My seven year old and I have our first major bone of contention.

He wants his own phone or a tablet or some kind of techbox under whose bluelight sway he can fall to play games or watch videos. He wants to disappear from the boredom of solo childhood into a fantasia of blinking lights and stimulation like an ersatz pint-sized Ready Player One. Who wouldn’t? Yes, Legos and keyboards and games are great, but you can’t always play Twister alone. And, as someone who has had her own somewhat unsavory love affair with blue-light distraction, I get it. I think we all do. I mean, you are probably reading this on your phone and I damn sure didn’t write it with squid ink in my study by candlelight.

Added to the mix is the very clear social pressure he faces. At Thanksgiving, he sits empty handed and watches his cousins’ faces lit brightly by the aquamarine and violet rectangles in their tiny hands. Yesterday, a kid brought his phone to our house for a play date. My son, managing his frustration and envy as well as he could, watched and whined. This sweet guest tried to reassure my son: “You don’t need a phone to be cool, you just need to have your mom buy you an iPad.” Yes reader, it only took seven years for me to ruin my kid’s social prospects.

Whenever these phones and tablets are around, my son tries to co-play, to watch, to share, and, because his cousins and friends are all awesome kids, they make it work. But he is acutely aware of his lack. I feel my son’s pain right in my gut, as my parents had a few seemingly-arbitrary rules beyond the “norms” of my Catholic school peers.

If you can’t go to sleepovers when that’s the social girl-bonding ritual, that might ensure you stay far from the epicenter of social glory. Was I doing this to my kid? What I know: different standards without clear rationales are hard for kids to swallow, especially when they have social impacts.

So I feel like a big meanie re-enacting my childhood sleepover trauma every time I say “phones aren’t good for kids” or “you don’t need a tablet.” I know that as he gets more perspective from the outside world, my rules seem more and more illogical. His dad and I can’t make pat arguments that his cousins and friends all have rotted grey matter, because they don’t. (And even if they had all devolved to some kind of shit-for-brains zombie level, it wouldn’t help his or our social or family bonds to articulate the fact, lol). Last week, when I took him to help me buy a kindle for a sight-impaired relative at BestBuy, there was no lack of kid-eye-level marketing evidence that tablets and phones are specifically meant “for kids” and that they are “educational.” Who am I to challenge not only the status quo but the Geek Squad?

Well, I’m not entirely alone. There is no doubt these devices and apps are designed to be addictive. And whether its alcohol or drugs or sugar or tech, children’s plastic, developing brains are far more susceptible to addiction and they far less likely to have the executive control to back away from the glow. It’s a bad enough scene that the prominent tech geniuses who made these irresistible devices either block their own children from them or limit their use at a draconian-level far below other Americans. Indeed, though companies like Google are pushing into schools and classrooms everywhere, the tech execs in Silicon Valley insist on giving their offspring an old-fashioned analogue education. Hell, tech is even bad for kid’s posture! Their posture, people!

But tech gurus don’t know everything. There seem to be growing studies showing benefits, particularly when content is educational and/or linked to conversational engagement. Notoriously cautious, the American Academy of Pediatrics has even loosened its once-strident guidelines based on research. Its new guidelines for 6 and older simply suggest “consistent limits” and ensuring media never displaces sleep, exercise or other “healthy behaviors.”

This is great news because, like a lot of moms, I want to have my cake and eat it too. I want to sleep in on a Sunday and let my kid blast off in a screen time flurry. I want to let him enjoy his very own shiny status item, likely a cheap-o tablet, wifi-blocked and loaded with educational games. And, no dummy when I see an opportunity, I want to leverage the hell out of it: “You can have a tablet if you agree to no more than 1 hour a day screen time forever…and walk the dog every day….and do the dishes…and…and…and.”

How we’ll actually move forward is still in discussion. But I feel like I have options again.