One of my main goals when meeting with parents is to help them navigate screen time issues with their kids. But I often meet parents who come to these meetings because they want help with their own screen time habits.
We’ve written before about how screen-free mornings can set up kids for a better day at school. But the truth is, a screen-free morning could set your entire family up for a better day.
Today I’ll share how, and…
Why morning routines matter (and why screens are the #1 way to screw them up)
How your own stress management might be connected to your family’s digital wellbeing
Let’s dive in.
Screen-Free Mornings Aren't Just for Kids (But The Parent Version Looks Different)
Studies suggest that kids who avoid screens first thing in the morning actually perform better academically.
Some debate these claims. But it’s not hard to imagine how a technology that discourages users from focusing on anything for longer than a minute or two (max) could have a negative impact on academics. And entering the day without the neuro-chemical bombardments that come from checking social media can help you enter it more intentionally, too.
It brings up a question: if screen-free mornings are good for kids, is it possible that would help us as adults, too?
Long before morning routines and lifehacking had become a cultural obsession, a man named Hal Elrod wrote a book called The Miracle Morning. In that book, he argued that:
“How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life. Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days—which inevitably create a successful life—in the same way that unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive, and mediocre days, and ultimately a mediocre quality of life.”
There’s a lot that Elrod recommends in the book that we don’t have space to get into. But the point of this quote is clearly true: morning routines set the trajectory for the rest of our days—and through that, the rest of our lives.
But not only that. For those of us who have kids at home, the morning can be an important time to connect with them (however briefly) before they go to school.
Easier said than done, though, right?
Are Screen Free Mornings Even Possible For Parents?
Mornings are chaotic, and a good chunk of that chaos isn't optional. Someone has to check the schedule to know if school sent a last-minute text about a bus route change, or if a meeting got moved up an hour, or if soccer practice got cancelled and changed the whole pick up routine.
Parents have 100s of good reasons to check their phones in the morning. The problem is what happens when you go to check.
You pick up your phone to check what time practice starts, so you and your spouse can coordinate pickup. Simple task, right? Except somehow your thumb finds Instagram out of pure muscle memory. Or an email notification stacks on top of the calendar app. Or you remember something you needed to add to the grocery order, and now you're online shopping for something else entirely.
What should have taken 30 seconds turns into ten minutes lost to a phone trance.
None of that makes you a bad parent. You’re just holding a device that was designed to do exactly that.
And we’re not just losing 10 minutes. It snowballs from there:
We start the day reactive instead of intentional and walk into breakfast already scattered.
We end up scrambling to get out the door on time, and the first thing our kids hear from us is frustration.
And our kids watch us do the exact thing we're trying to teach them not to do.
So how can we as parents avoid the phone trance and have lower stress mornings for ourselves and our kids?
I’m by no means perfect at this, but here are a few practical things I’m trying:
Get up before the kids: This is the single most effective thing I've seen work for parents wanting a lower-stress morning. Ten or fifteen quiet minutes before the house wakes up means you're not reacting to the first demand of the day. If you genuinely can't get yourself out of bed before your kids, don't just blame the alarm. Look at what happened the night before. More often than not, it's a screen that kept you up later than you meant to, and that's what needs fixed.
If you need to check, leave the room: Two reasons. First, my kids don't see me on my phone. They can't tell the difference between me checking a calendar change and me scrolling. To them it's just Dad on his phone again. Second, leaving the room turns the check into a task with a clear start and end, instead of something I do standing in the kitchen while everyone else's morning happens around me. Physically leaving the room I was in and then re-entering it creates a mental cue for me to re-engage the routine I'm trying to build with my own kids.
Mornings look totally different household to household based on kids’ ages, work set ups, etc. So this will look different for you. But fighting for a lower stress morning is worth it, and screens have a unique way of messing that up.
I’d love to hear how you’re going about this. Reply and share your tips!
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