What to do first

You’ve decided something is wrong. Here’s the order that tends to work.

1. This week: book a doctor’s appointment

Your pediatrician or family doctor is the right first call, and most parents skip them because it doesn’t feel like a medical problem.

They can check the things that produce identical symptoms and have nothing to do with a phone — thyroid, iron, sleep disorders, and more besides. They can assess mood and anxiety. They can refer, and a referral moves faster than a cold search for a therapist.

You can call and describe what you’ve seen before bringing your child in. That is a normal thing to do and most practices expect it.

2. Write down what you’ve seen

Before the appointment. Dates, what changed, what you noticed, in what order. Half a page is enough.

This is more useful than it sounds. Under time pressure in a consulting room, parents reliably forget the specific thing that worried them most and describe a general anxiety instead. A written note gets you a better ten minutes.

3. Tell the school

The school counselor sees your child in a setting you don’t and may already have noticed something. They can also flag it to teachers, quietly, so that a kid having a bad month isn’t disciplined for it.

This costs one email. The school counselor route.

4. Change one thing at home, not five

If sleep is the problem, the phone charging outside the bedroom is the single highest-value change available and it doesn’t require anyone to agree that there’s a problem.

Do one thing. Five changes at once reads as punishment, and it usually is one, whatever the intention.

5. Then look at what treatment involves

Once a doctor is engaged, the help section covers finding a therapist, what the credentials mean, what insurance covers, what things cost, and which options are free.

What not to do first

Don’t take the phone away as an opening move. If social media is genuinely central to a young person’s life, removing it without warning removes their entire social world in an afternoon, at the moment they’re least resourced to cope. There may come a point for it. It is not the first move, and it should never be the first move on the day you find something.

Don’t search their room. It rarely finds anything the phone didn’t, and it costs more.

Don’t open with screen time. It’s the conversation they expect and have already rehearsed. Ask about sleep instead.

Don’t tell them what’s wrong with them. “You’re addicted to that thing” ends the conversation and isn’t a diagnosis anyone can give.

Don’t post about it. Parents sometimes seek support in local Facebook groups. Your teenager will find out. It is a very hard thing to recover from.

If it’s urgent rather than serious

Serious and urgent aren’t the same thing, and the difference decides whether this list applies.

If your child has talked about not wanting to be alive, said people would be better off without them, given away things that matter to them, or if you’ve found evidence they’ve hurt themselves — this list doesn’t apply. Call or text 988 today. It’s free and it answers 24 hours a day. All crisis resources.

If you think a platform played a part

Some families reach a point where they want to know whether what happened to their child involved something a company did — a design choice, a recommendation system, an account that shouldn’t have existed.

That’s a separate question from getting your child care, and it should come second. Thousands of families have brought claims against social media companies, consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation and in California state court, and the first cases have begun reaching trial. Whether any individual family has a claim depends on facts a webpage cannot assess.

If you want to understand how those claims work, the legal section explains the process, what has to be shown, what falls outside it, and the deadlines — which vary by state and by the age of the child.

One practical thing, whatever you decide: don’t delete anything. Messages, screenshots, account histories and app data can matter, and they are frequently gone by the time anyone asks for them.

Where most parents are a month from now

Usually: a doctor has been seen, the school knows, one thing has changed at home, and a therapist is either found or being looked for. That is a reasonable month and it is roughly the pace this actually moves at.

Finding help · All crisis resources