Thoughts on parenting: mobile phones & other media

Apparently parents in the UK are pledging to not give their children a mobile phone until they’re 14.

I don’t like it. Mobile phones are one of the most powerful inventions in modern history: they allow us to access almost all of the knowledge that has ever been produced by humanity, at any time, from anywhere. And, they are a good tool for communicating. Withholding these advantages from children seems entirely backwards to me.

I get the concerns, of course. Phones let children access useful knowledge, but they also make it easier to access less enriching content; people can be far harsher online than in-person, and cyber-bullying is a thing; children can form cliques and exclude some of their classmates from group chats; so much of the content made for smart phones is short-form, which can reduce children’s ability to focus, and they don’t learn to enjoy long-form content (so that apparently even Ivy League students struggle to read books); and the constant pings are distracting and preventing children from having real interactions or engaging in non-digital activities.

But all of these things are true with adults as well. What I find so frustrating about this conversation is that the same ‘grown-ups’ who complain about kids being unable to go for five minutes without looking at their phone, or who bemoan that kids don’t read books, are glued to their phones themselves, and barely ever turn a page! So many of my friends cannot even watch a film end-to-end without checking their phone.

Preventing kids from using phones from an early age will only make them more susceptible to the ills of phone use when they do get them — much like my British friends at uni had a less healthy relationship with alcohol than my Greek classmates, because they had been forbidden from drinking until they turned 18.

This tendency towards outright bans feels like the result of the wider devaluation of personal agency. We can’t trust kids do something in moderation, so it feels easier to stop them from doing it at all. This becomes a vicious circle: children will never learn to exercise judgement or self-restraint, so there’ll be a need to ban more and more things — television, video games, drinking, swearing, gambling: anything that can be described as a vice has to go.

A better approach in my view is to role-model responsibility. Show children how to use phones to get something meaningful out of them instead of mindless entertainment. Teach them to prefer personal interactions over phones — e.g. no phones at the table — but don’t be a hypocrite: do not talk to them while also scrolling through Instagram yourself. Don’t have your phone out at the table. Spend an afternoon inside with a book in your hand — if you’re never reading yourself, why would you expect your child to start doing so? Doing all this is may be harder than just saying no to phones, but I’d argue that if you’re finding it hard to put your phone away when you’re having dinner with your family, you’ve no moral authority to be banning phones.

The same is true with other media: I hear of parents banning television, or video games, or comic books. But again, there’s value in all these media: there is good television, there are good video games (and playing games together can be very wholesome! many people have bonded over Mario Kart), and there are excellent comic books. Teach your children to appreciate things without being so overly consumed by them that they don’t have time for anything else.

I know, I know, I’m coming across very sanctimonious in this post. But I’m not wrong. (All this said, I don’t know what the right age to give phones to children; mine don’t have their own devices yet. But I can imagine giving them one when their friends start having phones, without worrying too much about it.)