My house may be like your house.

As I type these lines, my daughter, Harriet, who is 14, is on her iPhone skipping among no fewer than eight social media sites: Flickr, Tumblr, Kik, Snapchat, Instagram, Ask.fm, Twitter and Vine. Rarely Facebook. Facebook, she says, is so 2011.

My son, Penn, who is 15, will be asleep for hours yet. He was up all night with a friend playing two video games, Call of Duty and Eve, in a jag fueled by his four favorite foodlike substances: nacho cheese Doritos, Kit Kat candy bars, jelly beans and a Mountain Dew flavor variant known as Code Red. His is the prix fixe menu of the anti-gods.

My kids are smart, kind and more or less well adjusted. I like that they are comfortable and alert in the wired world, able to fish in it like young bears in a salmon stream. But increasingly I am terrified for them. It’s more apparent every day that screens have incrementally stolen them from themselves, and stolen them from us.

My wife, Cree, and I have allowed them to drift quite distantly into the online world, and we fear our casualness has been a calamity. Our kids are paler than they should be, ill at ease with casual boredom, squirmy without Wi-Fi. Their grades are not what they should be. We fear we have left them, as it were, to their own devices.

Each summer Cree and I resolve, over a series of panicked breakfasts at our local diner, to rein things back in. This is when we draft stern rules for a new school year, strictures like: no laptops in bedrooms during the week; homework before screen time; no electronics after 10 p.m.; no iTunes purchases without advance permission, not even that 99-cent Rihanna remix.

These rules invariably begin to crack by Day 3. By Day 4, there is pleading, and the discreet slamming of doors. By Day 5, Harriet is making cryptic remarks about us on Twitter. By Day 6, we are all aggrieved.

By Day 7, Cree and I are threatening them with the treatment a friend calls “the Full Amish” — all plugs pulled. By Day 8, the start of the second week of school, no one is sure what the rules are anymore. We’re back where we started, and plump with dread.

This year it occurred to me we needed help. So I sat down with three new books that offer assistance, understanding and quasi-epic subtitles. They are: “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age,” by Catherine Steiner-Adair with Teresa H. Barker; “The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul,” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang; and “The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World,” by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis. (I read an advance copy of this last one; it won’t be published until October.)

Consuming a short stack of self-help and academic books always reminds me what I dislike about the genres. These books are padded. The vital information in all three, about 900 pages combined, could be edited down and tattooed on my palm. They’re jargony and slogany. None made me laugh, or even smile.

But it’s been a lifelong mistake of mine never to take advice from someone who can’t write like a demon. Probably it’s time to listen.

Ms. Steiner-Adair, the primary author of “The Big Disconnect,” is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Her book is based on thousands of interviews, and it can be eloquent about the need to ration our children’s computer time.

I will never forget the experience of reading Ms. Steiner-Adair’s book. This is because it physically hurt to turn the pages. It was as if her palm were reaching up from the text to slap me across the face, the way Don Corleone slapped the singer Johnny Fontane in the first “Godfather” movie, telling him to be a man.

Here’s why: Before she speaks about how to pry our kids away from their phones, tablets and laptops, Ms. Steiner-Adair looks parents quite sternly in the eye. She describes a generation of us who are “unavailable, disconnected or narcissistic.” We spend the expanse of our days — even those of us paid to keep our eyes glued to the nonelectonic page — gazing into our phones, scanning for the next text, e-mail or tweet.

The message we communicate to our kids, she writes, is: “Everybody else matters more than you.” Children, she declares, “are tired of being the ‘call waiting’ in their parents’ lives.”