Phone battles at bedtime? See our family editor's easy fix

I know I’m not alone when I say that parenting can be a tough gig. I’m only five years into raising a little human and every day I learn something new. As family editor here at Goodto.com, I recognise that the parenting landscape has changed hugely in the last two decades and the main challenges parents face today didn’t exist when they were younger - such as the internet and ‘screen time’. And both can sometimes turn bedtime into a battleground, I hear you. But now I have a new battle plan to share with you...

Whether they're using your phone or their own - according to YouGov, over half of children under seven already own a mobile phone - screen time is a daily occurrence for most kids these days and I think it has a bad reputation. Done in moderation, screen time can actually be a brilliant tool for visual learners, fact-finding, playing brain games, and helping to make your children more independent as they grow. My son, Ted, found a snail the other day and we spent the afternoon on my phone researching all about them, how to look after them, how often they poo, and what they eat (apples, grapes, and leaves apparently).

Screens will be present in your child’s life, so I believe that it’s more about teaching them how to use them safely and helping them understand the limits and why they need to be set. And this is where EE can help.

The device-level Wi-Fi controls from EE let me apply specific safety settings for my five-year-old, separate from the rest of the home. My main job as a parent is to keep my child safe, and I tell him this every day. Sometimes keeping him safe looks like holding his hand while walking through a carpark, other times it’s saying ‘enough’ to screen time and helping him turn it off.

Before setting anything I work on our mindset. Instead of me versus my son, it's me and my son versus the problem (turning off a device when he might not be ready to). I sit with him and talk about how long his game is and how long he would like to play for, and we discuss and agree on a time limit. We then talk about how the internet will turn off just for him, and that means it’s time to turn his device off and get ready for bed. Some nights he's okay with this and it’s smooth sailing, other nights he’s not too happy and we get a protest, and that's okay too. Overall the EE Wi-Fi safety settings work brilliantly for us. I can get so easily distracted by pre-bedtime routines that I can accidentally leave him on a screen for two hours or more before bed - and then the battle is all too real. 

With EE it just makes it so much easier to know I’ve scheduled a Wi-Fi freeze just for him and it will switch off when it’s meant to.