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“My 13-year-old son is furious every time we take away his devices, especially at dinner and bedtime. We’ve tried everything from reasoning with him to cutting him off entirely, but nothing works. How do we get his screen use under control?”
— Seattle-area parent
Parents describe a version of this screen time battle with their teens to me all the time, and their interactions frequently go something like this:
“Put your phone in the other room,” parent says. “You know the rule.” Kid just continues scrolling, thumb repeating the familiar, rhythmic swipe as if parent hasn’t said a word. “I told you to put away your phone. I mean it. Don’t make me yell at you about this.” Kid snorts, mimics and mocks the plea under their breath. “That’s it. You have just lost your gaming privilege tonight,” parent says. “ I’m done with you on this!” With a hard kick to the table leg, kid runs to their room, still clutching the phone.
Fights about screen time and devices involve more than parental concerns about child health: It’s about who’s in charge of a kid’s attention and behavior.
Early adolescence brings the second great “autonomy surge.” Remember the terrific twos? This stage is similar, only this time, “You’re not the boss of me” isn’t nearly as cute or manageable.
Why are parent-child fights about devices so hard to resolve?
Parental battles like this one are set up to fail for many reasons. You’re trying to control your teenager with rules you made, probably without their real buy-in. While eliminating device use at meals and bedtime is reasonable, healthful and consistent with your family values, the emotional toll of enforcing these rules night after night can be enormous.
One of my favorite refrains when validating parents in these situations is, “You might be right, but are you effective?”
Digital platforms are extraordinarily good at capturing and holding attention. Notifications, novelty, social rewards, gaming incentives and endless scroll all make disengaging difficult. So when you abruptly interrupt something your teen is deeply absorbed in, expect friction.
If someone grabbed my laptop or turned off the router right now while I’m groovin’ away writing this column, I would look every bit as surly as your son. Maybe worse. Such coercive maneuvers could easily trigger my potty mouth.
Now layer adolescence on top of that. Thirteen-year-olds are developing rapidly, but their capacities for impulse control, emotion regulation and long-range decision-making are still works in progress. And at precisely the same time, they are exquisitely sensitive to being controlled by parents.
So when a parent exhorts “Put your phone away, now!”, the teenager is experiencing two unpleasant things at once: the abrupt interruption of something highly rewarding and another adolescent irritant, somebody telling him what to do.
You didn’t know you were a tiger? To a furious 13-year-old, you may suddenly look like one.
Back to the real bad guy. You’ve got a product engineered to capture attention colliding with a developmental stage built for increasing independence. That’s quite a setup. And we hand children these remarkably powerful devices without so much as a childproof cap, black-box warning or parent consent form acknowledging the potential harms.
It’s easier to buy your kid this device than to rent roller skates.
Why won’t reasoning or cutting him off work?
They fail for different reasons, and it’s worth understanding both.
Reasoning during “hot” emotional moments fails because humans, and kids even more so, can’t deliberate and process complex decisions very well while under duress. Mid-scroll, mid-show, mid-anything, your son is not particularly receptive to your thoughtful lecture about sleep hygiene.
Explaining why screens before bed are bad at bedtime is like discussing nutrition with someone who is already elbow-deep in a bag of chips. True, and useless.
A top-down, authoritarian approach has a different problem. Hard stops can certainly produce compliance, particularly with younger children. But if parental control is the only brake a child develops, what happens when the parent isn’t standing there?
There’s some interesting data on this. A 2025 analysis of more than 8,000 adolescents tracked over several years found that strict parental restrictions did reduce screen use. Kids in the highest-restriction households logged nearly an hour less screen time a day than kids in low-restriction households. But the effect faded as kids got older.
Restriction isn’t useless. But as kids move through adolescence, restriction alone has a shelf life. The developmental task is gradually shifting from “We control your device” toward “We are helping you learn to control it.”
What are the most effective strategies?
If daily screen negotiations have become an exhausting cycle of nagging and pushback, it’s time for a change. Below is a practical framework I recommend to families who want to shift from daily power struggles to a workable, team-based agreement:
Reset: Call a moratorium on device fights
Tell him you’re tired of being the screen police and you’re guessing he’s tired of being policed.
For the moment, nobody is changing the rules. You’re changing how the family makes them.
Top-down bans and repeated confiscations can invite secrecy, work-arounds and endless power struggles. Collaborative processes, in which teens have meaningful input into agreements with their parents, give them practice developing actual digital agency.
If you want a starting template rather than a blank page, Common Sense Media publishes a free family media agreement you can adapt together at the treaty table.
Try an apology to open a treaty table
A great technique to energize a reset is to apologize. Yes, I’m serious. Even cry “Uncle!” It gets their attention.
Try something like this: “We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible pattern around your phone. I yell, you get mad, I threaten, you get madder, and nobody learns anything. I’m sorry for my part in that. I want a do-over. We still need some limits around sleep, meals and family time, but I want your ideas about how we make them work.”
Notice what you did not apologize for: being the parent.
Negotiate: Don’t blow the treaty meeting
Commit to listening before problem-solving. Be curious. Ask about his favorite device activities:
- What does he like doing at different times of day?
- What does he use to socialize?
- What helps him relax?
- What does he turn to when he is bored, lonely, stressed or exhausted?
Don’t argue with his perceptions, even when you think his conclusions are preposterous. You are gathering intelligence before negotiating a deal.
And start small. Sleep is often a good place to begin.
One crucial point: collaboration does not mean democracy.
Your 13-year-old doesn’t get an equal vote on whether sleep matters or whether family members deserve one another’s attention at dinner. Parents still establish health and family boundaries. Collaboration means that within those boundaries, kids get voice, choices and increasing responsibility for managing themselves.
That is authoritative parenting, not permissive parenting.
Implement: Give the transition a runway
“Phones off in 10 minutes” beats “phones off now” almost every time.
You’re giving his brain time to disengage rather than demanding that it happen instantly. A timer he can see counting down can work better than a parent’s voice because it isn’t personal.
It’s hard to be furious at a clock.
Build in a landing
Devices don’t just end an activity. They often end a pleasurable, absorbing or soothing state.
Don’t necessarily hand him silence in its place. At bedtime, the landing might be an audiobook, music, reading, a shower, cuddling the dog or talking with you for 10 minutes.
You’re helping him learn something important: how to transition from a highly stimulating activity to a lower-stimulation one.
Externalize the rule
“House policy: no phones after 9 p.m.” lands differently than “I said so.”
You’re no longer the arbitrary obstacle between him and his phone. The agreement is the rule, and you’re helping everyone follow something you worked out together.
This is a small shift, but it matters enormously to a 13-year-old whose developmental job includes pushing against parental control.
It’s still hard. But it is learnable.
Avoid an in-the-moment battle
If dinner is a repeated flashpoint, solve it before dinner exists as a screen negotiation at all.
Devices go in a basket or charging station before dinner. No daily litigation. Fewer decisions in the moment mean fewer fights in the moment.
And yes, these policies go much better if parents join in.
I hear parents say, “Well, we drink wine and they don’t. It’s not an even playing field.”
True. But modeling self-control and giving your full attention to family conversation makes these policies considerably easier to sell.
Expect protest, and don’t take it personally
Despite a beautiful policy agreement process, your son could still blow up when you remind him of it.
Of course he can. He’s 13. And when he’s flooded, he won’t be remembering the Kumbaya at the family meeting. He may rage temporarily. Your job is to stay calm and keep thinking, “What goes up must come down.”
Adding fire to the flame, including perfectly rational reminders about the agreement, will usually impede his settling.
You don’t have to attend every fight you’re invited to.
If he punishes you with silence, that’s okay. Talk to another family member, clear the dishes and give him some space for his emotional, and perhaps embarrassing, recovery.
Dr. Laura’s bottom line about screen time battles
You cannot out-argue a device engineered by people with billion-dollar budgets, and you cannot out-muscle a 13-year-old’s need to resist you.
What you can do is stop fighting the battle at the worst possible moment — mid-scroll, at the table, at bedtime — and move it to a calmer one, where the rules are discussed in advance and your teenager has meaningful input.
The goal isn’t to surrender parental control. It’s to make parental control more effective while gradually transferring some of that control to the person who is eventually going to need it: your kid.
Then let the rule, not you, be the bad guy.
