Context · Digital Habits
The alerts on your kid's phone are not neutral messages that something happened, they are timed and worded to bring somebody back into an app, and most of them are generated by the app rather than by a person.
Most alerts are not from a human
A real message from a friend and a notification saying somebody you know just posted look identical on a lock screen. The second kind exists purely to reopen the app, and once you separate the two you usually find that the majority of a kid's alerts are the app talking to itself.
Why the timing feels uncanny
These systems learn when each person is most likely to open something and hold alerts for that moment, which is why the phone lights up right when your kid sits down to homework. It is not a coincidence and it is not your kid being weak, it is a scheduling decision made about them.
The setting that does the most work
Turning off notifications for one app helps a little. What changes an evening is turning off every alert that is not a message from an actual person, which usually kills eighty percent of them and leaves the ones your kid would genuinely miss.