Parenting Strategies I Use On My Devices

Image by Taras Yasinski from Pixabay

My three-month-old was having his first tantrum.

Not because he was hungry, tired, or needed a diaper change. He was screaming because we turned off the TV.

My baby was red faced, neck craning toward the blank screen. I was frozen in disbelief.

Despite all my plans to be an “intentional tech parent,” it hadn’t occurred to me that we’d need to start so soon. Three months old felt too young to have such a strong reaction to a screen, but there we were.

That seemingly innocent hour of television forced me to get serious about his digital wellness. It couldn’t be about someday anymore.

As I reflected on my 6 years of experience as a digitally intentional user and learned more about parenting, I found that I used parenting strategies… on my phone and other devices.

The same wisdom that helps parents guide their children through tantrums, bedtime resistance, and boundary-testing were surprisingly the same ones I’d used for years on my digital habits without realizing it.

So here are five strategies I’ve used on my phone, computer, and smart TV, that I recently learned are also parenting strategies. Turns out, we might all need a little more gentle, consistent guidance around our screens.

Give Your Phone a Bedtime

The screen tantrums weren’t our only challenge at three months old. We were also sleep-deprived zombies trading off on night shifts and stumbling through our days.

While other parent friends beamed about their babies sleeping through the night, we were still getting up multiple times until our little one was four or five months old.

I was a barely contained volcano when our pediatrician announced it was “totally possible” for our little night owl to sleep through the night… until her recommendation to check out Taking Cara Babies actually saved us.

The counterintuitive advice that changed everything? Put him to bed earlier, not later.

After a few transition weeks, we had two precious hours to ourselves before our own bedtime and a baby who slept through the night. Who knew that giving him an earlier bedtime would give us back our sanity?

This same logic works on devices. Putting your phone to bed an hour or two before you creates similar magic:

• Easier to fall asleep (no blue light or mental stimulation)

• Better sleep quality (no middle-of-the-night notification buzzes)

• Less stress (no doom-scrolling or obsessive email checking)

• Gentler mornings (no immediate digital overwhelm)

• Space for meaningful evening activities (reading, conversation, etc.)

More and more, I try to keep my devices not just out of arm’s reach, but on an entirely different floor of the house. My phone gets tucked away at the same time every night, far away from my bed. And my computer stays tucked away on my desk after work or on the dining room table.

Just like with the baby’s bedtime routine, consistency is everything… which leads me to the next tip.

Consistency, Not Perfection

To paraphrase economist and parenting data analyist Emily Oster: there are several evidence based parenting methods that work, so there’s not one right way. What matters is that you pick one and stick with it.

This philosophy has helped me go with my gut and not second guess myself so much when I hear about other strategies both in parenting and in maintaining balanced tech use.

We can think about the rules we set in our household with ourselves and with our children as boundaries. Before setting any boundary, I ask myself: Is this a boundary I’m willing to enforce, even when I’m tired, stressed, or running late?

As much as we may not like it, it’s a child’s “job” to test boundaries, and it’s our job to maintain them. The child isn’t responsible for holding the boundary. We are.

The same is true for our relationship with technology. Your phone will always try to pull you back in with notifications, red badges, and infinite scroll. That’s how it was designed. It’s your job to figure out how you want to handle the digital noise.

So when I decide to try a new digital wellness strategy, I commit to it for a designated period. A good starting point is a one-week experiment, but the real magic happens with 30 days or more.

Dr. Victora Dunkley, a psychiatrist who specializes in working with neurodivergent youth says that after a 3 week digital detox, biorhythms and brain chemistry come close to normalizing, stress and sleep hormones rebalance, and calmness replaces hyperarousal.

While detoxes can be great (I do them with clients), the strategy doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be consistent. I’d rather have a “good enough” phone boundary I can maintain most days than a “perfect” digital detox I abandon after three days because it was too rigid.

Pick Your Battles

This parenting philosophy builds on the last one and basically means to know what your non-negotiables are (i.e. what do you value most?).

You might have strong feelings about sugar intake, bedtime routines, screen limits, and manners. But expecting perfectionism from ourselves or our children leads to strained relationships and exhaustion for everyone.

The same applies to your relationship with your phone.

If you’re too rigid with screen time rules, part of you will inevitably rebel against all that restriction. I’ve seen this backfire when people become so obsessed with monitoring their screen time that they’re actually using their phone more — constantly checking usage apps and beating themselves up over every minute.

This is why I tell my coaching clients to take one small step at a time. Pick one tech boundary that feels manageable and turn it into a habit. Once that’s solid, you can reflect on how it’s going and see if other areas need attention.

Maybe you’ll discover you want to tackle online shopping next. Or you might find that you’re perfectly happy with where things are, and adding more rules would just overwhelm you and set you back.

The key is knowing the difference between your true non-negotiables (for me: no social media) and your preferences (I’d like to check email less, but it’s not the end of the world).

Just like with parenting, you can’t fight every battle. Choose the ones that matter most, and give yourself permission to be human about the rest.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Peekaboo isn’t just a heartwarming game. It’s actually how babies learn about object permanence (the concept that things continue to exist even when you can’t see them).

Even though we adults intellectually know that things still exist when they’re hidden, we genuinely do think about them less when they’re not visible. And when it comes to devices, this quirk of human psychology works in our favor.

The research on this is pretty compelling. One study found that students whose phones were completely removed from the room performed better on tests than students who had their phones sitting on their desks, and students whose phones were tucked away in their backpacks. Just knowing the phone was nearby, even hidden, affected their cognitive performance.

Another study showed that when phones are visible during conversations, people don’t think as deeply and the discussions aren’t as meaningful. The mere presence of the device changes how our brains work.

I’ve become strategic about using this to my advantage. While I’m working, my phone lives inside my desk drawer, though after reading that study about students, I’m considering removing it from the room entirely.

After work, my computer stays on my desk in the same room as my son’s crib. Once he goes to bed, I can’t access it without disturbing him, which is a natural boundary that keeps me from “just replying to one more email.”

As for my phone at night, it charges next to a chair across the room from our bed. I can’t just roll over and grab it. That friction is usually enough to keep me off my phone when I’m reading in bed or trying to sleep.

If you don’t want your kid (or yourself) obsessing over something, just put it where they can’t see it.

Sometimes the most sophisticated strategies are the simplest one.

Teach Yourself Emotional Regulation

One thing I love about modern parenting wisdom is the focus on teaching children autonomy. Giving them the skills to feed themselves, put themselves to sleep, and perhaps most importantly, how to regulate their emotions.

Most of us never learned self soothing skills from our own parents, so we’re trying to teach something we’re still figuring out ourselves.

It turns out, emotional dysregulation is often the real culprit behind tech overuse. When I’m anxious, bored, overwhelmed, or restless, that’s when I find myself mindlessly reaching for my phone or the remote. The uncomfortable feeling hits, and instead of sitting with it, I immediately seek digital distraction.

To raise the stakes, research by Jenny Radesky has found that pacifying kids with screens prevents them from learning coping strategies and can worsen emotional regulation over time. And a parent’s screen use is often a big predictor of a child’s screen use as they age, so by modeling healthy coping behaviors, our kids can pick them up.

Learning to pause, get curious about what I’m feeling, and tend to my needs has been a game-changer.

By going to the source and learning to cope without numbing out in front of a screen, I feel more capable of handling whatever life throws at me. And I’m modeling emotional regulation for my family.

The best parenting often happens through modeling the behaviors we want to see. If I don’t want my kid to become an “iPad zombie,” the most powerful thing I can do is put my own device down first, and show him what it looks like to sit with discomfort, boredom, and big feelings without immediately reaching for a screen.

In Conclusion

There’s immense pressure to do everything “right” as parents. The internet is full of experts telling you there’s one correct way to raise your child.

But experienced parents know there are many different approaches can work. What matters most isn’t finding the perfect method, it’s finding the way that is sustainable and aligned with your values.

The same grace we’re learning to give ourselves as parents we can extend to our relationship with technology too.

You don’t have to have the perfect phone setup or follow someone else’s digital wellness rules to the letter. You don’t have to choose between being a digital minimalist or a tech-obsessed addict.

Just like there’s no one “right” way to parent, there’s no one right way to have a healthy relationship with your devices. But there is your way — the approach that honors your values, supports your wellbeing, and helps you show up as the parent, partner, and person you want to be.

I’m for treating yourself with the same patience, compassion, and respect that you show your family.