My husband is screen addicted and it affects his mood, how he parents, our life. And I don’t know what to do about it

Treat this like any other addiction. He needs help, first to recognise he is addicted and second to recover.

The most difficult thing is that these days we need the phone for every bloody thing!!! 10 apps at work, passwords for everything, it’s impossible to get away from it. It’s a very difficult behaviour to get rid of.

But you really do need to do something because your children are getting a very wrong idea of what being an adult looks like. You don’t have many more years to model good behaviour for them and once they become teenagers you’ll have problems with them as well.

Challenge him to see how long he can go without his phone.

The only way out of this situation is the one thing you say is impossible.

Is it time for the WiFi connection to just break? I really sympathise with you OP, especially in trying to keep your kids away from screens and him not helping at all.

My husband is the same and it does my head in. He's on it 24/7. He gets annoyed when the kids interrupt his screen time. Just mindless scrolling of you tube. He just sits there on his phone and ignores us all. Like it's glued to his hand, such a bad example for the kids.

Does he have too much spare time? Can you give him more chores and errands so he doesn't have so much time for phone and video games?

Do you have a garden? Give him some DIY projects to work on. Veggie patch, a new deck, a cubby house, a bbq area? Get him cook up a bbq.

Volunteer your house to host friends and family over? Do games night with board games.

Go on a camping holiday. Road trip weekends.

Do little things to get him away from the screen a little bit at a time to get him to snap out of the algorithm. Get him a set of classes of something non screen related he might enjoy for his birthday - cooking, coffee making etc.

I think you can get a old school cordless phone that you can connect all the mobile via wifi so you can still get calls through but the family can put away their mobile.

Why don’t you grab all his Devices and Hide/ destroy/ disable them- that should bring things to a head he will realise he is powerless over the addition and his life is unmanageable I wonder if there are any specific support groups that would help search for things like partners of phone addiction support
you probably feel like you have been emotionally abandoned I felt the same way when my partner was prescribed morphine you probably feel like you’re in “Mourning “ you need to make a decision and stick to it there is no point in issuing ultimatums this will only stop when the user has a moment of clarity and realises that things have become unmanageable and costing them things that they don’t want to loose have a look at internet technology users anonymous for example they have a ,spin off group for family and friends

He needs to consider a Brick device which you can use to lock anything on your phone you want to for as long as you need. Trying that might help to break the cycle

What apps is he on? If it’s Instagram or TikTok, get onto them and start searching for phone addiction, parenting tips, impact of screens on children - try to change his algorithm so the thing he’s addicted to reminds him of it.

second get him to look up (every phone has this) his daily usage and calculate in years how much of his life he’ll waste.

It’s an addiction not like alcohol or drugs more like food in that we tell ourselves we need our phones for work/to remain in contact, so it’s not a go cold turkey situation.

But ultimately like with any addiction they can only change if they want to

I would sit him down and say you’re considering leaving him because of this issue. That either he’ll accept some help and work to reduce his screen time, or you cannot see a future for this relationship. Then he has a decision to make, but you can’t go on like this.