She wishes mom would ditch the iPhone

DEAR AMY: We have been exposed to countless news stories describing the extreme amount of time young people spend in front of a screen each day and their addiction to technology. I seem to be experiencing the opposite problem.

My mom recently got an iPhone and will not put the device down for one minute. She is a stay-at-home mom, so her phone usage is not for business purposes; she simply cannot take a break from her emails or "Words With Friends" games. While we are walking somewhere, she lags behind because she cannot walk and text at the same time and doesn't fully pay attention to our conversations because she is distracted by her phone activity. I have explained to her that it makes me feel she isn't present in our conversations, but nothing changes. I am the child; she is supposed to be telling me to get off the phone, not the other way around. But I do not have the authority that a parent has over a child to simply demand that she hang up.

How can I get my mom to stop being such a phone addict?Neglected Child

DEAR CHILD: Studies confirm that smartphone addiction is a real phenomenon (with a reported 70 percent of respondents in one Stanford University study saying they sleep with their phones).

While you can't cut off your mother the way some parents would, by (for instance) yanking her phone from her hand and hurling it out the window (my particular fantasy), you can talk about it once more and then try to retrain her Pavlovian iPhone response in real time.

See if she will agree to a "no phone zone" from 6 to 8 p.m.

You two can enforce this discipline by deliberately leaving distracting devices in another room.

Also, pet stores sell clickers for animal training. You might see if your mother is capable of being retrained like a Labrador retriever through selective clicking, followed by treats.