Phone Rules: Five Simple Steps to Save Yourself, Your Family and the Planet

Award-winning investigative journalist Luc Rinaldi offers insights, inspiration and practical advice to reset our relationship with our phones so we can raise healthier and happier kids and re-engage with life.

Everyone knows it: humanity is hooked on smartphones. Worldwide, our chronic overuse of these devices is obliterating our ability to focus, polarizing our politics, flattening our culture, ravaging our well-being and turning us into a lonely, sedentary, sleep-deprived species. And yet we can’t imagine living without them. What are we to do?

Our usual tricks—the digital detoxes and app blockers and screen-time limits—aren’t working, and meaningful systemic change seems out of reach. Stymied by the scale of the problem, we begrudgingly allow our phones to distract us, delight us and pull us back in.

Rinaldi offers a path out of this paralysis. Beyond diagnosing our self-destructive relationship with our smartphones, he offers solutions for people perpetually tethered to their devices, parents rearing digital natives, children navigating their first phones and everyone in between. Rooted in fascinating research and sympathetic profiles, Phone Rules shows us not only what is at stake, but paints a picture of what we stand to regain.