The day I truly listened to my son about screen time — And it changed everything

We’ve all been there. The usual tug-of-war over screen time, the same old rules, the same old resistance. As a parent to a boy in the 7th standard, I’ve done it all — parental controls, timers, app locks. But it had started feeling less like guiding him and more like a game of who outsmarts whom.

Until one day, I decided to do something radical. I dropped my guard. I put aside the urge to teach, control, or even worry and simply chose to listen. Really listen.

My son has always considered me his safe space, someone he could talk to without fear. This time, I wanted to prove it. I told him I wasn’t there to argue or fix things, but to understand. Not just him, but his whole generation.

What followed was a conversation that opened my eyes in ways I didn’t expect.

He explained that while my generation is constantly learning to keep up with new technology, his generation was born into it. They don’t just use devices — they think in that language. They see patterns and nuances that come naturally because they’ve grown up with screens almost as extensions of themselves.

He gave me a simple but clever example. I’d installed parental control apps to limit his screen time, thinking I’d covered all bases. But he casually pointed out that just by changing the time zone on the device, he could reset the limits. A loophole I hadn’t even thought of.

Then he shared something that both impressed and troubled me. Back in 4th standard, his teacher had asked the class to explore a website for learning. The catch? The site required you to declare you were 13 or older to create an account. So, at age 9 or 10, the kids learned it was perfectly acceptable to fake their age to get in.

And what happens when you learn one trick? You apply it elsewhere. Many of his peers, he said, now have social media accounts despite being underage, simply by repeating the same little lie. “There are hardly any real checks,” he told me. “You just type an age, and you’re in.”

It hit me how incredibly easy it is for kids to slip into the vast world of the internet and how ill-prepared many systems are to genuinely protect them.

But it also struck me how deeply children of today understand this world. They learn by doing, by figuring things out on their own, by experimenting in ways we might never imagine. And if they don’t feel understood or heard in their offline world, the online one can become dangerously appealing.

That’s what scares me most. Not the cleverness or curiosity, those are strengths. But how vulnerable children can become if they lack a safe space to talk about what they’re exploring or struggling with.

Our conversation left me in awe of my son’s mind. It also left me with a renewed commitment: to stay curious about his world. To accept that this generation doesn’t just think differently, they live differently. And it’s on us, the parents, to approach them with a learner’s mindset.

We need to stop assuming we know what’s best simply because we’re older. Sometimes, the wisest thing we can do is pull up a chair next to them, listen without judgment, and let them teach us a thing or two.

Because in the end, the safest filter, the strongest firewall, and the best parental control will always be the relationship we build with them, one grounded in trust, curiosity, and open-hearted understanding.