Let’s be real. You already know that the half measures don’t work. But maybe you don’t feel like getting rid of the screens is possible. Maybe you feel like you’re in a complete lose-lose situation. Other parents and your school don’t make it easy on you either. Phones are required for soccer practice updates and class assignments. All the outside pressures push toward screens. You feel forced into settling for devices with screen-time limits and parental controls, because that is the least worst option.

But the least worst option when it comes to kids and screens isn’t cutting it. When we put time limits or parental controls on screens, we’re already admitting that something about them isn’t good for kids. We don’t put time limits on kids riding their bikes or reading books, and we don’t install parental controls on their Legos or board games. We don’t have to. Parents don’t feel like they have a choice with screens. You feel forced to choose between one bad experience and another slightly less bad experience. Between screens unleashed with all their adverse effects or screens with limits and controls you have to police constantly.

But what if there is another way?

Ryan and Mary Thorne live in Arizona with their three boys, Dallas, Dylan, and Jax. Their second son, Dylan, was diagnosed with autism at age three, and when they received his diagnosis, the doctor warned them, “If you lose him to the world of video games, you will never get him back.” The doctor explained why the virtual world pulls these kids in. They don’t have to interact in person, and it feels easier for them to navigate a screen than real life. So he repeated, “You’re not going to get him back.” The Thornes got it. No video games.

However, they allowed all their sons to have iPads. They thought they were educational tools. In fact, they got the idea from one of Dylan’s therapists, who used flashcards on an iPad. If this was something that could help him, it couldn’t be bad.

Fast-forward a few years. The Thornes were told their youngest son, Jax, wasn’t ready for kindergarten. He couldn’t focus, and he was getting into fights at preschool. The Thornes kept him home another year – a year Mary admits he spent with his face in an iPad. One day, Mary and Ryan were out of the house when their oldest son, Dallas, called them with an emergency: Jax had lost at the game Angry Birds and taken an enormous bite out of the iPad. Shards of iPad glass were in his mouth.

Two months before Jax was supposed to start kindergarten, medication seemed like the only option. But Mary didn’t feel comfortable with the idea, and she was determined not to medicate her son until she’d exhausted every other option.

Around this time, close friends of the Thornes had started talking about how they had taken their kids off screens and were seeing the benefits. It sounded great, but the Thornes were hesitant. “We couldn’t picture dealing with this child without the iPad that seemed to make him better.” The Thornes had hit rock bottom. They didn’t know what else to do, so they decided they had nothing to lose by following their friends’ advice and trying out a screen detox for thirty days.

The first two weeks were hell. When they told their boys that they were getting rid of their devices, it was as though they had said “we’re killing your dog.” There were tears from all three boys – the most tears they’d seen out of them about anything. At first, Mary felt like she was going crazy. “If you’re going to take it away from your kids, you have to replace it with your time. Do I love playing Monopoly for five hours? No, I don’t. Did I do it? Every day.”

The Thornes kept going. It got better. The boys got over their initial distress. After the first two weeks, they started playing more independently and needed less parental involvement. They were excited about what they would get to do each day. Their sons’ friends even started getting involved, playing Monopoly and chess tournaments with them.

Ryan warns parents, “It’s going to be hard. It’s going to seem overwhelming, but you just have to try it.” And Mary emphasizes that it takes the full thirty days to truly see results. “What’s the point of going halfway? Because you’re not going to see the benefits if you don’t actually do it.”

“Aren’t you curious to know what the best version of your kid is?” Mary asks. “Even if you think your kid is perfect right now, aren’t you at least curious, if it only took thirty days, to see even how much better they could be? Because I promise you even the best kid would be better.”

It didn’t take long for the Thornes to see the benefits of the detox. Jax’s teachers told them that he had done a one-eighty. “He’s the happiest kid in class. He’s not doing any of the things that he was doing before.” Other people also noticed. They had known Jax and what he was like. One mom asked Mary, “What did you do? He’s like a new person.” The Thornes had gotten rid of the iPads. That was it.

Especially amazing to his mom, Jax had grown in self-awareness. One day she picked him up from a summer camp where someone had brought an Xbox to play while they waited for the parents. Jax didn’t even play the game, but when Mary went in, he was glued to watching the other kids playing. When they got in the car, she recalls, “he threw this fit that I hadn’t seen for months, and I was like, ‘Jax, do you realize what’s happening right now, how you’re acting?’” He told her, “It’s because of the video games. I don’t know why I do that, Mom.” Jax came to see for himself what the screens did to him, and he didn’t want to go back to that. Mary says, “Right now, if there’s ever screens around, he goes the other way because he knows the old him.” He doesn’t want to go back to the kid who got in trouble every day for exploding in rage. “He loves the kid he is now.”

Melanie Hempe, a mom of four living in North Carolina, had her first career as a labor and delivery nurse, helping families bring their babies into this world. Melanie is a parent who, like the Thornes, has struggled with the destructive impacts of screens on a child. Her oldest son, Adam, developed an intense video game addiction, and that experience led Melanie to reverse course completely on screens for her younger three children.

With passion in her North Carolina twang, Melanie told me that “little video game players grow up to be big video game players.” She lamented to me how she had kept thinking her son Adam would outgrow the video games. That was a myth. From the age of twelve, his video game use only kept getting worse, to the point where at age eighteen he dropped out of college because video games had destroyed his life and he couldn’t function or live on his own as an adult.

These screen-induced problems that start in childhood don’t go away on their own. And they lead to the exact opposite of what parents hope for their grown children. Adam, now free of his addiction, thanks to going through a total screen detox program known as boot camp when he joined the U.S. Army, encourages his mom to tell other parents that they have to (figuratively speaking) rip the screens out of kids’ hands. There is no pulling the Band-Aid off slowly. A total detox is needed to get the screens out of kids’ systems.

Dr. Victoria Dunckley confirms this. After helping more than five hundred children, teens, and young adults detox from screens to address the overstimulation and hyperarousal of the nervous system characterizing their symptoms, she shares that “even small amounts of gaming or computer play often renders the reset useless.” The reset program she outlines in her book has parents eliminate all interactive screen time, no exceptions.

After learning from her own experience with her son Adam, Melanie founded an organization called ScreenStrong and now has a second career helping other families deliver their children from the destructive virtual world back into the real world. Melanie and ScreenStrong walk parents through how to detox their children from screens and set up a family lifestyle without addictive screen technologies.

Before you dive into a detox, you should first prepare yourself, your spouse, and your family. The first step is preparing yourself as a parent. To make a detox successful, parents should educate themselves on the harms of screens to shore up their resolve and to help them explain their rationale to their spouse and children. Mary Thorne says that whenever she felt like she was going to lose her mind during their detox, she’d go back to the books she’d read beforehand, and they would help her keep going. She had to keep reminding herself why she was doing this – to remember the adverse effects of screens she was helping her kids detox from.

Being prepared as a parent also means getting your spouse onboard. It’s not uncommon for one spouse to think the screens aren’t that bad. Dad may enjoy playing video games with his sons. That’s okay. He doesn’t need to be exactly where you are. Simply ask him to commit to being a united front with you for thirty days, to try life without screens as an experiment, and explain to him the reasons you want to do this by showing him some of the research you’re reading.

Having a plan in place is essential before starting a detox. Many parents reiterated to me that you can’t just wing it and go cold turkey. Plan for how you are going to replace children’s screen time with other activities. Buy board games, art supplies, outdoor toys, or Legos; borrow books from the library; do what you can in advance to set up your house with non-screen options readily available.

The Thornes made a plan before their detox for how they would fill their three boys’ time once the screens were gone. Mary and Ryan divvied up responsibilities. They decided Ryan would take the boys to do fun things outside the house, like playing golf or going to a basketball game. Mary, who is more of an introvert, planned to do indoor activities at home with the kids. When her husband traveled for work, she would take them out for special treats like ice cream when they got tired of being at home. Then when her husband got back, he would take them out to do boy stuff and give Mom a break. Ryan and Mary were a team, and they had a game plan.

Help kids understand the plan too. Write out a simple schedule of what the days will look like during the detox. The schedule should be a mix of fun activities and household tasks, like taking family walks, making beds, and reading for thirty minutes to an hour.

Melanie finds that the best way to start the detox is going away as a family for the weekend on a screen-free wilderness trip together, like camping or staying at a cabin. Before you leave, you need to get rid of all the screens in the house. Do a total “screen sweep,” as Dr. Dunckley calls it: gather everything up – smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, handheld games, e-readers, laptops – put them all in a box, and get them out of the house so that when you come back from the weekend, all the screens are already gone.

Use the time away as a family to talk about the detox together, why you are doing it and what it will look like, and get your kids excited about all the things they can look forward to doing as a family without the screens.

Talking to your kids in preparation for the detox may also involve apologizing to them. One principal of a low-tech school has encouraged parents to consider reversing course on smartphones by asking, “What’s wrong with apologizing as a parent?” He explains that parents can say, “I have to apologize. I put you in a situation that I should not have put you into. I have done a disservice to you. We’re going to change this.”

Even if your child is a junior or senior in high school, you can take the smartphone back for a detox period or completely until they go to college. This can help them reset and start their adult life not addicted to the phone. We know these devices aren’t good for adults, either, so why not help your teens form good habits without these devices while still in your home to prepare them for healthy habits in adulthood? One mom who did the ScreenStrong detox shared, “I was surprised that my fourteen-year-old actually seemed very relieved when I finally took away the screens and his phone. He only had two minor meltdowns.” She says that after two months her son even told her he saw how much screens had been wasting his life. A reset can help anyone at any age at any time.

Parents may not be able to get rid of their smartphones entirely during the detox, but reducing your own use shows kids that you are a team player. To make your screens less addictive during a detox, ScreenStrong recommends setting your phone to grayscale and deleting social media apps. You can also put your phone physically away from you when at home with your kids. Some families have phone boxes, or “freedom baskets,” where parents leave devices once they are home from work.

If you can, find another family to do the detox with you, for accountability and encouragement. Detoxing together can make it easier on each family, because the children have peers going through it with them and parents have allies. It’s also helpful to be able to send your children over to each other’s houses to mix up the environment during the detox, because you know both families are following the same rules of no screens.

Detoxes work. There is science behind them. Dr. Dunckley explains that, by the third week without screens, “biorhythms and brain chemistry may be close to normalizing, and as healing continues, stress and sleep hormones rebalance and promote calmness rather than hyperarousal.” She goes on to say, “In contrast to the survival state [induced by interactive screens], which is inherently selfish, impulsive, and one-track-minded, your child is now on his or her way to becoming healthier in mood, thought, behavior, and relationships.” Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, says that “tech holidays or digital fasts are very effective for restoring baseline mood, motivation, energy, and sleep, as well as decreasing the constant cravings to check our devices.”

The Thornes found all of this to be true. They started their screen detox for their youngest son, Jax, because of his behavioral issues. They were shocked when they also saw huge changes in their second son, Dylan, who is on the autism spectrum. Dylan had always been behind academically. The classroom was a constant struggle for him. Year after year, when Ryan and Mary went in for Dylan’s school evaluations, it was painful to hear how he was behind.

After they got rid of the screens, it was time for Dylan’s fifth-grade evaluation. Although they had seen some positive changes in him at home, they still braced themselves for what they would hear from his teacher. Ryan recounts, “I still remember the teacher that said, ‘Hey, he’s my best kid in class. He’s at the top in every subject.’ And I remember I lost it. I just started crying there in the evaluation.” When Dylan received his diagnosis at age three, the Thornes didn’t think he’d have a normal life. Mary says, “He graduated sixth grade with straight A’s. When he started kindergarten, he was nonverbal.” Not only did he get straight A’s, but his teachers also told the Thornes he was doing better in the district assessments than all his peers. And it’s not just academics. Dylan made a club basketball team. He’s doing well socially. He has real friendships.

A support coordinator from the state goes to the Thornes’ home every three months to check on Dylan. He’s in charge of about two hundred families, and he told the Thornes, “I see kid after kid every single day, and Dylan is the only one that shows progress like this. I just wish that I could make the other families that I go to see the importance of the screens.” In every other home he visits, the kid on the spectrum is either using an iPad or playing a video game, and maybe the kid looks up when he comes in and maybe they don’t, but Dylan comes in and greets him. The Thornes never expected this much progress. “We didn’t think that taking the iPad away would create a kid who made a club basketball team and has straight A’s. We didn’t know. That was a gift.”

Once they saw these changes in their kids, the Thornes could never go back. “After those thirty days were up, we were like, let’s do thirty more. They didn’t even ask for their screens back. Once they saw how it changed their lives, they didn’t want to go back.”

Adapted from Clare Morell, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones (Forum Books, 2025), 37–52.