Blog · Families · 8 min read
The back to school screen time routine for the whole family (yours included)
A back to school screen time routine is built in windows and built for everybody: breakfast with no screens, homework with the noisy apps shut, dinner with the phones off the table, and phones sleeping outside the bedrooms. Your breakfast without a scroll teaches more than three rules on the fridge.
Term starts with a new bag, early alarms and an argument you already know by heart: the phone. After a summer of letting things slide, putting limits back sounds like war. It isn't, if you do it now, because the first week of term is the one week of the year when the whole house changes its hours at once. Here's the plan, window by window, for the kids and for the adults. Mostly for the adults.
Why the week before term starts is the best moment to fix this
Because term resets every schedule at the same time: sleep, meals, homework. A new rule costs far less when everything else is moving anyway.
Over the holidays screen use climbs, and not because you got it wrong. No timetable, no school, parents still working: it was always going to. Beating yourself up about the summer buys you nothing.
What's actually useful is the other thing: at the start of term, habits reshuffle on their own. There's a time to get up, a time to eat, a time to turn the light off. Every one of those moments is a hook to hang the phone rule on, because it doesn't arrive as an isolated punishment — it arrives as part of the term package. In February the same rule is a battle. In the first week of term it's one more line on the new timetable.
And you have an ally you didn't have a few years ago: schools are pulling phones out of the school day. In England, Department for Education guidance on mobile phones in schools now expects schools to be phone-free by default; most US states have some version of the same rule. Whether any of it works is a fair question, and we went through the evidence in do phone bans in schools work. Either way, the real match is played in the hours that are left: morning, late afternoon, night. In other words, at home.
How do you build a family phone routine?
You decide it in a conversation before term starts, not by decree: clear windows for everyone, and the same ones for adults and children in the shared parts of the day.
Three principles hold up everything else:
1. Agree it as a family, before the first day back. A twenty-minute conversation: which moments of the day are phone-free, what each window is for, what happens at the weekend. When your child helps design it, the rule is "ours". When they find it imposed on them on day one of term, it's yours, and their job is to knock it down.
2. Windows, not a minute counter. The American Academy of Pediatrics has moved away from a single daily number and towards screen-free times and zones, naming bedrooms and mealtimes as the places to start, especially the hour before bed. That's a relief, because counting minutes turns you into your child's accountant. A routine made of windows — "not at breakfast, not at dinner, not at night" — is understood first time, applies to everybody and needs no daily audit.
3. Yours counts. And it counts for more. Here's the part almost no back to school article dares to write: a parent's phone routine teaches more than a child's. Children don't do what they're told, they do what they see. One breakfast with you actually present beats three rules stuck on the fridge. If your morning window is a scroll with the coffee, theirs will be a fight over the phone with the cereal.
Children don't do what they're told, they do what they see. One breakfast with you actually present beats three rules stuck on the fridge.
The routine, window by window
This is how a normal term-time day looks. The third column is the one that decides the other two.
| Window | Their routine | Yours (the one that counts) |
|---|---|---|
| Morning | The phone isn't touched until they're out of the door; breakfast, clothes and bag come first | Breakfast with no scroll: email and the news can wait until they've left |
| School hours | The school covers it: the phone doesn't come into the classroom | Your focused hours at work are your version of the classroom rule |
| Homework | Homework with the phone outside the room, break afterwards | Don't supervise homework with your phone in your hand |
| Dinner | The table is a phone-free zone, every day | Yours goes in the drawer first, with no "it's work" exceptions |
| Night | Phones sleep outside the bedrooms | Yours charges in the living room too; the new alarm is an alarm clock |
Three quick notes, because every window has its trap:
Homework time is where most of it is lost. You don't need to stand guard: it's enough that the phone isn't in the same room as the books, because its presence alone splits attention. How to set that hour up without becoming a police officer is the whole of building a homework routine that holds.
Dinner is the highest-yield window of the lot: it's the only stretch of the day when you're all in one place, and a single phone on the table ruins it. Including yours. Especially yours.
Night is the window that decides how the next day starts. Paediatricians ask directly for screens to stay out of bedrooms. If your child is old enough to be keeping the phone in there "for the alarm", you have the problem known as vamping, and that one doesn't take improvising: the why and the how are in why your teenager isn't sleeping.
Make room for screen-free time as a family, and start with the two obvious zones: bedrooms and mealtimes, especially the hour before bed.
American Academy of Pediatrics.Why routines like this die six weeks in
Because they rest on whatever willingness is going that day: every afternoon and every night, somebody has to enforce them, and by the second week of term nobody has it in them.
Week one goes well. Everything is new, there's energy, even the kids play along. The problem shows up on an ordinary Tuesday: homework drags, you come home wrecked, and at half nine it's time for the nightly negotiation. "Five more minutes." "I need it for something for school." And your own thumb, which has also had a long day, opens Instagram by itself while you decide whether to hold the line.
It isn't a character flaw, not yours and not your child's. Every app on that screen is built by entire teams to hold attention as long as possible. Against that, a rule that depends on the mood available at half nine loses every time. You don't need more discipline or better speeches. You need the routine to stop depending on somebody defending it each night.
The routine you don't renegotiate every night
The half-nine negotiation disappears because there's nothing left to negotiate with you: the "no" belongs to the rule, not to the parent.
This is where the Monk comes in, and it fits because it does exactly that: it takes the routine out of the hands of the day's mood and hands it to an object.
The Monk is a physical device the size of an AirTag, magnetic, no battery, that shuts the apps you choose on an iPhone. For term time, the key piece is scheduled sessions: at homework time a session starts and the distracting apps close on their own; at dinner time another one; at night, another. And here's the difference from any start-of-term resolution — to get back into a blocked app, somebody has to scan the physical Monk. Always. No soft unlock, no code to guess, no "go on then, just tonight". The app holds three emergency unlocks for genuine emergencies, and they're finite.
Look at what changes. The night session starts and the apps close without anyone having to go and ask for the phone. In the morning they're still closed, so breakfast without a scroll isn't a promise: it's the default state, and it ends when you decide to scan, on the way out of the door for instance. The half-nine negotiation disappears because there's nothing left to negotiate with you: the "no" belongs to the rule, not to the parent. And if the Monk lives stuck to the fridge, getting up to scan it is exactly the friction that gives anyone — you included — time to think "actually, I don't need this".
Let's be honest, because this blog doesn't sell magic: on iOS there is no block that can't be worked around. What the Monk kills is the automatic gesture, the unlocking you never decided to do, which is the one that eats breakfast, homework and dinner. And that's enough for the routine to still be alive in March.
What the Monk is, and how it builds your routine in 3 steps
The Monk isn't another screen time app: the solution can't live inside the problem. It's an object that stays in your kitchen and holds the rule up when willingness runs out. It works on iPhone only (iOS 16.2 or later, iPhone XS onwards): there is no Android version, and it does not work on an iPad. And for children it isn't surveillance: it doesn't spy, doesn't read messages, doesn't track. The point isn't to take the phone away, it's to teach them to put it down, under the same rule you follow.
Setting the term routine up takes ten minutes:
- You each pick your apps. Everyone marks the ones that eat their time on their own iPhone: social, video, games. Calls and texts are always outside the block.
- You schedule the sessions on the routine you already agreed. Homework time, dinner time, bedtime: the session starts and those apps close by themselves.
- To get back in, somebody scans the Monk. When the work is done, when dinner ends, when you decide. The gesture is the same for the child and for the parent, and that's what makes it a house rule instead of a punishment.
If your child has an iPhone, you can also switch on a remote block that only opens by scanning the Monk that stays at home. But the order matters: live it yourself first, let them try it, let them make it theirs. One thing to know before you order: Monk currently ships within Spain, and you can join the list for the UK and the rest of the EU. It's €54.95, one payment, no subscription, with 30-day returns.
Frequently asked questions
What if my child needs the phone to tell me they're out of school?
They can, always. The Monk blocks the apps you both choose (social, games, video), but calls and texts work at all times, and so does the camera. The routine doesn't cut them off: it leaves them without TikTok during homework, which is a different thing. For anything that matters, you're still one call away.
Isn't this just parental control under another name?
No. Parental control watches from the outside: it tracks, it reads, it restricts quietly. The Monk sees nothing your child does, and it works the same way on every phone in the house, yours included. The rule isn't "I'm watching you", it's "in this house the phone rests at these hours". That difference is what stops them spending the whole term hunting for the back door.
What do we do with the routine at weekends?
Loosen it without dropping it. Moving the sessions later or releasing a window makes sense, but keep two floors under it: the table stays a phone-free zone, and phones still sleep outside the bedrooms. What breaks a habit isn't a flexible Saturday, it's having to start from zero on Monday.
What if my child has an Android?
The Monk works only on iPhone, and there is no Android version — no date, nothing we can promise you. But the routine in this article works with any phone: the windows, the table, charging outside the bedroom. And the piece that counts for most you can set up right now — yours. A parent who puts the phone down at breakfast teaches from any operating system.
Sources
- American Academy of Pediatrics. Helping kids thrive in a digital world: AAP policy explained.
- Pew Research Center (2024). Teens, Social Media and Technology.
- Ofcom (2025). How the UK goes online.
- Department for Education. Mobile phones in schools (England).
The bags are already by the door. Leave a place there for the phones to rest
The start of term gives you something no other week does: the whole family changing habits at the same time. You can spend it on another round of rules that arrive at half term exhausted, or you can build a routine that doesn't depend on defending it every night.
Start the term in peaceNo surveillance · No codes to guess · Calls always work
