Phone-Free Evenings

A 21-day plan for parents of school-age kids to park the phones after dinner and get bedtime back.

Evenings are a scroll pile: dinner, homework, and bedtime keep losing to phones, including yours. This is not a culture manifesto and not an adult digital-detox memoir. It is an evening install for the hours after 5pm.

Short paragraphs. Scripts you can say once. Cards you can tape by a bowl. Composite school-night houses, not portraits. A bowl is a bowl. No gadget brand as a cure.

What you actually get:
• Night-one forty minutes: bowl, station, one clock, three promises you will not make
• If you only have tonight: four moves and stop
• The 21-day shape from audit to a one-page house rule
• A 48-hour map of where every phone goes, including the parent phones
• A visible bowl after dinner and charging in a hall or kitchen, not a bedroom
• Parents first: the sequence the kids can see
• Dinner without a screen as the centerpiece, plus photo and work-ping scripts
• Homework hour with a lid-down time and no YouTube as the open tutor
• Park time as a clock, and a house definition of "off"
• Bedtime with the charger already out of the room
• Pushback lines for guests, carpool, two homes, and the kid who bargains
• Named exceptions so every night is not a hearing
• Day 21 closeout page, calendar, copy-ready scripts, two-home card

This is not medical advice, therapy, or a treatment for insomnia, anxiety, ADHD, or "addiction." It will not tell you to ignore a court order, a custody agreement, or a school's required device. It does not promise grades, mental health, or a closer family in 21 days. It will not coach hidden tracking apps or sell a branded dock as the plan. If a child is in crisis, get local professional help. A stricter bowl is not a crisis plan.

Put a bowl where you rinse plates. Put your phone in first. Set a number. The rest of the book is how not to turn the next twenty nights into a debate series.

Forthcoming tools from THE PHONE BOWL PRESS: a homework-lid card, and a two-home evening card.