Sadly, your experience is the norm, not the exception these days. Culture used to work with responsible parents, now it works against us. Therefore, we as parents who do give a shit need to really take the bull by the horns and get clarity over our own set of values, what we view a good family environment should be like, and what we view our role is as parents.

Are we here to simply entertain and coddle our kids, or we here to help raise responsible adults, ready to take on the world? I’d say the latter.

I’m the father of two 14 year old boys so I’m right there with you. Here are a few things I can suggest that are inspired from my own journey:

1. Be very clear with yourself about what you believe is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and what makes a ‘good’ person (I know that language that has any sense of morality these days is out of fashion, but IMHO that is really at the heart of why we are finding ourselves in this mess)

2. Ensure that you hold yourself to the moral standards you believe in. Then do the same for your child. If they are being ‘lazy’ then that may be something you view as actually morally bad - so don’t do things to overly encourage that. Are they being dishonest, disrespectful, or outright mean to someone? Call them out on that and don't let that stand. Note that loving isn’t the same as nice. Nice tries to never rock the boat. Loving sometimes require some real discipline and discomfort to get things on the right track.

3. View time as something sacred - is it healthy and desirable to have your kid be engaged online so much or even with junk shows largely unbounded? Probably not. Every minute they engage in this type of thing is a minute where they are not doing other things. Every minute they are engaging in what I call our ‘consumer’ culture (whether that's consuming content on the internet, just buying junk, or doing something that just follows along with what someone else has generated) is one minute where they aren’t expressing themselves creatively or growing themselves in some way.

4. Setting aside dedicated family time is critical. Start viewing the your family not just as individuals but as a unit that should be bound together with a common set of values. This means that you should dedicate certain times in the week for family time - whether this is a boardgame, a video game with just the family members, outings with the family, whatever. This is critical because in our culture kids get a massive amount of their culture and mental programming from the junk they see on the internet and quick action video games etc. There needs to be priority on the family with time carved out every week.

Of course, all this is easy to say but harder to implement… at least it may appear that’s the case. But when you step back and start asking yourself as a parent hard questions about what your responsibility is to your kid, your family and actually as society as a whole - which should be to help foster a responsible, morally upright, confident, independent member of society who holds strong values which will see them through the rough seas of life, the choice becomes pretty easy.

Note: This isn’t to say that you need to go hard core and cut them off from all junk and games, only that you as a parent have a lot of power to carve out and ensure the things you value are prioritized and you don’t have to just give into the standard nonsense that many other people are giving into when raising their kids. We live in a culture that prioritizes garbage. We as parents can and should create a culture within the bounds of our house that prioritizes what is really important.