Bedtime Without Screens: The Sunset Protocol
The Monday morning my eleven-year-old son Ethan refused to get out of bed for school, crying with fatigue and dragging his feet as if he were carrying a physical weight, I knew our evening routine was failing. He had spent the previous night with his tablet hidden under his blankets, chatting with friends and watching video clips until past midnight. The resulting morning was a battlefield of emotional reactivity: he snapped at his sister, spilled his cereal, and complained of a headache before we even reached the car. I realized that our attempts to manage his screen time during the day were completely undermined by the absence of boundaries around his device at night. His bedroom had transformed from a place of rest into a 24-hour digital arcade, and his brain was paying the price in lost sleep and chronic fatigue. ...