

“Stop insisting I join Bluesky – it’s full of old people.”

“Is that all?”

“Stop asking whether or not I’m likely to be radicalised by Andrew Tate.”

“I wouldn’t really call that a screen time issue, that’s more a pollution of the information ecosystem … ” I break off, because I’m sure there’s some word for that and I should probably look it up. Some seconds later, I become dimly aware of a commotion.

“You’re on your phone! We’re in the middle of a conversation! You’re unbelievable!”

“I think it’s about all of us being more conscious of how we’re using digital technology,” is Bazalgette’s gentle advice. “We need to role model what we think of as a healthy relationship. That’s hard – phones are addictive. And we’re giving the impression that the phone is more interesting to us than our family members. When children say things like, ‘Put your phone away, mummy’, that’s them trying to set a boundary. And we should listen to that.”

This unearths a shameful memory, that for at least 10 years, probably more, whenever Thurston and I watched TV together he always had to say, “Put your phone down”, until I realised it was better to leave my phone in a different room than try to resist the temptation from one minute to the next. In my defence, some of that TV was incredibly boring. However, if you can’t sit through a 10-minute episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, that is pretty bad.

Day 5 I make it out of the house and get to lunchtime, with screen time to burn, though I don’t know how much. That’s one of the annoying things about a limit, it doesn’t count down, you only find out how close you are to the end when you’re five minutes from it. There’s probably some way to check, but I’d have to ask my son.

Anyway, I am on the tube and who should sit opposite me but Kwasi Kwarteng, who is plainly in the middle of some important event or nervous breakdown, as he is talking to himself and holding two phones, which he is sort of wrestling and juggling. I transmit this information to my sister, by WhatsApp, in between stops, as the wifi cuts in and out. Then, wham, just before Marylebone, my time is up. I can see she was still typing, and my hunch was that she was formulating a joke about putting the “chancer” into “chancellor”. It’s great having a sister. Much better than having children.

The following day I get her message: chancerllor.

Day 6 In the spirit of the experiment, my 15-year-old daughter has set her own screen time limit: two hours max on Instagram and TikTok. This seems to mainly interfere with the depth of her current affairs knowledge. So, she’ll know something niche about the South Korean constitution but won’t have a clue why there are 300 tractors on the A3 outside our front door. (It’s because the farmers were protesting changes to inheritance tax, thanks for asking.)

Day 8 I take a phone call, which was unscheduled and important. This is vanishingly rare – the form if you want to talk at all is to mutually agree a time and scope out by text all the actual information you want to exchange, recapping afterwards. It is only after this call, in fact, that I realise how much we’ve overcomplicated communication, some combination of post-Covid norms and the fact that young people have some kind of allergy to phone calls.

So there I was, talking business to my agent. We were agreeing a real-life rendezvous, figuring out who should say what to whom, speculating the likely responses of third and fourth parties, and in the middle of all this, nothing yet concluded, the phone went dead. The call had been placed on Telegram, and that counted as part of my socials. Sure, sure, no big deal. Pick it up by email. Except it was a big deal.

Try not to get too hung up on rules, Bazalgette says. Instead, ask yourself: “How do I create an environment where I’m showing my children that I really value their time and their company? Where I’m only getting the phone out when I need to do something and the rest of the time I’m available?”

The verdict
Day 10 arrives, and I ask Thurston how he’s found me during this experiment, which has reduced my daily screen time average to 2h 52m, with a weekly total of 20h 8m, of which 15h 47m is spent on social media.

“I think you’re more receptive to conversation, you’re more concentrated … ”

“Do you mean, I have more concentration or do you mean the impact of my personality is stronger, less diluted? Honestly, I wish you’d done English A-level.”

“You’re a better mother, you’re less irritating.”

“Wait, are you being sarcastic?”

“I’m afraid I’ve found you profoundly irritating, just in a different way.”

He goes on to describe his gestalt theory of phone use, starting with a parable about the time he deleted Twitter (now X): it didn’t actually deplete the amount of time he spent on his phone, it just meant the content he was browsing was less interesting. He thinks I’m so programmed to check my phone to see if anyone’s texted me that, even when I can’t do that, I still need to go through the motions of that tiny dopamine quest.

He has noticed that I go on my phone and just scroll through my camera reel or, sometimes, in absent-minded desperation, look through my coat pockets. These are all variations of not being entirely in the room. At the same time, all of us have reprogrammed how we are with each other, so that when we are entirely in the room, the full beam of our attention focused on the interaction in front of us, that’s a little bit too much pressure on the moment.

“Wow, that sounds quite bad,” I say.

“Hush,” he replies. “That was your phone, I think you have a message.”

* * *

‘My husband’s got a new job – he’s my switchboard, fielding my calls’

Gynelle Leon

As a mum of two with a love of social media and a slightly unhealthy Vinted addiction, I know my screen time is pretty bad. From my wallet and maps to various messaging apps and social media, I find it impossible not to pledge allegiance to my smartphone. Meanwhile, my six-year-old, Malakhi, has fairly rigid screen time rules. TV is mostly limited to weekends, but he can earn up to 10 minutes daily for Xbox or Nintendo Switch games by doing chores, homework and through good behaviour. YouTube is banned, and he’s off social media – with no mobile phone.

My screen time status quo
Daily average: 5h 45m
Total weekly screen time: 40h 16m
Social media time: 23h 55m

Top 3 apps
Instagram: 17h 34m
WhatsApp: 5h 30m
Vinted: 5h 30m

The conversation
I ask Malakhi how he feels about me and my phone usage. Does he think I use it a lot?

“Yes!” he says, immediately. “You use it a lot when you’re at home – and even when I’m sleeping.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” I ask.

“Doing work and messages, calling people … ” he thinks for a moment. “You’re typing things and working for the whole family. And playing music – because you really like music.”

At this point my husband, Malakhi’s dad, chips in: “What about Instagram?!” Ah yes, Instagram. I love it – but I think I’ve hidden this from our son.

“Yes,” Malakhi says, “and Instagram.”

I ask Malakhi how he feels about his screen time rules: “I only get screen time on the weekend. Which isn’t great because it’s fun, you can do so much stuff and play games.”

“Why did Mummy limit your screen time?” I ask.

“So I don’t get addicted and can be happy,” he says. “When I was on my iPad or watching TV too much I didn’t want to go to school or sleep.”

Then it’s time for him to set my rules. He goes for it: I can only have screen time while he’s at school (8.45am-3.30pm), which includes my iPhone, iPad, laptop and TV. In essence, he wants me to be present when we spend time together, which is sweet – and brings a pang of guilt as I realise how much my phone pulls me away. Here’s how it goes …

The experiment
Day 1 My alarm goes off at 7.30am and I instinctively reach for my phone, only to remember … school hasn’t started, so neither has my screen time. Boring! Instagram brings me joy; the algorithm knows me better than most people, feeding me parent memes and recipe videos I’ll never try. Now, I simply get up and start the day.

Throughout the morning, I catch myself, on autopilot, reaching for my phone and realise I’ll need to power it down outside screen time hours. Fortunately, 8.45am comes around fast, so normality resumes. By 2pm, I am furiously texting friends and family the same broadcast message about my screen time restrictions, advising them to contact my husband in an emergency (mostly for my mum, who’d probably show up if I missed two calls). Malakhi draws his own snakes and ladders game and we play as a family several times.

Day 2 After school drop-off, I scramble for my phone with the enthusiasm of a smoker off a long-haul flight. After 17 hours without it, I feel a rush of comfort and excitement. Yet, anticlimactically, I find I’ve missed nothing urgent. This realisation makes it surprisingly easy to put my phone down again at 3.30pm. However, later, when both kids are off to bed, I miss it. When I am putting the baby to sleep, I usually scroll or listen to a podcast (often both), and now I’m sitting in the dark with white noise playing. Inevitably, I fall asleep at 7.30pm.

Day 5 My husband admits he is “very surprised by my commitment” to the experiment. He says that our evenings feel fuller; instead of settling into watching TV while scrolling on our devices, we find ourselves talking for hours. With fewer distractions, we also tackle long-overdue projects around the house; one evening after the kids’ bedtime I manage to go to Ikea, then return home and transform the front room with the help of my husband, something we’ve been putting off for months.

Observing the shift, he says that it has spurred him to reduce his own screen use. I start to feel less anxious and am sleeping better, too. I usually spend one to two hours doomscrolling at night, savouring the solitude without guilt. Without the blue light, I fall asleep instantly. I’m even saving money – normally, I’d be scrolling Vinted while putting the baby to sleep, but I don’t make a purchase during these 10 days. Instead, I meditate in the dark, discovering a calmness that is a great way to end the day.

Day 7 Life admin productivity is out the window. I’ve got a growing inbox of messages and emails, and people start chasing me for replies. This is very unlike me, and I’m counting down the days.

After school, I take Malakhi to the library, where he attends a free Lego club. Finding other ways to fill our evening means that I discover clubs like this on my doorstep, instead of rushing home. I need to place a grocery order, but my husband has to step in, and even then, a two-factor code is sent to my phone. I realise life without a phone is highly inefficient. Yes, phones distract and encourage procrastination, but they also allow me to work on the go, manage finances, stay entertained and connect with loved ones. Limiting screen time feels as if I’m living off-grid. And, my screen time isn’t just having an impact on me. My husband has gained a new job as my “switchboard”, fielding calls from my mum outside my screen time hours.

Day 10 After school, we have a Michael Jackson dance party as Malakhi has discovered 90s pop music, and the family enjoys a special evening sharing our childhood favourites with our child.

The verdict
My daily average screen time dropped to 2h 27m, with a weekly total of 17h 56m, 7h 58m of which is spent on social media.

“How do you think my screen time went over the 10 days?” I ask Malakhi.

“Good,” he says. “I think it was really nice. I liked that when I wasn’t on a screen, you weren’t, either.” I hadn’t thought of that – it must have felt fairer. “Yessss! I liked having the power, making the rules, not just you and Daddy. I wish I could make all the house rules!” We agree that it has been a success – he wants me to do it every evening after school.

Before this experiment, I would find myself picking up my phone to do a food shop or check my calendar and, like an act of sorcery, I would realise I was scrolling on Instagram. Now, I can see that just as we set healthy boundaries for our kids’ screen time, it’s clear we need them, too. I decide to keep some things from the experiment: no morning scrolling until 9am and leaving my phone in the bedroom after school pickup. I no longer feel the need to constantly carry my phone around with me like an extra appendage.

This experiment reminds me how important it is to give kids agency, too, and I’m happy it has shown Malakhi that I need rules just as much as he does to maintain balance and wellbeing. I’d love to say that I’m off social media, but I’m not – it remains my guilty pleasure. The algorithm loves me, and I love it right back.

* * *

‘A ban on apps can be a huge irritation when trying to find an Uber on a dark street late at night’

Tim Dowling

It is a belief shared by my entire family that I spend too much time on my phone. My wife is the most vocal holder of this theory, but my three adult sons agree with her, even though they are always on their phones. For my children, it’s not the actual amount of time that matters, but the fact that I’m doing it while being old. It’s bad enough I’m on my phone too much; I’m also doing it wrong.

“And too slowly,” says the youngest one.

“He can’t hear you,” my wife says. “He’s on his phone.”

“I can hear you,” I say. “I’m just checking out some memes.”

“Please don’t say that,” says the middle one.

“Our modern culture is based on memes,” I say.

“You don’t know what a meme is,” says the youngest one.

“A meme can be many things,” I say, “but it’s usually a picture of Squidward from SpongeBob looking fed up.”

“I mean, he’s not wrong,” says the middle one.

My screen time status quo
Daily average: 2h 52 minutes (This, by the way, is not a lot: in 2023, Britons logged an average daily screen time of 3h and 50m, which actually represents a decrease from a peak of more than 4h in 2022. Still, it amounts to almost a day a week, which does strike me as a shocking waste of my time.)

The conversation
My sons decide it will be impossible to improve the quality of my screen time, so we agree I should simply halve the amount. There are several suggestions as to how to achieve this.

“Have you thought about just deleting Twitter?” says the oldest.

I have thought about it, I tell him, and in preparation for that eventuality I have joined two other social media apps, so I’m actually currently keeping track of three accounts.

“Can’t I just get some timer that restricts my access to everything?” I say.

“Yes, you can,” say the youngest one. “Give me your phone.”

“There’s also an app I heard about that grows a tree on your phone,” says the oldest, “and if you use your phone the tree dies.”

The experiment
I have downloaded the tree app, which is called Forest, and as an additional strategy I’ve also accepted a built-in restriction that shuts down access to virtually all my apps from 7pm to 7am. I give myself four weeks to halve my phone screen time.

It takes a couple of days for me to get to grips with Forest, but eventually I come to understand its basic operation: I plant a tree, and a timer begins to tick down from two hours. If I try to use the phone during this growing phase, I will be greeted with a message such as “Go back to your work!” or “Stay focused!” or “Stop phubbing!” (the act of ignoring someone you’re with to be on your phone; I had to look that up and, when I did, the tree died).

The first time I planted a tree I unconsciously reached for my phone eight or 10 times over the two hours, but I was never driven to unlock the app. The bulk of the time I spend on my phone constitutes what I would call Pointless Monitoring – refreshing social media apps or email inboxes or a string of websites to see if anything’s changed since the last time I looked. Of course, I’ve never needed to do it; but Forest made me realise that I don’t even really want to do it. I do it without thinking.

At 6.55 that evening I receive a polite warning from my phone. Five minutes later, all the apps go dark. This is overridable, of course, but the little shaded icons are enough to remind me that looking at my phone – even as I’m also watching TV – is a terrible misuse of my limited time on Earth.

In practice, I can usually find a couple of two-hour slots in the day where I can safely plant a tree, but I don’t always remember. And while the ban on apps is no hardship if you’re sitting at home, it can be a huge irritation when you’re trying to read someone’s urgent WhatsApp message, or find an Uber on a dark street late at night. A couple of times in the second week I suspended the blanket ban for the night.

The verdict
In the first week of the experiment, my daily phone use dropped to an average of one hour and 40 minutes. Unfortunately, in the second week it went back up to two hours and one minute, and was just under two hours the weeks after. By week four, however, I was down to one hour and 27 minutes.

“It’s not bad, but it’s not half,” says the oldest one, while looking at his phone.

“It’s very nearly half,” I say.

“But it went back up in the middle,” says the youngest.

“I’ve looked into that,” I say. It turns out that in the second week there was a single day when I spent four hours and 43 minutes on my phone, which was also a day when I drove to Tunbridge Wells and back. The extra screen time was entirely consistent with using Google Maps to navigate both ways.

“I strongly feel that satnav doesn’t count,” I say.

“Of course it counts,” says the oldest. “Everything counts.”

After four weeks, I stopped using both Forest and the nightly app shutdown, figuring that I could rely on muscle memory to stop myself drawing my phone from my pocket for no reason. The daily average has settled in at about two hours. It’s still an improvement, if only a small one.

But I’ve decided that all screen time is not equal: sometimes I am wasting my life, but other times I am reading scholarly articles online, or not getting lost on my way to the M3. On those occasions when I pull out my phone for no reason, just to look at it, these days I tend to sigh and put it straight back in my pocket, feeling, for a moment, a little bereft.

“Has not being on your phone changed your life at all?” asks the middle one.

“No,” I say.

“Or maybe made it worse?” says the youngest.

“Yes, made it worse,” I say.

“It turns out you liked being on your phone all day,” says the oldest.

“Exactly,” I say. “Now I have to find something else.”