R RECLAIM

RECLAIM · A 7-Step Framework

Where Did My Child Go?

For parents whose kids are losing themselves to social media — by Mark Ingles, a father who built the systems that took them.

Take the 4-question quiz See the framework
"I spent the better part of my career on the other side of the screen. Not as a user but as an architect."

The honest version

This was not a parenting failure.

The smartest people on Earth — and I am not speaking loosely but literally — spent billions of dollars figuring out how to make your child unable to put their phone down. They hired neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists and machine learning engineers. They ran billions of experiments and built systems of extraordinary sophistication specifically designed to exploit the developing brain.

You raised a child, and then a system designed by the most well-funded engineers in human history ran a sustained campaign against their developing brain. The brain was not finished developing and was not designed to resist this particular kind of attack, and it lost ground.

That is what happened. It matters that you hear it, because everything that follows is built on the premise that you are not the problem and neither is your child.

Responsibility is not the same as fault. Fault looks backward. Responsibility looks forward. This book is entirely about looking forward.

The framework

RECLAIM is seven steps, in order.

Each step depends on the one before it. Skipping Connect to get to Limit is the most common mistake parents make — and the reason most attempts to fix this stall in the first month.

  1. R

    Recognize

    Name what you're looking at. Lying about phone time is the line — that's when this stopped being a screen-time problem.

  2. E

    Evaluate

    Build a profile of your specific child. The plan only works if it's calibrated to reality, not a general case.

  3. C

    Connect

    Repair the channel before you try to use it. Skipping this to get to Limit is the most common mistake parents make.

  4. L

    Limit

    Set the boundaries that actually hold. Not punishments — structural changes to how the device exists in your home.

  5. A

    Activate

    Fill the space you just opened. Limit alone creates a vacuum; Activate gives them something better to do with their hands and attention.

  6. I

    Include

    Pull in the people around you — co-parents, schools, other families — so your child isn't fighting the only household with rules.

  7. M

    Maintain

    Hold the gains. The platforms don't stop trying to win them back, and your plan needs to be a durable system, not a one-time push.

Read more about each step →

Who this is for

Three kinds of parents.

You have a diagnosis.

A professional has named it. You're past arguing about whether this is real and trying to figure out what to do on Monday. The framework starts working for you immediately.

You don't have a diagnosis — but you know.

You haven't gotten anyone to say it out loud, but you can feel it in your house. Chapter 1 gives you the language. Chapter 2 builds the profile.

You've already tried everything.

You took the phone away. You bought the parental controls. You had the talk. None of it worked, and you're not sure you trust that anything will. This book was written for you most of all.

A turning point

"The moment your child started lying about how much time they spend on their phone is the moment this stopped being a screen-time problem."

Kids lie about things that matter to them. Things they're afraid to lose. Things they can't imagine living without. The question most parents are really asking isn't is this a problem, it's am I allowed to call it what I think it is?

You are. Let's start there.

Find out where to start Read the introduction