My DS is 14, he's had a mobile for a couple of years (we're abroad and they start later here). He goes through periods of spending masses of time on it, usually watching videos but also messaging friends, but he is able to rein it in if strongly reminded (or forced) to. I've never spied on him, he had parental control until his 14th birthday and he had a time limit with that which obviously has gone now. I kept an eye on what apps he was installing and at one point did block TikTok because he was spending waaay too much time on it. Anyway, even though I think I've always respected his privacy with the phone, right from the start he was very physically possessive of it. For example, if mine has run out of battery and I ask him to put on some music while I'm making dinner or whatever he would be so weird about me touching it to change song or turn up the volume that in the end we'd just give up.
Anyway I can kind of understand the actual touching, since it's probably his most valuable possession and a big part of his social life and if it were to get damaged he'd be gutted. But yesterday evening he was telling me about some video he'd watched (I'll spare you the details) and I told him about something else I thought he'd be interested in. He looked it up and we were about to watch it together when he said 'no I'm sorry, I just can't bear to have other people looking at my phone screen' and got up off the sofa. My first thought was that he was worried I'd see what else youtube was suggesting and be angry because I'd figure out he'd been watching inappropriate things. He swore blind that that just wasn't the case. So I wondered if this had happened to anyone else? And what did you do?