Parenting & Habits

Every worried parent knows the scene: your child is glued to the screen, and you're plotting how to pry it away. In most middle-class Pakistani homes, this usually ends the same way — the phone is snatched, a lecture follows, and the child is called nikamma or told they're wasting their life on a screen. It comes from love and fear, but it teaches the child only one thing: that the phone is forbidden and that they are somehow failing us.

There is a gentler, more effective way. What if the phone isn't the enemy, but the most patient tutor you never hired? Instead of confiscating it, we can redirect it — the device stays in their hands, and what changes is the question we hand them along with it.

Start small, start real

Start with things our own parents would recognise as useful. Ask your child to find the best-rated restaurant nearby and read out two reviews before you decide where to eat. Ask them to compare two microphones and explain which one reviewers rate higher and why. Ask them to look up the side effects of a medicine you've been prescribed, or whether today is the day to pick the olives, or if the fruit needs another week on the tree. Ask how long a particular vegetable should be steamed so it doesn't turn mushy.

None of this feels like homework to a child. It feels like being trusted with something that matters to the family — and that is exactly why it works. Each of these small, ordinary requests is a lesson in research, comparison, and judgment, folded quietly into everyday life.

Replace the taunt with a task, and the lecture with a little trust.

Then raise the stakes

Once this becomes a habit, give both siblings a joint task: find a film the whole family will enjoy this weekend. Let them read plots and reviews, weigh one director's work against another's, argue their case to each other, and land on a shortlist together. Do the same with a family trip — routes, hotels, the one attraction actually worth the detour. This is not simply outsourcing chores. It is teaching children to gather evidence, weigh options, disagree respectfully, and arrive at a decision together — the same values of patience, fairness, and give-and-take we try to instill at the dinner table, now practiced through a screen instead of despite it.

The same idea, at Athens Academy

This is exactly the philosophy behind how we approach technology at Athens Academy in Islamabad. We don't treat the phone or laptop as a distraction to be managed, but as a tool to be trained well. Students work through interactive quizzes and flashcards, build genuinely useful notes instead of copying someone else's, and are measured against their own past performance rather than their classmates — this week's effort against last week's, never child against child. The same principle carries over at home: correcting pronunciation on a language app, listening to a podcast on business or adventure, following an argument they actually care about. None of it is dressed up as learning, and that is precisely why it sticks.

So the next time that familiar worry rises as you watch your child scroll, resist the urge to snatch the phone and reach instead for a question. You will likely see something shift — a child who lights up because, for once, the phone earned them a word of appreciation instead of a scolding. Repeated evening after evening, this small change in tone is how a child glued to a screen quietly becomes a resourceful one you're proud to have raised. That hope, grounded in the everyday values of a good middle-class upbringing, will carry you further than any rule or restriction ever could.