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My son is the stereotype of an iPad kid Motherhood was never for me. I never, ever wanted a child. But I let my mother pressure me into having one, because she wanted to be a grandma soooo bad and she badgered me about it for years and years and YEARS, to the point of tears and begging. And eventually I let her warp my brain into being reluctantly convinced I wanted one too. I hated being a mother before my child was even born. I knew I was making the biggest mistake of my life and I could not believe how stupid and weak-willed I was to cave to pressure. My partner wasn't even the one insisting on it, he was totally ambivalent. I could have told him I didn't want a child and he would have still stayed with me and loved me. I don't know why I did this to myself and our relationship. He is more emotionally engaged with our son than I am and I'm glad for that, at least, but he works long night shifts so he isn't really super involved. As for our son... He is now 6. I have put a screen in front of his face for most of his life. It's the only thing that would get him to settle. He is the embodiment of the stereotype of the "iPad kid" you see online. He could expertly navigate a smartphone before age 3. He needs his iPad at basically every waking moment of the day and if you take it away from him he just screams and screams, sometimes until he starts vomiting. He'll do this anywhere, public or private it doesn't matter. His will is so unbelievably stubborn, he doesn't give up EVER and I eventually cave every time because I don't have the energy or commitment to deal with him. He has a low attention span, is always in a foul mood. He always has the iPad within reach, he needs to have it on and playing YouTube even in restaurants. Enjoying a day out at the park to touch grass or even sitting through a two-hour film in a movie theater is out of the question because he would get bored and scream for the iPad again. He doesn't play with toys, they don't interest him. Sometimes I think the iPad has prevented him from forming an imagination of his own. He doesn't draw, play pretend, etc. Just iPad and YouTube. It is the only thing he enjoys and wants to interact with. Don't even get me started on the issues he has in school. And I feel horrified by all of this because I know this is not normal for a child, but I'm so exhausted. I know I'm the one that did this to him, that he's just a child and I'm the one who decided that I couldn't get through parenting him every hour of the day. I just pray he turns out even somewhat normal, that maybe as his brain develops further his behavior will level out. I don't have a lot of hope because I don't have the will power to take the iPad away. Motherhood is too hard without it. I feel like the most selfish mother in the world. I posted this in a mom group because I had nowhere else to put it. I wasn't looking for advice. Honestly I didn't think anything could help at this point. But a mom commented something that I wasn’t able to get out of my head. She said her son was exactly like mine. The low attention span, the moods, the screen obsession, all of it. And she said before she tried to take the screens away, she looked into what was actually going on inside his brain. Turns out he was deficient in iron, zinc, magnesium, and vitamin D — all of which directly affect dopamine production. Which is the thing that makes normal activities feel rewarding. She said that's why the iPad was the only thing that worked for him. Not because he was addicted. Because his brain couldn't produce enough dopamine to make anything ELSE feel interesting. The screen was the only thing giving his brain what it was starving for. When she said that, something clicked for me that nothing else ever has. It's not that I need more willpower. It's that HIS BRAIN needs what it's been missing. And until it gets that, no amount of "just take the iPad away" is going to work. I've tried. It doesn't. Now I understand why. She told me she started giving her son something called Mood Balance — a gummy, not a pill, — that has all of those nutrients plus stuff for mood and gut health. She said her kid actually takes it without a fight and within a few weeks the screen grip started loosening on its own. He started wanting to do other things. Not because she forced him. Because his brain finally had what it needed to find other things rewarding. I ordered it right away. I didn’t know if it was going to work for my son. Honestly I didn’t have much hope for anything anymore. But I figured if there's even a chance that the problem isn't my willpower and it's actually what's missing in his brain, I have to try. Because I can't keep doing what I've been doing. And I can't keep hating myself for it. The first week, nothing. He took the gummy without a fight, which honestly shocked me — he fights everything. But behavior-wise, I didn't see a difference. I almost stopped. Then around week two, something small happened. He sat through dinner. The whole dinner. No iPad on the table. He complained, but he didn't scream. He didn't vomit. He just... ate, and talked to us, and asked to be excused. I looked at my partner across the table and neither of us said anything. We were afraid to jinx it. Week three, his teacher sent me a message. Not a complaint. She said he'd been "more present" in class. Her words, not mine. I read it three times because I'm so used to those messages being bad news. Then last Saturday he walked past his iPad on the couch, went to his closet, and pulled out a box of Legos that had been sitting untouched for over a year. He sat on the floor and built something for 20 minutes. No screen. No prompting from me. He just... wanted to. Twenty minutes. That's it. Then he went back to the iPad. But those 20 minutes? That's 20 minutes of imagination he didn't have before. That's 20 minutes where his brain chose something real over a screen. On its own. Last weekend he asked to go to the park. He hasn't asked to go to the park in... I don't even know how long. A year? More? We went. He played. Not for hours — maybe 40 minutes before he wanted to go home. But he ran around. He climbed things. He got dirt on his shoes. Watching him play brought tears to my eyes. He's not a different kid. The iPad is still his favorite thing in the world. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's gone. But the grip is loosening. Just like she said it would. And for the first time in six years, I don't feel like the worst mother in the world. I feel like maybe — maybe — I'm becoming the kind of mom he needed me to be all along. I just didn't have the right help. That doesn't mean everything is fixed. It means something is finally different. And different was all I needed to keep going. If you're reading this and you're in the same place I was — hating yourself, exhausted, watching your kid disappear into a screen and not knowing how to stop it — maybe the answer isn't more willpower. Maybe it's giving their brain what it's been missing. EDIT: I keep getting PMing asking what saffron gummies we used, so here the link [uselumexa.com/pages/saffron-2]