Every parent who has ever barked “put that phone away” at dinner has probably done the same thing five minutes earlier.
Kids and teens are “more receptive to reasonable limits when they have a voice in shaping them,” according to guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that starts with parents admitting their own habits need work too.
That’s the premise behind a new list of tips from Bark, the parental-control and monitoring company, published August 18. The post lays out seven concrete ways parents can model healthy screen use instead of just policing their kids’ devices.
The first step is simple: create screen-free zones. Research found that conversations feel “less fulfilling and empathetic when a mobile device was present,” and Pew Research Center found 46% of teens say their parents are at least sometimes distracted by their phone mid-conversation. Bark’s fix is low-tech: a basket by the dinner table where every phone lands before the meal starts.
The list also pushes parents to narrate their own phone use out loud, something like “I’m checking the weather,” so kids learn to see the difference between intentional use and habitual scrolling. It’s a small habit, but it reframes the phone as a tool rather than a reflex.
Related: 4 Ways to Cut Your Children’s Screen Time in Half Without a Fight
Parents don’t get a pass, either. Sixty-five percent of parents with kids under 12 admit they spend too much time on their phones, and Bark suggests picking one specific boundary, like a 30-minute phone-free window each evening, rather than a vague resolution to “do better.”
Movieguide® has made this same case before. In a previous article on parents’ own screen habits, psychologist Jean Twenge put it bluntly: “If you don’t want your teens looking at phones at dinner, you shouldn’t either.” Therapist Matthew Solit added that “kids have an amazing ability to call us out when we are not engaged,” a line that lands even harder alongside Bark’s research.
Bark’s other suggestions lean practical rather than preachy. Letting kids help set the household’s screen rules makes those rules stick better, researchers say, and owning up to a slip-up teaches kids that habits can change rather than just be enforced. Even how families document their lives matters: a study in Nature found people remember experiences less precisely when they photograph them with the intent of sharing, which is a good argument for putting the phone away after the first picture.
The last tip is the most countercultural: make offline life appealing on purpose. A JAMA Network Open clinical trial found that reducing leisure screen time improved psychological symptoms in children and teens, which tracks with what most parents already suspect but rarely act on.
None of this requires a family to swear off screens entirely, and Bark doesn’t ask for that. What it asks for is honesty, the kind that admits kids are always watching, whether or not they’re being watched. For Christian parents raising children in a culture that hands them a screen before they can walk, that’s less a productivity hack than a discipleship one: children learn what’s modeled long before they learn what’s demanded of them.
Movieguide® has tracked this conversation for years, from practical tips on cutting screen time to research on how screens affect kids’ development. Bark’s latest list doesn’t reinvent that wheel so much as hand parents a mirror first.
Read Next: Is Your Screen Time Affecting Your Kids? Experts Say Yes.
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