Screens, Balance and the Halloween Party

Guest Authors: Steve Shepherd and Samantha Meghawry

Book five, Bewitched by Screens, is the odd one out in the series. There's no stranger, no hack, no photo shared without permission. The risk in this book is simply too much time on a screen, and the story turns on a Halloween party Fizz very nearly misses because she can't put her tablet down. Even Mum has to model putting her own phone away, which was a deliberate choice on our part. Screen balance isn't a lesson you can hand a child while ignoring it yourself.

This is where emotional resilience does its work: recognising the feeling of not wanting to stop, understanding why that feeling is normal rather than something to be ashamed of, and building the confidence to choose the party over the screen anyway.

We suspect this is the book that lands closest to home for a lot of people reading this on Amigos Network. An always-on culture isn't unique to young children with tablets. It's notifications at 11pm, a laptop that never quite closes, the low hum of feeling like you should be checking something. If anything, the adults in cyber security and tech are living the more extreme version of what Fizz is learning to manage in miniature.

We don't have a tidy answer for the adult version, and we're not sure anyone fully does yet. But watching a young child learn to notice the pull of a screen, name it, and choose something else instead, is as good a starting point as any we've found.