Hey everyone. So I need some advice and I feel a little embarrassed even asking this but here goes.
I am a parent of three kids, ages 7, 11, and 14. My husband and I both work full time and by the time we get home, cook dinner, and sort out homework, we are already running on empty. The only time we actually sit together as a family is in the evenings, and even then everyone is just on their own device. My youngest is watching cartoons on the tablet, my middle one is gaming, my teenager is glued to TikTok, and honestly my husband and I are scrolling too.
I brought it up at dinner last Saturday and my 14 year old literally said “this is how we relax, why is it a problem” and I did not have a great answer for that. I do not want to be the parent who bans everything because that just creates sneaking around. But I also miss actual conversations. Like real ones. Where we look at each other.
Is anyone else dealing with this? What actually works in real life, not just what sounds good in theory?
Oh I feel this so much 
We went through the exact same thing about a year ago. What actually helped us was not taking screens away but replacing them with something worth showing up for. We started a weekly game night, nothing fancy, just Uno or a board game after dinner on Fridays. At first my kids acted like I had personally offended them by suggesting it. My son actually said “this is so boring” in the first five minutes. By week three he was asking if we could do it on Thursdays too lol.
The trick is you are not fighting screens, you are just giving everyone a better option. Screens will always win if the alternative is just sitting in silence staring at each other.
Not to be the one person who says the uncomfortable thing but your 14 year old kind of has a point 
Like, adults scroll, decompress, watch stuff. We just call it “unwinding” when we do it. When kids do it we call it a problem.
That said, I get what you are saying. There is a difference between everyone chilling in the same room vs actually being present with each other. What worked for us was making dinner itself the screen free zone. No phones at the table, not even ours. We use a little basket on the counter, everyone drops their phone in before we sit down. It sounds small but dinner became a real conversation again. My kids actually started telling me things about their day that I had no idea about before.
Auralyte makes a good point about dinner actually. We did something similar and it made a bigger difference than I expected.
But I want to add something that nobody talks about enough which is that you have to model it yourself first. Kids notice everything. If you are telling them to put the phone down while yours is face up on the table buzzing every five minutes, they will not take you seriously. I made that mistake for a long time. The moment my wife and I actually committed to no phones during family time, the whole energy in the house shifted. It was kind of embarrassing how quickly it worked.
Okay real talk, I tried the “no screens after 7pm” rule and it lasted exactly four days 
My teenager acted like I had cut off electricity to the whole house. Full meltdown. I gave up.
What I do now is way more chill. I started watching one show together with my kids on purpose. Like we picked something all three of us were interested in and we watch it together on the TV. No separate devices. We pause it constantly to comment and argue about what is happening and honestly those arguments became some of the best conversations we have had in years. Last week my 13 year old explained a whole plot theory to me and I was genuinely impressed. So sometimes the screen is not the enemy, it is just about whether you are sharing it or disappearing into your own little world with it.
Cynerion that show idea is genuinely good. We did that with a cooking competition show and now my daughter actually wants to try some of the recipes. So now we have a new thing where once a month we pick a recipe from the show and make it together. It has become this whole event.
For the original poster though, I think the key thing is not to make it feel like punishment. The second kids feel like you are taking something from them they dig in. Frame it as adding something, not removing. “Hey let us try this thing” lands way better than “put that down and come be a family.”
I am going to be straight with you. Screen time rules in a house with a 7 year old AND a 14 year old are nearly impossible to enforce equally because what works for one age group does not work for the other at all. The 7 year old still thinks mom and dad know everything. The 14 year old is going through a phase where everything you suggest is automatically uncool by definition.
So I would not try to fix everything at once. Pick one small thing. Maybe it is just the dinner table rule like Auralyte mentioned. Just that one thing. Once that becomes normal, add another. Trying to overhaul the whole family routine in one go will just start a war you do not need.
Can we also just acknowledge that some of this is seasonal? In summer we barely look at screens because the kids are outside all day. In winter everyone hibernates with their devices including me. I think expecting the same level of engagement year round is setting yourself up for unnecessary guilt.
That said, one thing that genuinely changed things in our house was giving the kids something to look forward to that has nothing to do with screens. We started doing a “Sunday special” which is just something slightly different, sometimes we go for a walk, sometimes we bake, once we built a blanket fort which sounds embarrassing but the kids talked about it for weeks. It does not have to be expensive or elaborate. You just need something that breaks the pattern.
I read through all these replies and I think Fluxorix and Tekvanta are both onto something important. The framing matters a lot.
Here is what I found worked for us after a lot of trial and error. We stopped saying “family time” because my kids associated that phrase with being forced to do something boring. Instead I started saying things like “hey I am making hot chocolate, anyone want some” and suddenly everyone is in the kitchen. Or I would start a puzzle on the table and just leave it there. Within an hour someone always comes and starts doing it without being asked. You are not making rules, you are just creating moments that are more appealing than whatever they were doing. Kids are surprisingly easy to pull in when they do not feel like it is mandatory.
The puzzle trick Astrynex mentioned is actually real. There is something about an unfinished puzzle that is almost irresistible lol. We have done this and it works.
Also just want to say to the original poster, you asked a really good question and the fact that you care enough to ask it means you are already doing better than you think. A lot of parents just accept the chaos. You noticed it and you want something different. That is half the work already done.
One last thing that helped us was a simple Sunday evening routine. Nothing strict, just after dinner we all sit in the living room and someone gets to pick what we do for 30 minutes. Sometimes it is a game, sometimes it is just watching something together, sometimes my youngest picks a dance video and we all look ridiculous. But that 30 minutes every week has become something my kids actually protect. They remind us if we forget 
Late to this thread but wanted to add something a little different. I work in tech and I think about this stuff a lot, maybe too much.
The screens are not going away. They will only get more present as the kids get older. So the goal probably should not be to reduce screen time but to build a family culture that is strong enough that people want to put the screens down sometimes.
How you do that is by making the offline version of your family worth choosing. Good food, laughter, inside jokes, a sense of us. When that exists, kids come back to it. My 16 year old will still put his phone down to watch a movie with me if I ask him the right way and we have that kind of relationship. But it was built over years of small moments, not rules and restrictions.
Also agree with everything Auralyte said earlier about modeling. If the adults in the house are constantly on their phones, the message is clear no matter what you say out loud 