Digital Habits
Why Their Phone Keeps Buzzing
A lot of the alerts on your kid's phone are timed and worded to pull them back into an app, and most of them come from the app itself.
Most alerts aren't from a human
A real message from a friend and an alert saying someone you know just posted look exactly the same on a lock screen. The second kind is only there to get them to open the app again, and once you split the two apart, you usually find most of your kid's alerts are just the app talking to itself.
Why it buzzes at the worst time
These apps learn when each person is most likely to open something, and they hold the alerts for that exact moment, which is why the phone lights up right as your kid sits down to do homework. Apps do that deliberately, so when your kid gets pulled away from homework, it's not a willpower problem.
The setting that does the most work
Turning off alerts for one app helps a little. What really changes an evening is turning off every alert that isn't a message from an actual person. That gets rid of most of them and leaves the ones your kid would really miss.
The Sunday Script
Get one script every Sunday
The words for one hard conversation, in your inbox every Sunday, and a short note once a month. You can stop anytime.
That email doesn’t look right.