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Max Hartman
Cover of Screen-Proof Family by Max Hartman

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Screen-Proof Family

The Digital Parenting Guide — From First Phone to AI Safety, Age by Age

A guide to raising kids through phones, social media and AI. The wager of the book: your relationship with your kid does more to protect them than any screen-time limit.

$6.99 $2.99 on Kindle

216 pages · Published May 25, 2026

Your 8-year-old wants a tablet. Your 11-year-old wants a phone. Your 14-year-old is on three apps you've never heard of — one of them an AI chatbot that talks back.

It runs on habits and on how you set up the house. Lists of bans break the day your kid finds the workaround. What holds up is smaller and duller: who charges their phone where, what happens at the dinner table, what you say the first time they show you something that scared them. That part outlasts whichever app is in the news.

What makes it different

  • An age-by-age plan: what to introduce and what to hold back at each stage, with the milestones and the red flags to watch for.
  • Habits that don't depend on which app is popular this year, so they still work after you switch phones or the school changes its rules.
  • Word-for-word scripts for the hard talks: first phones, social media, cyberbullying, online predators, AI chatbot dependency, and the 'everyone else has it' one.
  • A Parental Controls field guide — router-level, device-level and monitoring tools, organised by age.
  • Neurodivergence runs through every chapter, because ADHD, autism and screens don't behave the way generic advice assumes.

What’s inside

Named systems, and what each does.

  • The Family Tech Contract

    An agreement you write with your kid and both sign, with templates for every stage and a schedule to revisit it.

  • The 30-Day Phone Rollout

    A day-by-day plan for your child's first smartphone, plus a 30-Day Reset if you're catching up.

  • The Family Safe Word

    One low-tech rule that defends against AI voice-cloning and deepfake emergency scams.

  • The Mirror Check

    The uncomfortable research, turned into a habit: the strongest predictor of your kid's screen use is yours.

  • The AI Pause

    A reflex for chatbots, AI overviews and deepfakes: stop and ask, “how would I check this?”

Who it’s for

For parents and guardians of kids 0 to 18, plus grandparents, pediatricians, teachers and counsellors. First tablet still in the box, or a phone already under the pillow? Start at the chapter for the age you've got.

Get the book

Available in several formats. Read it wherever you like.

$6.99 $2.99 on Kindle

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