Here’s what to know.

Assess the problem

Assess whether you or your child is simply a person who uses the phone a lot or a person with behaviour that could be considered addictive.

Jason Nagata, an associate professor of paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, drew a parallel to substance abuse. Plenty of people enjoy the occasional drink, but the behaviour becomes problematic when it begins to impair their social lives, affect their relationships or hurt their work.

The same types of red flags can apply to phone use. If a person is spending most of his or her time scrolling through social media apps instead of making friends, that could be a sign of a phone problem. Or if your child’s grades are slipping because he or she is scrolling through social media instead of studying, it may be time to consider intervening.

Come up with a family media plan

As is often the case, household behaviour starts with the adults in the room.

One study, led by Nagata, found that higher media use among parents was linked to more problematic phone use in their adolescent children. And for younger people who appeared to be addicted to their phones, the health problems cascaded: they were more likely to show symptoms of depression, attention deficit disorder, suicidal behaviour and sleep disturbance.

On the flip side, studies have also found that problematic phone use among younger people was significantly reduced when parents set limits on the family’s phone use in certain situations, such as during bedtime and mealtime, Nagata said. Children slept better when phones were kept out of the bedroom, and they tended not to binge eat when the devices were kept out of the dining room.

“It’s important that parents practice what they preach,” Nagata said. “If you make rules about phones at the dinner table, you have to follow the rules.”

So come up with a family media plan. This could be a dynamic plan that varies throughout the week. For instance, the rules could be more rigid on weekdays – no phones at the dining table on school days – but loosened on weekends to let teenagers make plans to go out with friends.

Coming up with a robust family media plan is easier said than done because adults typically struggle with balancing home life with the demands of the office. Nagata confessed that if he had to break his own rule and use his phone at the dinner table, he first communicated to his family that he was on call for work.

Think less about time and more about content

For much of the smartphone era, people concerned about phone use focused on screen time – the hours spent on their devices – as a metric to determine if they were addicted. But academics now generally agree that screen time is a dated concept because not all screen time is equal: a person could be spending lots of hours each day writing work-related messages or reading a book on the phone – tasks that are not problematic.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University who has written several books on minimising digital distraction, suggested thinking about digital content similarly to the way we think about food. Social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok, which involve endlessly scrolling through random short videos, could be considered junk food designed to be addictive.

Cutting off those apps should be a priority over measuring minutes spent on the phone.

“It’s okay to think of these as the Doritos or Oreos of digital content and just say, ‘I’m an adult, I don’t need this stuff’,” Newport said.

Parents can also consider this approach when coming up with phone rules for their children, Newport added. While the current consensus favours waiting until high school for teenagers to get their first phone, Newport suggests delaying social media access until the latter half of high school, when it is more developmentally appropriate, as children’s brains mature to better regulate their emotions.

Replace scrolling with a healthier activity

For people cutting down on phone use, the toughest part is figuring out what to do instead, especially when seemingly everyone around them is glued to screens.

Jenny Odell, an Oakland, California, artist who wrote How to Do Nothing, a book about resisting the attention economy, suggested activities that counteract the negative consequences from phone overuse, including social impairment.

She recalled volunteering at a festival in February in Berkeley, California, where members of the community showed people how to repair items. One booth taught people how to sew, and a group of high school students stuck around for hours, learning ways to work with their hands.

“I find there’s this strange divide between Gen Z people who are so addicted to phones and people who are so purposeful, seeking out these other things,” Odell said.

“I don’t know what that’s about,” she added. “Maybe it’s the age they were given a phone.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Brian X. Chen

Photographs by: Derek Abella

©2026 THE NEW YORK TIMES