Adolescence accurately portrays that it is the most vulnerable children who are the worst impacted by these devices. Two alarming examples of this are the dramatic rise in young men recruited via social media to county lines and the increasingly high number of children and young people being arrested for terrorism offences. So what does this have to do with GPs and general practice? It is commonplace for us to ask young people about their sleep, happiness at school and home, alcohol or drug use, and ideas of self-harm or suicide. Indeed, the latter is an essential component of a safe mental health consultation. (In my training we failed vivas if we didn’t ask about this). Research shows that the average 12 year-old spends 29 hours a week, equivalent to a part-time job on their smartphone, and over a third of adolescents report continuous online contact. Yet how many of us are routinely asking about screen use in our consultations with young people? By asking about screen use in a chi...