School Required Tech Does Not Mean Unrestricted Tech

Hey Mama~

Your child likely needs a computer or tablet for homework. It's basically unavoidable. And tech is NOT all bad. Kids don't get addicted to Microsoft Word or Excel. But school required tech shouldn't mean unrestricted access to the entire internet.

Nobody likes homework battles, so let's set you and your kiddo up for success this school year. If homework feels like it's taking longer than it should, you're not imagining it. An assignment that could take 45 minutes stretches to two hours, because it's being done on a device built to pull attention away from whatever your kid is trying to do on it.

That screen holds the assignment. It also holds the group chat, the game, the video, and one more tab tempting your child and luring them in.

We are asking a brain that is still building impulse control to sit inside a slot machine and do algebra.

The Part That Should Get Your Attention

The OECD released the PISA 2025 results this week. More than 760,000 fifteen-year-olds across 91 countries.

Across developed countries, reading scores have fallen 28 points in a decade. By the OECD's own measure, close to a year and a half of learning, gone. And it's speeding up.

Two out of three American students say they get distracted by digital devices in class.

But here's the part that matters tonight: kids on leisure screens more than five hours a day scored roughly 80 points below kids who kept it under an hour. Kids who used devices moderately, for actual schoolwork, did fine.

The laptop isn't the enemy. The unguarded laptop is. And guarding it is where YOU come in.

Homework Rule 1: Where

Any schoolwork that requires an internet-connected device happens in a shared space. The kitchen table, the dining room, the family room. Never a bedroom, never behind a closed door. Reading a book or doing a worksheet in their room is fine. It's the digital device that stays in common areas.

You don't have to stand over their shoulder. You just have to be close enough to matter. An adult who could walk by at any moment is usually enough to keep a kid on task.

And the personal phone goes in another room. Not face down, not silenced. Another room. In the Brain Drain research, simply having a phone on the desk, even powered off, measurably reduced working memory. The solution isn't willpower. It's distance.

Homework Rule 2: What

A mom recently told me she couldn't run a simple errand without a knot in her stomach. She had caught her middle schooler on pornography once, and every time she left the house while he sat doing homework, she wondered.

She had no idea there was a simple fix. Most parents don't, and this is the one I most want you to know about: a filtered internet router.

Your router is the most important digital device in your home, because every digital device your family owns passes through it. A filtered router blocks entire categories of content before they ever reach your child's screen, lets you shut off your kid’s internet with one tap while yours stays on, and turns their access off automatically at bedtime.

So when I run to the grocery store and my boys are on their laptops at the kitchen table, I know that violent content, adult content, games, and social media cannot reach them. Not because I'm hovering. Because the content is blocked on their devices.

Two I recommend, and I have no financial incentive here, just good products: Gryphon, built from the ground up for filtering content on your kid's device, and Eero, which many families already own to extend their WiFi without realizing it can also filter content. Check your own router before you buy anything. You may already have what you need. If you do nothing else except add a filtered router, you’re doing a lot to protect your kids. Remember you’re child doesn’t need to go looking for inappropriate content—nowadays it finds them.

And don't assume a school-issued device has it covered. Filters get circumvented, extensions get downloaded, and the pull of what's available is stronger than a twelve-year-old's impulse control. The filter you control is the one that holds.

Try This Week

Check your router tonight and see what it can already do. That's the whole assignment.

None of this is helicopter parenting. Seeing extreme things too young isn't just upsetting for a child. It changes how they feel about themselves and the world around them, it also impacts how they approach relationships. We can't protect them from everything forever. But we can keep it away while their brain is still under construction.

It's not about controlling. It's about protecting. And that's our job.

Coming next week: the other half. The best approach for when homework should happen, a timer trick that ends the two-hour slog, and what the brand new data says about AI and your kid's schoolwork. We’re all in this together. 

You've got this~

Dr. Carrie

P.S. Do you have a filter on your home internet? Hit reply and tell me yes or no. I'm curious how many of us have this in place, and I'll share what I hear.