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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
This is not an argument against limits. It is an argument for knowing what you are cutting. If the same device carries the friendships, the homework help and the thing you are worried about, removing all of it treats them as one problem when they are three. A narrower limit, aimed at the particular use that is causing harm, keeps the support in place while the trouble gets dealt with.
They are those who are neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance (Quran 25:67). What is asked for is a measure, not stripping something away entirely.
الفرقان
وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَنفَقُواْ لَمۡ يُسۡرِفُواْ وَلَمۡ يَقۡتُرُواْ وَكَانَ بَيۡنَ ذَٰلِكَ قَوَامࣰ ا
They are those who are neither wasteful nor niggardly when they spend, but keep to a just balance
Qur’an 25:67read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of the literature on problematic smartphone use in children and adolescents gathered the factors that predict it, and noted how few comprehensive syntheses of this exist. What comes out is a picture of who is at risk and under what conditions, rather than a verdict on the device itself. So the evidence supports looking closely at the specific pattern of use rather than treating all access as the thing to remove.
Fischer-Grote L, Kothgassner OD, Felnhofer A. (2019). Risk factors for problematic smartphone use in children and adolescents: a review of existing literature.. Neuropsychiatrie : Klinik, Diagnostik, Therapie und Rehabilitation : Organ der Gesellschaft Osterreichischer Nervenarzte und Psychiater doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Taking away the harmful use and the connection in a single move leaves someone with less help than they had before.
If a young person is being groomed, blackmailed or seriously bullied online, cutting access quickly is a safety step and needs help alongside it, not instead of it.
After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.
Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.
Try one hour with the phone away and out of reach, then talk about what came up. The hour itself is the information.