We forgot the cable. Three weeks later, the phone was at 40%.

I promised the cable story in Edition 11. Here it is.

At Christmas we went to stay with my parents for ten days. On the second day I realised I had left my son's tablet charger at home. The tablet had about sixty percent battery. We were three hours from Barcelona in a village with one small shop that sold neither chargers nor anything we actually needed.

I made a decision without quite deciding it: I would not tell him about the charger. I would say nothing, ration the tablet use naturally by not offering it, and see what happened.

What happened: he used the tablet for about forty minutes the first evening. The next morning he asked for it and I said sure, go ahead. He used it for about twenty minutes and then put it down and went outside. The pattern continued. Not because I restricted it — because nothing was recharging it, and he began, gradually, without knowing why, to ration it himself.

By day five he was checking the battery percentage before using it. By day eight he was asking me if we could 'save it for later' — meaning for the journey home. The tablet finished the holiday at forty percent.

The key detail: he never asked where the charger was. I expected him to. He didn't. He just adapted to the condition he found himself in, without knowing what had created it. The adaptation was the interesting part — not the result, but the process. He noticed feedback and responded to it without an adult directing the response. He still does.

What I find most interesting about the cable incident is not what it says about screens. It's what it says about scarcity and self-regulation.

Children — people — are actually quite good at managing scarce resources when they experience the scarcity directly. My son didn't know the charger was missing. He only knew that the battery was going down and not coming back up. He responded to that information by adjusting his behaviour. He rationed. He planned. He thought ahead.

The infinite recharge removes this. When the device is always fully charged, there is never a reason to think about conservation. The abundance removes the feedback loop that makes self-regulation possible.

I'm not suggesting you hide your children's chargers. This is not a strategy I'm recommending, partly because it relies on deception and partly because it doesn't scale. But the cable incident taught me something that I've been trying to replicate since: the goal isn't to restrict screen time from outside. The goal is to create conditions where children develop their own relationship with it.

That relationship requires feedback. The battery percentage was feedback. The infinite scroll gives none.

This is the twelfth edition of WiseTip. Thank you for reading it. We're nearly three months in. We'll see what the summer brings.

This has stayed with me since the cable holiday because I think it describes something important about how self-regulation actually develops — and it's not through rules.

Rules are external. Someone decides on the rule, applies the rule, enforces the rule. The child's relationship to the rule is compliance or non-compliance. Neither of those is self-regulation. Self-regulation is when the child has internalised the feedback loop and is responding to it themselves.

My son, rationing the battery, was self-regulating. He didn't know he was. He was just responding to the situation he was in. But the skill he was practicing — noticing a constraint, adjusting behaviour, planning ahead — is exactly the skill that makes self-regulation possible.

This is the twelfth edition. Thank you for continuing to read. I'll keep going if you will.

Does your child currently have any direct feedback about their own screen use — time elapsed, battery consumed, anything that makes the use visible to them?

Or does the device manage all of that invisibly, leaving the child with no signal about how much they've used?

This week: turn on screen time reporting for your child's device and show them the weekly report together — without commentary. Just the number. Let them react first.

We bought a charger at a supermarket on the way home. My son plugged in the tablet immediately and watched it charge to 100% with a satisfaction that I found completely understandable. The holiday was over. The scarcity was over. Normal conditions resumed. See you next week.

Names of people and brands in these editions are changed. Whoever was there and reads this knows what we are talking about.