The Screen Glow

Daily Inspiration

It was quiet in the house that night. The kitchen light buzzed, and the soft hum of the fridge broke the silence. I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open. The news headline caught me like a hook in the ribs.

“Surgeon General Warns: Social Media Damaging to Teen Mental Health.”

I stopped scrolling.

Twenty years. That’s how long I had been carrying the weight of a conversation from a kitchen like this one, different house, same ache.

My son was seven. I remember the game—soldiers, guns, explosions. A screen full of bodies. He played it like it was nothing. Joy on his face, the kind that’s usually meant for birthdays or snow days. But this was different. I watched him press the buttons, watched the avatars fall.

He didn’t flinch.

I said, “He shouldn’t be playing that.”

His mother barely looked up from her phone. “He likes it.”

“He’s killing people.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re being overdramatic.”

Maybe I was. Or maybe I just knew the difference between pretend and numb. He was seven. Seven-year-olds should be building Lego forts, not simulating war.

I brought it up again. She dismissed it again.

“It’s just a game,” she said. “Everyone plays it.”

That was the defense. Everyone plays it.

I didn’t win that fight. I didn’t win many, back then. I had my days—every other weekend, some holidays—and I tried to limit things. Turn off the Wi-Fi. Collect the phones during dinner. Set timers. But it was a losing battle.

At their mother’s house, there were no rules. Phones in bed, games until midnight, YouTube at breakfast. She said it made them happy. I said it made them hollow.

They always chose her way. Of course they did.

I became the mean one. The one who took the phone away. The one who said, “Enough screen time.” The one who made them come outside, made them talk, made them feel the silence of being off the grid.

They looked at me like I was punishing them.

And maybe I was.

Maybe I was punishing them for needing me less and needing that screen more.

I sat there tonight staring at the screen, that old glow. It said what I’d always feared. That children can’t handle what the screen gives them. That it changes their brain. That it teaches them to be empty, to compare, to crave, to never rest.

It said that depression was rising. That girls were starving themselves. That sleep was lost. That suicide had been typed into the search bar too many times by kids too young to spell it right.

It said the brain between ten and nineteen is vulnerable. That’s when my daughter got her phone. Eleven. Her mother bought it. Said she needed it for school. I said she needed it like a fish needs a bicycle.

But it was done.

She got on Instagram. Then TikTok. Then Snapchat. Then silence.

When she visited me, she stayed in her room. The phone was her window. I stood at the door sometimes and asked about her day. She said “fine” without looking up. Her thumbs moved fast. Her eyes didn’t.

Once, I asked what she was watching. She shrugged.

“Nothing.”

But her face had gone pale. I remember that. I remember thinking, whatever it is, it’s not nothing.

There were moments. Bright ones. Like the time she left the phone downstairs by accident. We played cards. She smiled. I saw my little girl again, for a moment, before she remembered the screen and went running back to it like an addict who’d misplaced the bottle.

And I wondered if I had failed her. Or if I’d simply been too late.

---

Discover the heartfelt stories of John Rinaldo—author of Remi’s Journey, Rediscovering Vancouver, and Dancing Letters. Each book inspires hope, healing, and wonder. Available now on Amazon.

---

They’re grown now. My son is a man. He doesn’t talk much. Always on the move. He’s quiet at holidays. Doesn’t stay long. I don’t know if it was the games or the divorce or just life, but I see a distance in him. A coldness I never taught him.

My daughter is softer. She texts me sometimes. I cherish those. When she posts something about mental health, I pause. I wonder what she’s not saying. I wonder what she found in those early years that she never told me about.

They had the internet before they had a father who could stop it.

The article from Yale said teens need limits. That parents should talk. That phones should stay out of bedrooms. That children need to sleep, not scroll. That watching too much war or beauty or sadness warps a child’s sense of the world.

It said everything I tried to say twenty years ago.

I stared at the screen and felt a strange kind of grief.

Not just for my kids, but for all the fathers who tried.

Who were called old-fashioned. Overreacting. Controlling.

We weren’t perfect. But we saw it. We felt it in our bones.

There’s a loneliness in watching your child fade into a device. A kind of slow death you can’t mourn out loud. No one brings casseroles when your son stops speaking. No one sends flowers when your daughter stops laughing.

But you feel it. Every time they visit and stay behind a screen. Every time they forget how to sit in silence or walk without music. Every time they scroll through life instead of living it.

That’s what this story is.

Not an answer.

Just a remembrance.

Of a man who tried.

Of a time when we didn’t yet have the proof but still felt the cost.

I closed the laptop. Stared at the blank table.

It was too late to save those moments. But not too late to remember them.

Not too late to tell another parent: You’re not crazy. Trust your gut.

Not too late to sit with a child, even if they don’t look up. Just sit. Just wait.

One day, maybe, they’ll put the phone down.

Maybe they’ll ask you a question.

Maybe they’ll remember the time you were the only one who said no.

And maybe they’ll understand.

Until then, I’ll be here.

In the quiet.

With the hum of the fridge.

And the memory of what I tried to do, back when no one believed it mattered.

---

Subscribe to The Positive Pen on Substack for daily reflections and uplifting tales that brighten your week.

---

Inspiration for This Story.

Inspired by a recent Yale Medicine study on how social media affects teen mental health, I felt compelled to share my own experience as a parent. Years ago, I struggled to set boundaries while my children were given unrestricted access to violent games and the internet by their other parent. I was labeled the “mean one” for expressing concern, but now, two decades later, research confirms what I feared—early and excessive tech exposure can deeply harm developing minds. This study validated my past worries and reminded me that, even when our voices aren’t heard, the truth often emerges with time.

—John Rinaldo

How Social Media Affects Your Teen’s Mental Health: A Parent’s Guide

Source: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide

---