If a friendship that survived all summer is quietly dissolving three weeks into the school year, you're not watching something go wrong. You're watching September.

Most first phones get handed over in a parking lot. Here's the other version of that moment — a read-together guide for the first phone conversation between parents and tweens.

The supply list is the easy part. Here's a two-week plan for everything that actually decides how the first week goes — most of it invisible to your kid.

The screen-time debate obsesses over hours. The question that matters more is simpler: who's in the room?