Worried dad acts on screen time after son, eight, talks about pals' 'six packs'

Andy Miles, 48, and his wife say 'images are warping our view on what's realistic for our life'

A Midland dad has revealed how he limited his kids' screen time after hearing his eight-year-old son discussing his friends' "six-packs" and his daughter, 13, talking about private jets she saw on Instagram.

Andy Miles, 48, and his wife Verity, 46, implemented Apple's family control systems on their two youngest children's gadgets after he was alarmed by the conversations he overheard.

The children must now request permission to buy apps. Time restrictions have also been placed on their apps, meaning access is blocked once the allotted time is up.

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If they want additional time, the children must ask for it and the parents can either approve or deny the request.

Andy, from Leamington Spa, is the co-founder of social networking app Hollrs, and has two older children aged 22 and 19. He said: "We started to notice there would be five or six hours on an individual app in an evening - that's a quarter of a day.

"We haven't had massive issues with our three girls and I think it seems to be harder on younger girls in terms of image.

"But my son is eight and has already started to talk about his friend having a six-pack. I started to see the fact that boys are more body-conscious and not necessarily in a healthy way.

"There is a lot of extreme over-training using excessive weights. I was an athlete but it wasn't the be-all and end-all to be aesthetically pleasing and fit.

"I think in general images are warping our view on what's realistic for our life and what we're going to get. Some of that behaviour comes from a bad place where maybe you're not one of the boys who gets a lot of attention from the opposite sex.

"That can be for whatever reason - maybe you're not very tall or confident - and the feeling of being ignored can lead to the kind of psyches you're starting to see Andrew Tate take advantage of.

"People feel disenfranchised. In general everything seems to be so much harder. Life was a lot simpler in the 1990s."

Andy said he could not limit his adult children's use as they needed to "find their own way and monitor their own behaviours".

But he said it was a "parental responsibility to keep an eye on things" with his younger kids. He said: "They're maybe making poor decisions because they don't know any better."

The couple have implemented a "downtime" protocol which blocks the phone between set times, and he said he was content with his children's school enacting a mobile phone ban.

Pupils submit their phones into a sealed bag with a magnetic lock at the start of the day and are only able to access them at the day's end.

Andy said: "There are a lot of distractions for my daughter that come with a mobile phone - as a parent, that's my responsibility.

"I have parents who say they cannot get their child off the phone and I have told them about this family system and they didn't even know it existed - it's not widely known.

"It removes the discussion about whether you should be on your device and there's not a constant war about whether you have had enough time.

"It's not me being a dad, being mean, saying: 'No more phone for you. You had an amount of time we agreed'.

"Online bullying is a thing my children's school has been quite hot on. I think we have been lucky in as much as we haven't seen too much of that."

"But the biggest problems have been over their perception of what life is like - what they believe they are entitled to. They see a lot of things online - people in private jets, expensive cars - and wonder why they don't have them."

His youngest son is allowed to watch YouTube Kids and Fortnite videos and plays computer games with the chat options disabled.

Andy said: "He has no social media nor will he.

"We're probably of the view that our girls were given a phone too early but can you take it away? Whereas if he was to get a phone, it might be an old Nokia so he can keep in touch."

Hollrs was founded last year by Andy.

He said: "It's a small social network that allows customers or people with an opinion to be able to talk to brands or political bodies by leaving videos. We take those views and put people into discussion groups.

"I realise there's a contradiction but we have tried to set up something where people get to have conversations about something that's bothering them that they care deeply about."