Wonderful and convicting post Melanie! It was a breath of fresh air to read your list of "hidden benefits" and to have the common story about teens needing phones turned upside down. Our daughter got her first phone when she entered university (at 16), and after experiencing some of the content, was grateful that she never had one when she was younger. Our soon 16-year old son has no interest in a phone at all and has a lively group of friends who simply call him on our landline. Accentuating the gains and spelling out the losses is truly a helpful perspective shifter. Will be sure to share your piece with my readers :)
Thank you, Ruth, for your kind words. Once you experience the benefits, it makes so much (common) sense. I love that your son has “a lively group of friends who call him on the landline.” I wish all teens could enjoy the benefits of a lively group of friends without the distraction of a smartphone and the stress of social media. Thank you for sharing!
I was reflecting a couple of days ago that he must be one of the few remaining teens who spends time memorizing phone numbers of friends and family (his younger brother was actually quizzing him all the way through his hand-penned phone book) :)
Great article... I did it too with my daughter - no cell phone whatsoever. She turned 18 this spring - gave her her first phone - she forgets it, lets its battery die - generally ignores it. I feel that's a win.
I straight up lost my flip phone at my first job after high school (a summer camp). I didnt even realize it was gone until my boss found it and reprimanded me. I went back to a flip phone in 2016 and hope to stick with it indefinitely.
This article made me cry. Tears of joy for your daughter, tears of joy for her current views and tears of joy that this stance can and DOES work. We have often felt very lonely in our journey, but so many small nuggets from this post are filed away in my brain to site whenever I have doubts. Or even harder, whenever we face another parent expressing their opposing views. Thank you Melanie, this is huge for all of us. Keep up the amazing work!
Andrea, it is a very lonely journey, but I found that having just a few friends who were like-minded really helped. We need a small community. I have been on both ends of the screen addiction problem in my own home. I know the pain very well, but I also know the joy of success. Thank you for understanding that joy!
I'm trying to start just that in my local area for our kids. Right now my biggest goal is making our house the "fun" place to hang out despite limited screens.
It's amazing how many people said kids need to be tech-savvy in order to succeed, which in their minds means constant phone use. Like the author said, four-year-olds figure this stuff out, what they don't figure out is the addictive portion of it.
Several dads I talked to state how their daughters go home, shut their door, and play on their phone. And then they say how slow progress is with their therapist. Well, maybe if you took control and gave her some life direction instead of her looking for it in her immature friends, things would be different.
It's so frustrating, and the ridiculous lies people tell themselves to avoid making hard decisions makes it all the harder. Then you're the bad guy for taking a stand against habits everyone knows is detrimental, because it feels mean.
We turn it around at ScreenStrong; we are the 'good guy' parents! Kids know that they need parents to do the hard things for them. We can’t parent out of worrying that our kids won’t like us - that doesn’t work out very well. Our job is to make this phone thing not such a big deal and instead focus on family connections and having fun with our kids! Thanks for your note.
Indeed. I recall an old anti-drug commercial from the 1980s: "Parents who use drugs, have children who use drugs". Replace "drugs" with "smartphones" and "social media" and it still makes sense today, *a fortiori* in fact.
There has never been a society where adults use smartphones and/or social media, but teens don't. Nor has the reverse ever been true. As Gandhi famously said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world". Otherwise one is being a flaming hypocrite, even if one may argue that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
I think it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think most parents are trying to do the best thing by their children. Maybe they erroneously think early cells are best, but I think it’s more that they worry about their kids’ social development if they don’t have phones. Whenever we made our decisions (and my kids are pretty late in getting phones,) we weighed costs/benefits on both sides, but never was fear of our kids rejecting us a consideration. I’m glad we didn’t get them phones early, and actually each kid seems to be getting hers a bit later, but that doesn’t mean that parents who make the other decision care less about their kids or are living in fear.
1) After puberty, the kids often become physically bigger and stronger than the parents.
2) After 18, they become legal adults, which means that their phones (and all other personal possessions and effects) legally become vested property rights that cannot be arbitrarily seized or revoked without due process.
But before both of those happen, if they are afraid, it is basically due to culture more than anything else.
My boys are 3 and 1.5 so I got plenty of time to bulk up!
All jokes aside, I can see your point. specially between moms and their boys.
Now once they are 18 it becomes more tricky, but if you are the one financially maintaining them I think you still have control. Hopefully by then you've had the conversations and they will make better choices.
Indeed. But the deeper question of course is, why any parent in their right mind (who is not an insufferable control freak, at least) would actually WANT to keep on controlling their kids well beyond the legal age of majority is really quite puzzling IMHO.
And before anyone brings up the latest pop neuroscience (which is still very much in its infancy), note that these tendencies pre-date such ideas for some people, and in some cultures.
ScreenStrong is not about control, at all. To those who have not experienced the success it may be hard to understand. Our kids love their family unit, they love belonging, and there is no conflict over this as they get older at the age of 18. Could it be that they actually like their low-smartphone life as young men in college? Yes! Listen to this episode of our podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/live-teen-q-a-on-growing-up-without-addictive-screens-179/id1474681355?i=1000641960104
It's not like once your child turns 18 they seize to be your kids. Plus look around, 18 year olds are not that wise! Specially now being socially stunted and lacking "real world experience". You will always be a parent and want to positively influence them as much as you can, help them succeed.
If they want to go and buy a smart phone with their own money, so be it. But if they still depend on me financially at that time then I still have a say no? "my house my rules" kinda thing.
Yes, many are. What they don’t understand is that 1) your children will absolutely pick up on your fear of them 2) the children will likely exploit that fear and 3) children don’t like or respect adults who are afraid of them.
Terrific article. I wonder if you might address how you dealt with all your daughter’s peer’s phones. My wife and I have 7 children. Our oldest is just 12 so the battle is only beginning. However, we’ve been ahead of the game from watching the childhoods of our older nieces and nephews compromised by their parents’ decisions to allow far too many screens in their lives. We don’t do video games and screens are pretty limited at our home. But it’s still so frustrating because despite our constant efforts, other parents undermine us with their screen and phone permissiveness.
And we’re in a very traditional conservative community and classical Catholic school with many like-minded people. Still, we’re undermined every step of the way. I’ll invite my sons’ friends over to spend the day running around outside doing boy things, but inevitably one boy will have a device in their pocket and lure the other boys away from non-screen based activities and into screen-based. It’s a constant source of frustration and I’m sure a permanent and unavoidable part of the battle, but I just wonder how you managed that. I’m sure gymnastics as an extracurricular certainly helped since it is so time intensive. But, more often, the families trying to live in this manner are also more free range style so keeping the kids busy may not be part of the solution. With that in mind, my kids can all be swinging from the tree tops with all the other conservative free range screen free kids from our community, but when they take a break, there’s still going to be several kids lying in wait to show them porn. Of course, that’s not an argument against “accepting the things we cannot change, having the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” but I wonder if you might have any thoughts on that. Perhaps it’s a question to address in a future post.
Yes, it is a problem with other kids, and it is impossible to have zero exposure, and that is okay. You are doing a great job! We had a rule at our home that (friend's) phones were not allowed to be out when friends came over. The kids got used to it (the parents had more problems with that rule than the kids.) I would love to address this more in a future post. For now, I will say that having scheduled activities is really important in our digitally saturated world. We see so many benefits, especially as kids get older and enter the high school years. I used to have a different opinion until I raised a gamer who spent all his free time on a video game ☹ Thanks for reaching out, and stay strong!
Thanks for your essay. When you enforce the friends-need-to-put their-phones-away rule in your house, what is the best way to go about it? A table by the front door where they can drop their phones? I'm curious about how you put it into practice, and did you say anything to their parents -- or only talked with other moms about it as needed? I am realizing I need to have a relatively strict rule about this, otherwise many kids will take full advantage if I am wishy washy.
In all honesty, and with all due respect, I believe your son would most likely have developed a gaming problem (and/or other tech-related problem) regardless of how he was raised. Fortunately, most gamers don't develop such problems. I have personally only known one such person in my four decades on this Earth, and she wasn't even a guy, interestingly enough. (She was a colleague of mine in grad school who just barely graduated after wasting all her time on World of WarCrack, and they felt sorry for her so they gave her a master's, apparently.) And I have known literally hundreds of gamers, and been a gamer myself to one degree or another since I was before I was even kindergarten with my Nintendo (OG NES), then the later generations of systems too. I never really got into any of the newer MMORPGs, though.
The newer MMORPGs are much worse and more addictive. I know hundreds of addicted gamers. in one private FB group alone, we have 20,000+ families, and I would guess that at least half are struggling with gaming overuse in their kids. There are over 50 treatment centers (last count). Hate to say it is a much bigger deal than some people realize.
I hear you, sounds like a constant struggle. I dont think its possible to reduce the exposure to 0 so just do as much as you can. Can you try talking to the parents and schedule "Device free outings" ?
If you're concern of porn, i would get ahead of the situation and have a discussion about it.
How it can affect their ability to date and connect with a girl in the future
How a lot of those videos come from abuse and human trafficking situations and watching them is supporting it.
At least when they eventually watch it they will know the risks
Our three younger children have had (and, in the case of the two younger, still have) a LightPhone—dumb phones that have texting, calling, music, and directions but no browser or social media access—until a year or so before they will be moving out on their own. Then, they get a smartphone with limited functionality, which will be unlocked when they go out on their own and are making their own decisions. None of them have ever had social media. We repeatedly receive comments from others about the ways that our children are able to interact with others and always find something to do instead of retreating into their devices.
You do realize that once they turn 18, even if they are still living at home, they can easily just buy their own fully functional smartphone and plan, right? The phones are cheap, and even if they don't have a plan of their own they can just use someone's Wifi.
Sure - they can buy their own phone, but we still gave them the advantage of growing up without a smartphone. We have found that they love that choice so much that it just isn't a big deal at 18. It is more fun than you think :)
That would be a win though. You gave them a chance to develop a more fulfilling life and had teenage years without this extra crutch. By then hopefully you educated them on the dangers enough that they'll do well.
Love this so much! And I agree wholeheartedly. We gave our now 19-year-old daughter one of our old phones too early (she agrees with us) and while she’s grown a lot this first year of college, she can attest that screen addiction is REAL. …We decided several years ago that her younger siblings wouldn’t get smartphones until 18 or later, and so far so good — neither of them want one and we’re frequently told what great, we’ll-behaved young men they are.
I love that there are more and more of us out here doing this sort of counter-cultural work!
This type of parenting and shepherding is akin to making kids earn the money they get, prior to becoming old enough to work - verses just handing them money for breathing. The lessons and benefits of the former will serve them well, the rest of their lives. You're choice to keep the mental poison and subversion away from her, will be even more beneficial..
Thank you! And...I might add...we will never buy a smartphone for a child even if they are 30 years old! If parents would stop buying phones for kids the tide would turn.
I'm always asking people, "for all that we traded away for every "progress" we fell victim to, are we better off financially, emotionally, intellectually and behaviorally??
It all (you name the product) was created, marketed and sold to the masses, for two reasons- profit and control (through addiction, coercion, manipulation and demoralization and distraction).
The future looks grim, because it's a numbers game and those like your daughter will be victims of attrition. The bright spot is that she and her rare ilk, will be stars in a sea of droolers and hopefully will keep the remnant alive, going into the next half century.
"...will be stars in a sea of droolers and hopefully will keep the remnant alive, going into the next half century." I just love the way you said this! Perfect!
We raised 4 girls and one boy with this simple rule on cell phones. They were allowed to have them when they met these conditions:
1. Pay for it yourself.
2. Graduate high school.
If an emergency ever arose where they needed to call us all they needed to do was ask the person next to them to borrow theirs. All 5 kids grew up without being hooked to social media...really helped their ability to be productive members of society that cared about other people.
LOVE THIS!! Have young kids now, but already have thought a lot about cell phone/screen time, etc. I want them both to have the childhood I did - unencumbered by a smart phone and the addiction to checking it allll the time (something I struggle with as a 35 yo!!). Thank you for this great article - plan on sharing it widely and referencing back to it often.
Seriously -- it is time for grownup America to end this silliness. Smartphones and social media are not the problem with teenagers. Scientific studies, including CDC, Pew, meta-analyses, and serious reviews such as in Nature show being online generally benefits teenagers, including younger ones, in terms of sharply reduced suicide attempts, self-harm, and other major risks. If you don't believe this, I invite you to download and analyze these surveys and studies yourselves instead of relying on pop-media and pop-psychology splashes. What, then, is driving higher teen depression and suicide? Again, the surveys and statistics are distressingly clear, even as escapist feel-good posters deny them. Widespread violent and emotional abuses by increasingly troubled, addicted, mentally troubled parents and household grownups are by far the biggest causes of teens' depression, suicide, self-harm, and other risks, the CDC 2021 survey conclusively shows. Teens use phones and social media to keep in contact with others who can help them deal with this epidemic of troubled grownups around them, the Pew and CDC surveys show. Sure, any individual teen and family may differ from these norms, but in general, parents and adults should focus not on controlling teens' social media use, but on addressing their own adult crises of addiction, abuse, and unstable behaviors that affect the most vulnerable teens the most. I know what I'm saying here is not popular, unlike the soothing, self-flattering messages grownups indulge in these forums. I also know social-media moguls who would love to boost their profits by exploiting adult and teen alike are no heroes. But if we are grownups, we have to stop this cult of self-praise and admit that where teens are troubled, the adults around them are even more troubled. Let me leave you with this statistic: during the 2011-2021 period when teens became more depressed, CDC figures show an appalling, record 722,000 American grownups of age to parent teens (30-59) died from self-inflicted suicides and drug/alcohol overdoses, equal to the ENTIRE population of Denver gone, just the iceberg-tip of messed-up grownups our young people have to endure today. Teens today are right to be more depressed at the family, community, and global challenges they face. Let them at least keep their social media contacts so they can find peer help for themselves.
And furthermore, if smartphones and social media are really as horrible as they claim, why won't the grownups just throw their own proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom for good and quit those things themselves as well? I mean, they really should be leading by example, right? And the specious idea that smartphones and social media are that unacceptably and categorically harmful for teens but yet somehow innocuous for adults above some arbitrary age limit (pick your poison) really strains credulity, to put it mildly.
The amount of social media fueled drama that's spilled over into in-person drama, porn addiction, technically illegal photographs on phones, and kids ending up with discipline issues in the school because they can't resist looking at their phones during class is unreal. The existence of smartphones has made his job much more difficult in a LOT of ways.
Of course, there was also the time they busted a kid with a vape on campus (the other all-pervasive electronic menace) because he posted a picture of himself with it IN A CLASSROOM on his Instagram...
Just found your Substack! Looking forward to following along. My oldest is 9, and we don’t plan for him to have a phone for many years yet. And our plan is for his first phone to be a flip phone. But this was encouraging to wait even longer. I’ve been trying to have more conversations with parents at my kids’ school about phones, and I’m saddened / surprised by the excuses parents give about why they’ve already given their young kids phones. 😢
Wonderful and convicting post Melanie! It was a breath of fresh air to read your list of "hidden benefits" and to have the common story about teens needing phones turned upside down. Our daughter got her first phone when she entered university (at 16), and after experiencing some of the content, was grateful that she never had one when she was younger. Our soon 16-year old son has no interest in a phone at all and has a lively group of friends who simply call him on our landline. Accentuating the gains and spelling out the losses is truly a helpful perspective shifter. Will be sure to share your piece with my readers :)
Thank you, Ruth, for your kind words. Once you experience the benefits, it makes so much (common) sense. I love that your son has “a lively group of friends who call him on the landline.” I wish all teens could enjoy the benefits of a lively group of friends without the distraction of a smartphone and the stress of social media. Thank you for sharing!
I was reflecting a couple of days ago that he must be one of the few remaining teens who spends time memorizing phone numbers of friends and family (his younger brother was actually quizzing him all the way through his hand-penned phone book) :)
Great article... I did it too with my daughter - no cell phone whatsoever. She turned 18 this spring - gave her her first phone - she forgets it, lets its battery die - generally ignores it. I feel that's a win.
Yes! A WinWin! This is the secret that no one understands until you raise a teen without a phone :) Stay Strong!
Once a kid gets into thought patterns in her teenage years they are very hard to break. This can be good or bad.
I straight up lost my flip phone at my first job after high school (a summer camp). I didnt even realize it was gone until my boss found it and reprimanded me. I went back to a flip phone in 2016 and hope to stick with it indefinitely.
This article made me cry. Tears of joy for your daughter, tears of joy for her current views and tears of joy that this stance can and DOES work. We have often felt very lonely in our journey, but so many small nuggets from this post are filed away in my brain to site whenever I have doubts. Or even harder, whenever we face another parent expressing their opposing views. Thank you Melanie, this is huge for all of us. Keep up the amazing work!
Andrea, it is a very lonely journey, but I found that having just a few friends who were like-minded really helped. We need a small community. I have been on both ends of the screen addiction problem in my own home. I know the pain very well, but I also know the joy of success. Thank you for understanding that joy!
I'm trying to start just that in my local area for our kids. Right now my biggest goal is making our house the "fun" place to hang out despite limited screens.
Yes! Make food and they will come!
It's amazing how many people said kids need to be tech-savvy in order to succeed, which in their minds means constant phone use. Like the author said, four-year-olds figure this stuff out, what they don't figure out is the addictive portion of it.
Several dads I talked to state how their daughters go home, shut their door, and play on their phone. And then they say how slow progress is with their therapist. Well, maybe if you took control and gave her some life direction instead of her looking for it in her immature friends, things would be different.
It's so frustrating, and the ridiculous lies people tell themselves to avoid making hard decisions makes it all the harder. Then you're the bad guy for taking a stand against habits everyone knows is detrimental, because it feels mean.
We turn it around at ScreenStrong; we are the 'good guy' parents! Kids know that they need parents to do the hard things for them. We can’t parent out of worrying that our kids won’t like us - that doesn’t work out very well. Our job is to make this phone thing not such a big deal and instead focus on family connections and having fun with our kids! Thanks for your note.
Are parents afraid of their children?
If they see its a problem why dont they just take it away completely ?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes. And given the stats on how many children break off contact with their family, this tiptoeing is making things worse.
"tiptoeing is making things worse" YES!
Yes, parents are afraid of their kids and of culture :(
Indeed. I recall an old anti-drug commercial from the 1980s: "Parents who use drugs, have children who use drugs". Replace "drugs" with "smartphones" and "social media" and it still makes sense today, *a fortiori* in fact.
There has never been a society where adults use smartphones and/or social media, but teens don't. Nor has the reverse ever been true. As Gandhi famously said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world". Otherwise one is being a flaming hypocrite, even if one may argue that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
I think it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt. I think most parents are trying to do the best thing by their children. Maybe they erroneously think early cells are best, but I think it’s more that they worry about their kids’ social development if they don’t have phones. Whenever we made our decisions (and my kids are pretty late in getting phones,) we weighed costs/benefits on both sides, but never was fear of our kids rejecting us a consideration. I’m glad we didn’t get them phones early, and actually each kid seems to be getting hers a bit later, but that doesn’t mean that parents who make the other decision care less about their kids or are living in fear.
Two reasons come to mind:
1) After puberty, the kids often become physically bigger and stronger than the parents.
2) After 18, they become legal adults, which means that their phones (and all other personal possessions and effects) legally become vested property rights that cannot be arbitrarily seized or revoked without due process.
But before both of those happen, if they are afraid, it is basically due to culture more than anything else.
I guess I better ramp up my lifting :D
My boys are 3 and 1.5 so I got plenty of time to bulk up!
All jokes aside, I can see your point. specially between moms and their boys.
Now once they are 18 it becomes more tricky, but if you are the one financially maintaining them I think you still have control. Hopefully by then you've had the conversations and they will make better choices.
Indeed. But the deeper question of course is, why any parent in their right mind (who is not an insufferable control freak, at least) would actually WANT to keep on controlling their kids well beyond the legal age of majority is really quite puzzling IMHO.
And before anyone brings up the latest pop neuroscience (which is still very much in its infancy), note that these tendencies pre-date such ideas for some people, and in some cultures.
ScreenStrong is not about control, at all. To those who have not experienced the success it may be hard to understand. Our kids love their family unit, they love belonging, and there is no conflict over this as they get older at the age of 18. Could it be that they actually like their low-smartphone life as young men in college? Yes! Listen to this episode of our podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/live-teen-q-a-on-growing-up-without-addictive-screens-179/id1474681355?i=1000641960104
It's not like once your child turns 18 they seize to be your kids. Plus look around, 18 year olds are not that wise! Specially now being socially stunted and lacking "real world experience". You will always be a parent and want to positively influence them as much as you can, help them succeed.
If they want to go and buy a smart phone with their own money, so be it. But if they still depend on me financially at that time then I still have a say no? "my house my rules" kinda thing.
Yes, many are. What they don’t understand is that 1) your children will absolutely pick up on your fear of them 2) the children will likely exploit that fear and 3) children don’t like or respect adults who are afraid of them.
This is so, so encouraging. I look forward to sharing it in my monthly roundup, later this month! Thank you Melanie!
Thank you for sharing!
Terrific article. I wonder if you might address how you dealt with all your daughter’s peer’s phones. My wife and I have 7 children. Our oldest is just 12 so the battle is only beginning. However, we’ve been ahead of the game from watching the childhoods of our older nieces and nephews compromised by their parents’ decisions to allow far too many screens in their lives. We don’t do video games and screens are pretty limited at our home. But it’s still so frustrating because despite our constant efforts, other parents undermine us with their screen and phone permissiveness.
And we’re in a very traditional conservative community and classical Catholic school with many like-minded people. Still, we’re undermined every step of the way. I’ll invite my sons’ friends over to spend the day running around outside doing boy things, but inevitably one boy will have a device in their pocket and lure the other boys away from non-screen based activities and into screen-based. It’s a constant source of frustration and I’m sure a permanent and unavoidable part of the battle, but I just wonder how you managed that. I’m sure gymnastics as an extracurricular certainly helped since it is so time intensive. But, more often, the families trying to live in this manner are also more free range style so keeping the kids busy may not be part of the solution. With that in mind, my kids can all be swinging from the tree tops with all the other conservative free range screen free kids from our community, but when they take a break, there’s still going to be several kids lying in wait to show them porn. Of course, that’s not an argument against “accepting the things we cannot change, having the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” but I wonder if you might have any thoughts on that. Perhaps it’s a question to address in a future post.
Yes, it is a problem with other kids, and it is impossible to have zero exposure, and that is okay. You are doing a great job! We had a rule at our home that (friend's) phones were not allowed to be out when friends came over. The kids got used to it (the parents had more problems with that rule than the kids.) I would love to address this more in a future post. For now, I will say that having scheduled activities is really important in our digitally saturated world. We see so many benefits, especially as kids get older and enter the high school years. I used to have a different opinion until I raised a gamer who spent all his free time on a video game ☹ Thanks for reaching out, and stay strong!
Thanks for your essay. When you enforce the friends-need-to-put their-phones-away rule in your house, what is the best way to go about it? A table by the front door where they can drop their phones? I'm curious about how you put it into practice, and did you say anything to their parents -- or only talked with other moms about it as needed? I am realizing I need to have a relatively strict rule about this, otherwise many kids will take full advantage if I am wishy washy.
In all honesty, and with all due respect, I believe your son would most likely have developed a gaming problem (and/or other tech-related problem) regardless of how he was raised. Fortunately, most gamers don't develop such problems. I have personally only known one such person in my four decades on this Earth, and she wasn't even a guy, interestingly enough. (She was a colleague of mine in grad school who just barely graduated after wasting all her time on World of WarCrack, and they felt sorry for her so they gave her a master's, apparently.) And I have known literally hundreds of gamers, and been a gamer myself to one degree or another since I was before I was even kindergarten with my Nintendo (OG NES), then the later generations of systems too. I never really got into any of the newer MMORPGs, though.
The newer MMORPGs are much worse and more addictive. I know hundreds of addicted gamers. in one private FB group alone, we have 20,000+ families, and I would guess that at least half are struggling with gaming overuse in their kids. There are over 50 treatment centers (last count). Hate to say it is a much bigger deal than some people realize.
I hear you, sounds like a constant struggle. I dont think its possible to reduce the exposure to 0 so just do as much as you can. Can you try talking to the parents and schedule "Device free outings" ?
If you're concern of porn, i would get ahead of the situation and have a discussion about it.
How it can affect their ability to date and connect with a girl in the future
How a lot of those videos come from abuse and human trafficking situations and watching them is supporting it.
At least when they eventually watch it they will know the risks
Our three younger children have had (and, in the case of the two younger, still have) a LightPhone—dumb phones that have texting, calling, music, and directions but no browser or social media access—until a year or so before they will be moving out on their own. Then, they get a smartphone with limited functionality, which will be unlocked when they go out on their own and are making their own decisions. None of them have ever had social media. We repeatedly receive comments from others about the ways that our children are able to interact with others and always find something to do instead of retreating into their devices.
You do realize that once they turn 18, even if they are still living at home, they can easily just buy their own fully functional smartphone and plan, right? The phones are cheap, and even if they don't have a plan of their own they can just use someone's Wifi.
Sure - they can buy their own phone, but we still gave them the advantage of growing up without a smartphone. We have found that they love that choice so much that it just isn't a big deal at 18. It is more fun than you think :)
That would be a win though. You gave them a chance to develop a more fulfilling life and had teenage years without this extra crutch. By then hopefully you educated them on the dangers enough that they'll do well.
Love this so much! And I agree wholeheartedly. We gave our now 19-year-old daughter one of our old phones too early (she agrees with us) and while she’s grown a lot this first year of college, she can attest that screen addiction is REAL. …We decided several years ago that her younger siblings wouldn’t get smartphones until 18 or later, and so far so good — neither of them want one and we’re frequently told what great, we’ll-behaved young men they are.
I love that there are more and more of us out here doing this sort of counter-cultural work!
I should clarify — we won’t allow smartphones until 18 or later… if they eventually want one they’ll have to buy it themselves.
Well Done!!!
I wish more parents would follow your lead.
This type of parenting and shepherding is akin to making kids earn the money they get, prior to becoming old enough to work - verses just handing them money for breathing. The lessons and benefits of the former will serve them well, the rest of their lives. You're choice to keep the mental poison and subversion away from her, will be even more beneficial..
Bravo!!
Thank you! And...I might add...we will never buy a smartphone for a child even if they are 30 years old! If parents would stop buying phones for kids the tide would turn.
Truer words!!
I'm always asking people, "for all that we traded away for every "progress" we fell victim to, are we better off financially, emotionally, intellectually and behaviorally??
It all (you name the product) was created, marketed and sold to the masses, for two reasons- profit and control (through addiction, coercion, manipulation and demoralization and distraction).
The future looks grim, because it's a numbers game and those like your daughter will be victims of attrition. The bright spot is that she and her rare ilk, will be stars in a sea of droolers and hopefully will keep the remnant alive, going into the next half century.
"...will be stars in a sea of droolers and hopefully will keep the remnant alive, going into the next half century." I just love the way you said this! Perfect!
We raised 4 girls and one boy with this simple rule on cell phones. They were allowed to have them when they met these conditions:
1. Pay for it yourself.
2. Graduate high school.
If an emergency ever arose where they needed to call us all they needed to do was ask the person next to them to borrow theirs. All 5 kids grew up without being hooked to social media...really helped their ability to be productive members of society that cared about other people.
LOVE THIS!! Have young kids now, but already have thought a lot about cell phone/screen time, etc. I want them both to have the childhood I did - unencumbered by a smart phone and the addiction to checking it allll the time (something I struggle with as a 35 yo!!). Thank you for this great article - plan on sharing it widely and referencing back to it often.
A real question for me as a father is: how can I use this wretched thing less?!
Now we need to get parents off their smartphones.
BINGO. That has to come first, to lead by example, so as not to be flaming hypocrites.
Seriously -- it is time for grownup America to end this silliness. Smartphones and social media are not the problem with teenagers. Scientific studies, including CDC, Pew, meta-analyses, and serious reviews such as in Nature show being online generally benefits teenagers, including younger ones, in terms of sharply reduced suicide attempts, self-harm, and other major risks. If you don't believe this, I invite you to download and analyze these surveys and studies yourselves instead of relying on pop-media and pop-psychology splashes. What, then, is driving higher teen depression and suicide? Again, the surveys and statistics are distressingly clear, even as escapist feel-good posters deny them. Widespread violent and emotional abuses by increasingly troubled, addicted, mentally troubled parents and household grownups are by far the biggest causes of teens' depression, suicide, self-harm, and other risks, the CDC 2021 survey conclusively shows. Teens use phones and social media to keep in contact with others who can help them deal with this epidemic of troubled grownups around them, the Pew and CDC surveys show. Sure, any individual teen and family may differ from these norms, but in general, parents and adults should focus not on controlling teens' social media use, but on addressing their own adult crises of addiction, abuse, and unstable behaviors that affect the most vulnerable teens the most. I know what I'm saying here is not popular, unlike the soothing, self-flattering messages grownups indulge in these forums. I also know social-media moguls who would love to boost their profits by exploiting adult and teen alike are no heroes. But if we are grownups, we have to stop this cult of self-praise and admit that where teens are troubled, the adults around them are even more troubled. Let me leave you with this statistic: during the 2011-2021 period when teens became more depressed, CDC figures show an appalling, record 722,000 American grownups of age to parent teens (30-59) died from self-inflicted suicides and drug/alcohol overdoses, equal to the ENTIRE population of Denver gone, just the iceberg-tip of messed-up grownups our young people have to endure today. Teens today are right to be more depressed at the family, community, and global challenges they face. Let them at least keep their social media contacts so they can find peer help for themselves.
Amen to that! Well-said, Mike.
And furthermore, if smartphones and social media are really as horrible as they claim, why won't the grownups just throw their own proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom for good and quit those things themselves as well? I mean, they really should be leading by example, right? And the specious idea that smartphones and social media are that unacceptably and categorically harmful for teens but yet somehow innocuous for adults above some arbitrary age limit (pick your poison) really strains credulity, to put it mildly.
You should write a substack article.
Thanks. I have a Substack page and of course invite viewers: https://mikemales.substack.com/publish/posts
My husband is a high school administrator.
The amount of social media fueled drama that's spilled over into in-person drama, porn addiction, technically illegal photographs on phones, and kids ending up with discipline issues in the school because they can't resist looking at their phones during class is unreal. The existence of smartphones has made his job much more difficult in a LOT of ways.
Of course, there was also the time they busted a kid with a vape on campus (the other all-pervasive electronic menace) because he posted a picture of himself with it IN A CLASSROOM on his Instagram...
Just found your Substack! Looking forward to following along. My oldest is 9, and we don’t plan for him to have a phone for many years yet. And our plan is for his first phone to be a flip phone. But this was encouraging to wait even longer. I’ve been trying to have more conversations with parents at my kids’ school about phones, and I’m saddened / surprised by the excuses parents give about why they’ve already given their young kids phones. 😢