Parenting Tip: Phone-Free Meals
For her Youth Advisory Panel project this summer, Kigumi Summer Associate Varsha, a freshman studying computer science in the US, decided to focus on documenting ways to reduce phone use during in-person interactions, particularly in family and social settings. Using survey data from youth in the US, she’s designing practical, behavior-based interventions that help people intentionally disconnect from devices.
One of the key concepts that’s coming up amongst her peers are variations on a “phone parking lot”: a structured, agreed-upon system within a family or in a group of friends where devices are placed in a designated area during meals to reduce distraction.
How to Make a Phone Parking Lot
Leaving phones in another room during meals
Creating a designated “parking” space for devices before eating
Putting all phones together (e.g., in one person’s purse) during social outings
Agreeing as a group to delay checking phones until after the interaction
Another set of suggestions were related to accountability: not just placing your phones far away, but also using gentle peer pressure to check each other’s reflexive behavior to reach for phones. Some suggestions that Varsha gathered from her peers who do this with their own families and friend groups:
Asking people to state why they need to check their phone so that other people can push back gently or check the thinking (“Is it really going to make a difference if you wait 20 mins to check your email?”)
Using a physical timer + consequences (for example, assign a chore if the rules are broken)
Turning it into a game (for example, stack your phones in the middle of the table in a tower and the first person to touch your phone has to pay for dinner)
Varsha’s Family Tech Rules
Setting clear boundaries for where tech is and isn’t allowed in the house
Varsha describes growing up in a household where her parents intentionally structured physical space to support device-free interaction. Rather than enforcing rules at the moment of use, her parents created a system early on in her and her brother’s pre-teen years where devices stayed upstairs, and common areas, especially during meals, were implicitly reserved for connection. As she explains:
Whenever I go downstairs at home, I actually leave my laptop, iPad and phone in my room [like my mom taught us growing up]. So it’s not even with me downstairs [in the living room or dining rooms]. So we’re kind of obligated to interact with each other.
Although she notes that her younger brother got his first phone and laptop earlier in middle school than she did due to COVID (and that this makes a difference in the way they each interact with technology), this family rule of not bringing devices into shared spaces made device-free behavior feel natural and habitual, rather than restrictive.
Over time, it became instinctive for her to disconnect during shared family time.
What Were the Benefits of Phone-Free Meals?
Varsha highlights several meaningful benefits of growing up with this parental rule:
More focused presence: “It’s a lot easier to stay off your phone when you’re actively doing something else… it makes me pay more attention to what I’m doing and what’s around me, like I can actually focus on holding the piece of bread in my hand and know that I’m eating it.”
Stronger communication and openness: “It’s easier to say whatever I need to say [without phones around]… a lot of important conversations have actually taken place at the dinner table.”
Deeper family connection in busy lives: “We’re all so busy… so [eating time is] kind of our time to sit down and talk as a family.”
