When I speak in front of parents, the question of the phone comes up within the first five minutes, and it is rarely a technical question. It is a question about authority, about trust, and about the fear of missing something important. I do not come with a rule, because no single rule would hold for every family. I come to help each person recover their own capacity for judgement, with what research knows today and what teenagers say when we listen to them. Here are some possible directions.
First direction: what research says, and what it does not say
Public debate swings between panic and denial, and leaves parents without support. Anses, the French health agency, in its collective expert review of teenagers’ social media use, documents real effects on sleep, anxiety and self-esteem, and shifts attention from time spent to what the teenager actually does online, with whom, and what they invest of themselves in it. That distinction changes everything, including what gets decided at home. I also draw on the work of Serge Tisseron, with whom I have collaborated for years, and on Cloud of Nuanced Screens.
Second direction: the word “addiction” makes us look in the wrong place
When a teenager spends hours on their phone, the vocabulary of addiction gives the impression of having understood, and prevents us from looking at what is really going on: a missing bond, boredom, a suffering that has found a refuge there, or quite simply a passion. This is the direction I prefer in front of parents, because it gives back power to act instead of taking it away. It comes from Detecting « screen addiction » and from The confiscated phone, which recounts what confiscation produces when it becomes the only answer.
Third direction: what they really do online
Teenagers learn an enormous amount on their screens, they read, they write, they get politicised, sometimes they look after themselves, and they develop forms of self-regulation for which we never give them credit and which they discuss among themselves. Asking them what they do there, without prior judgement, opens a dialogue that prohibition closes. This direction draws on Not judging people’s digital practices and on Banning social media for under-15s.
Fourth direction: pitting sport, reading or nature against screens weakens both
It is a frequent reflex and it backfires: the proposed activity becomes the side of good, the screen the side of evil, and the teenager finds themselves summoned to pick a side. An educational project gains by connecting rather than opposing. See Sport against screens ?.
Fifth direction: making images together
In front of parents as in front of professionals, the most concrete direction goes through practice: making an image, showing it, listening to it being looked at. Much of what blocks the dialogue around screens comes undone through a shared, very short experience of creation, which puts parents and teenagers back in a symmetrical position. See Making images in an adolescent centre and The Selfie, Mirror of Narcissus ?.
For the professionals who support parents
A variant exists for teams: educators, foster carers, youth workers, social workers, librarians, health staff. The question then becomes their own isolation in front of the screens of the young people they support, and the circulation of their practices. This is the subject of « So what do we offer them ? » and of The screens of a child in care.
What happens in the room
With parents I work a great deal with questions answered by standing up or staying seated, because it shows within two minutes that you are not alone in asking yourself a given question, and that the room’s certainties are less shared than people think. Then short exchanges in pairs, then a moment of anonymous writing whose contributions appear on the wall. The final discussion starts from what the room has written, which allows the most intimate questions to exist without anyone having to take the microphone.
What remains
The contribution wall stays accessible online, hosted on our own servers, and often becomes a resource the organising structure reuses with other groups of parents. The questions written during one evening feed the next.
Formats and preparation
A two-hour evening is the most frequent format, in a library, an adolescent centre, a secondary school, a community centre. I prepare with the organisers, because the composition of the audience changes everything: parents alone, parents and teenagers together, professionals, or all three mixed. And when a structure prefers the words to be carried by someone from its own team, an educator, a youth worker the families know, I can support that person in building and holding the evening themselves [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.
What I have published on the subject
The section Screens, adolescence and psychic life gathers the essentials. See also « The use of screens at the heart of child protection » : conference / training by Serge Tisseron and Benoît Labourdette.