Does Your Kid Have iPad Rages?

On a Saturday morning a few months ago, Rachel, a mom of two in New Jersey, tried to follow the screen-time advice she had seen repeatedly on parenting Instagram accounts and heard on parenting podcasts: Be clear about limits and give lots of advance warning. So Rachel told her 10-year-old son, Jonah, the night prior and again during breakfast that they would be leaving at 11 a.m. for a birthday party and that he would have to put his iPad away when it was time to go. After he ate his cereal, he sat with his iPad on the couch toggling between Roblox and YouTube shorts, and she set a timer. When there were 15 minutes left on it, and then again when there were five minutes left, she reminded him how long he still had to play. But when she walked into the living room at 10:56 a.m. as the timer rang out and said, “Okay, off,” her son’s reaction overwhelmed her.

“He just left his body,” she says. Jonah threw the controller onto the couch. He started yelling, “You said I had until 11! It’s not 11 yet! You’re always doing this!” He followed her into the kitchen still yelling. She tried to stay calm and be firm. Then she tried walking away. He followed her again. At one point, he sat down on the floor and refused to move.

“I remember standing there thinking, I don’t know this person. I genuinely did not recognize him,” she told me. It took Jonah 30 minutes to calm down enough to get his shoes on. In the car, he slowly became himself again, chatting as if nothing unusual had just transpired. “That’s the part that really messes with you,” Rachel says. “How fast they come back.”

Few children relish turning off their personal tech devices. But for some otherwise happy-go-lucky kids, the mere suggestion of ending screen time sparks a response so intense it changes the texture of the family’s daily life and feels genuinely alarming to the adults on the receiving end. Nora, a technical writer in New Jersey, knows it well. Recently, she asked her 13-year-old to hand over his phone so she could check the settings, and he told her she was ruining his life. When she calmly persisted, he escalated: “You make me want to kill myself.” He’s often emotive, but the words were still frightening — the kind that leave a parent frozen and unsure of whether they’re suddenly facing an emergency.

Last month, a University of Washington study found that 22 percent of screen-time transitions evoked a negative reaction from children under age 5, while another study from Brigham Young University found that of children ages 2 to 3 using screens, 93 percent of parents reported their toddler at least sometimes throws tantrums or whines when transitioning away from media. There’s scant research on the screen-specific meltdowns of older kids, but there are countless memes. One popular video shows a child aggressively scribbling in a journal while a voice-over narrates, in the cadence of Mean Girls, “This girl is the nastiest skank bitch I have ever met, do not trust her.” The caption: “When your mom says we have to go somewhere and your Roblox event starts in 10 minutes.” It’s funny because it’s not an exaggeration. There are parents I know who saw the recent headline about an 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy who shot his father after having his Nintendo Switch taken away and admitted to the dark thought, I could see how that happened. But as obvious and urgent as this phenomenon feels for many parents, it is only just gaining acknowledgment and study in the psychological community, which remains divided on what’s happening and why.

Dave Anderson, a senior psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, doesn’t think technology in particular is to blame for children’s intense reactions. “We frequently hear from parents who say, ‘When I ask my child to get off technology, they get very mad at me,’” he says. “That is true of almost anything that children find reinforcing.” He adds that there’s a tendency right now, among people with and without children, to “pathologize normal behavior” by applying clinical terms that don’t entirely fit. When I mentioned that a number of parents I’d interviewed had likened their children’s tech tantrums to an addict in withdrawal, he took issue with the analogy: “More often than not, parents who are concerned about their teenager’s behavior around screens use the word addiction when it doesn’t really fit.” Anderson points to one particular fact: Real withdrawal symptoms don’t fade away after a few intense minutes, whereas screen meltdowns typically do. He says that post-iPad rages occur because children’s brains are still developing and can’t yet smoothly handle losing something pleasurable — and that they’re essentially normal.

But Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation, is convinced screens are a special case — and she doesn’t mince words about their addictive properties. In a recent conversation on The Oprah Podcast, she was asked to explain what happens in a child’s brain when a parent tries to take away a device mid–gaming session and the child erupts. “When you expose a child’s brain to a digital drug that is incredibly reinforcing, it is inevitable that that child will get into this loop of addiction where they get into a state of craving and withdrawal when they don’t have their drug,” she answered.

When I raised Anderson’s explanation with Lembke (namely, that these meltdowns are a normal emotional-regulation challenge), she conceded that not every child who gets upset when their device is taken away is in withdrawal. But for kids whose use has tipped into something resembling compulsion, Lembke sees a different pattern: extreme reactions that last too long but tend to resolve with continued abstinence. In addition, abstinence leads these kids to sleep better, exercise more, and reengage with family and school. “These long-term trajectories toward improved physical and mental health are not seen in the wake of your average temper tantrum,” she says.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 117 studies, published in Psychological Bulletin, suggested that parental concern about screen-induced emotional outbursts is specific and warranted. “Online games pose additional risks because they often function like social-media platforms,” lead author Roberta Vasconcellos of the University of New South Wales told CNN last year. “Since these games continue even when a player logs out, children may feel pressure to stay connected for longer periods.” Her research has found not only that screen time can cause behavioral and emotional problems but also that kids who are already struggling emotionally often turn to screens to cope — which just digs them deeper into the cycle of withdrawal tantrums.

Outbursts can range widely, from foul language to the flinging of fists. Nicole, a lawyer in Brooklyn, has asked her 11-year-old what he’s feeling during his post-tech outbursts. He told her it was “the feeling, in the moment, that he will never get it back, and so he panics,” she recalls. Lauren, a mom of two girls in Atlanta, says her 5-year-old’s reactions have included screaming, crying, throwing things, and knocking objects off tables. “There was one morning where she said, ‘Can I turn on the TV?’ and I said, ‘Sure, after you get dressed.’ That turned into a 45-minute meltdown,” she says. Lauren says she has since sought out a parenting coach because she was snapping in response to the outbursts and didn’t know what else to do. She told me it’s hard to talk to other parents about what’s happening in part because her daughter is a “model kid” outside the house. The rages only happen at home, which keeps them invisible and makes Lauren wonder whether other parents are shouldering the same burden.

Sarah Coyne, a professor of human development at Brigham Young University who has spent 25 years studying children and media, bristles at comparisons of screen time to other minor pleasures. “I’m not sure how many children are struggling to function because their parents tell them to be done with their ice cream,” she says. What she and many parents describe is not the whimpering of a child who has been told “no more dessert” but inconsolable sobbing born from desperation. Several parents I spoke with used nearly identical language to describe what they’ve experienced; they say their child “left his body,” became an “alternate personality,” or seemed gripped by an acute panic. Coyne has seen evidence of problematic, addictionlike media use in children as young as 2. The ones who combust at an iPad’s removal, she says, are not simply children who love something — they are children for whom the device has become, in some functional sense, a coping mechanism. Parents who regularly use screens to manage difficult emotions end up with children who throw bigger tantrums when devices are taken away, she explains. (About 28 percent of parents give in to screen time to avoid a meltdown multiple times a week, and nearly three in four have used screens to manage their child’s behavior in public, according to a 2025 survey by Lurie Children’s Hospital.)

I asked Rachel if she had ever approached Jonah to take away his iPad, seen him happy and calm, and then decided to instead let it go. “Yes. More than I want to admit. I’ll tell myself ten more minutes. And then ten more minutes becomes 20 because at least the house is quiet. At least nobody is yelling,” she says. She remembers when the cycle began for her younger child, Maya, too: “It was after a dinner at a restaurant where I didn’t have my phone on me and she spent the whole meal grabbing at the salt shaker. So I started handing it over and dinners got easy. And then I created a monster. I made this problem. And now I can’t unmake it.” Last month at an Italian restaurant, Rachel let Maya finish a show on YouTube Kids at a restaurant. When the check came, she took back the phone. Maya went rigid and started screaming, then slid under the table. Rachel had to leave her credit card with the waiter, carry Maya outside to the car while she kicked, and then go back in for the card.

Catherine Pearlman, a licensed clinical social worker and the author of First Phone, has watched this same pattern play out in living rooms across her practice. “Even the most conscientious parents will give in partially or completely just to get the behavior to stop,” she says. “I have seen this so many times and it is heartbreaking — because parents know what needs to happen, but they are out of tools.”

Almost every parent I spoke to conveyed harboring shame for their kids’ extreme tech tantrums — either directly or indirectly in the way they hedged as they shared their stories. Emily, a mom in Kansas City, traced her kids’ worst moments back to her own decisions. “When this happens, I’m not like, Oh my God, my children are monsters,” she says. “I think, Ugh, I let this happen.”

Rachel has not told any of her mom friends the full story about that Saturday morning when they showed up very late to the birthday party. “I told one of them we were late because of ‘a thing with Jonah.’ That’s it,” she says, “A thing.” She thinks about how it would sound if she just said it: My 10-year-old sat on the kitchen floor screaming about a video game. “Even saying it out loud sounds like I have no control over my own household. Like I failed at something basic and my kid was being rotten.”

And what would be the point? Despite copious searching, no one has offered Rachel a solution outside of removing the iPad entirely, which she doesn’t view as reasonable. Instead, she is trying to make peace with the idea that every serene moment in her home involving a screen has an expiration date — and more often than not, she will be the one who sets the chaos in motion.

But Deanna, a mom in Manhattan, is slightly more hopeful. She told me that after getting into the habit of extending her kids’ screen times to delay their meltdowns, she finally decided to enact a few changes. Before her kids receive their devices, she makes them verbally agree to an end time. And when their timers go off, she never allows an extra minute. She also always has the next activity queued up and waiting — Legos on the table or a baking project half-prepped — so the screen doesn’t get replaced by a void. It’s a lot of work, and the first week was “completely brutal,” she told me. But she kept at it, and about a month later, the tantrums weakened. “They still grumble,” she says. “But the fighting — that’s mostly over. I don’t brace myself the way I used to.”