Dear Editor,

Just this weekend my son and I had a full-blown argument over his endless scrolling versus his non-existent Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) study time. My wife supports the phones to keep them connected and safe; I fall back on the “research tool” justification. But nobody warns you about the sheer exhaustion of playing tech police.

You confiscate the phone, they rebel. You lecture, they zone out. You hide the devices, and they suddenly channel an Ocean’s Eleven heist team to locate them. Somehow, you become the villain for enforcing boundaries that didn’t even exist when you were a kid.

I remember when screen time meant an hour of cartoons on a holiday. Now it is a 24/7 negotiation. However, we have yet to collectively learn that simply seizing a device solves nothing — it just pushes the battle underground. The silent treatments start, secret accounts multiply, and the “one more video” sessions happen under blankets with the brightness dimmed. We might win the skirmish by taking the phone, but we lose the war when they learn to hide, lie, and resent the very boundaries intended for their protection.

The real work is harder: teaching them why balance matters. It is about fostering self-regulation — a skill many adults still lack — and modelling the behaviour we expect. How can we demand they disconnect when we are equally glued to our screens?

This isn’t a power struggle; it is about raising children who can make conscious choices about their attention before an algorithm starts making choices for them. That start line, uncomfortable as it may be, begins with us.

Clifton Martin

St. Ann, Jamaica

itnopretty@yahoo.co.uk