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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do not have to like it or pretend to. You can be honestly uninterested in the game and still curious about why it grips them, and the difference between those two is audible. The cost of getting it wrong is that they stop telling you things, including the things you would want to know.
The love of desirable things is made alluring for men (Quran 3:14). The pull is described as built into the thing itself, which is a kinder way to read your child's absorption than treating it as a fault in them.
آل عمران
زُيِّنَ لِلنَّاسِ حُبُّ ٱلشَّهَوَٰتِ مِنَ ٱلنِّسَآءِ وَٱلۡبَنِينَ وَٱلۡقَنَٰطِيرِ ٱلۡمُقَنطَرَةِ مِنَ ٱلذَّهَبِ وَٱلۡفِضَّةِ وَٱلۡخَيۡلِ ٱلۡمُسَوَّمَةِ وَٱلۡأَنۡعَٰمِ وَٱلۡحَرۡثِۗ ذَٰلِكَ مَتَٰعُ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَاۖ وَٱللَّهُ عِندَهُۥ حُسۡنُ ٱلۡمَـَٔابِ
The love of desirable things is made alluring for men- women, children, gold and silver treasures piled up high, horses with fine markings, livestock, and farmland- these may be the joys of this life, but God has the best place to return to
Qur’an 3:14read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of findings from the ABCD study, which follows more than eleven thousand young people, reports that screen and social media time has climbed among nine to fifteen year olds, particularly since the pandemic, with links to mental and physical health in both cross sectional and longitudinal data. The size of that shift is the useful part for a parent, because it shows where a lot of their social life now happens. The health links are associations and cannot tell you what any one child's use is doing to them.
Nagata JM, Lee CM, Hur JO, Baker FC. (2025). What we know about screen time and social media in early adolescence: a review of findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.. Current opinion in pediatrics doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An interest at that age is not a hobby sitting to one side of the person, it is part of how they see themselves.
Ask everybody, at the start, what they use and how it goes for them there. Not only the ones who arrive with an obvious phone problem.
For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.
When someone misuses a device, sending explicit messages or piling on to someone or going where they should not, the useful read is that they were not ready for that much freedom yet. Not that they are a bad person.