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Helping kids find a balance with smartphone use

Smartphones are ubiquitous for modern teens. Parents, including this reporter, are wrestling with how to best help kids create healthy relationships with their devices and each other.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
A teen holds her cellphone, which she received after signing a contract with her parents that limits her time spent on social media.

My daughter is a budding teenager, and it’s fun for us to watch movies together that I loved at her age. Some of the films – dialogue and plot – have aged poorly. Sometimes we cringe together at the sexism that went right over my teenage head. Sometimes she finds things hilariously old-fashioned. But after watching the 1984 film “Footloose,” she had this take: “I wish I was born when you were a teenager.”

I was not expecting that.

When we drilled into it, she was referring specifically to the ending, when the high schoolers come together to transform an old mill into their senior prom. And, she added with zero prompting from me, there were no phones occupying the teens’ time and energy. They didn’t need to search Pinterest for ideas! It was no less fun because it wasn’t immortalized on TikTok!

I was particularly interested in reporting this week's cover story with my colleague Jackie Valley because the question of how much phones should occupy teens’ time and energy is one that occupies my mind on a daily basis.

We live in a major city, where my child has a lot of autonomy (including getting herself to and from school on the subway at a young age). She needed a phone – I know not all would agree – at a younger age than I would have liked.

I also find myself stricter – my daughter confirms – about phone usage than most of the other parents I know. I believe that’s in part because I know more about the risks, due to my job and because of this story.

In almost every interview, my heart dropped at least once, as I listened to all the ways that parents are getting it wrong. I am one of those parents getting things wrong.

Yet I also feel better after doing this story. I’m getting a lot right! But more broadly, this is a conversation we as a society weren’t really even having a few years ago, at least not at the scale we are having it today.

What resonated with me the most came from an education director at a media literacy organization. This isn’t an absolute, he said, that social media is bad and only abstinence is good. It’s about finding the balance, teaching young people to use it intentionally as an addition to their lives, but not at the expense of living life.

I can’t imagine the discord in our house if today I tried to swap out the ubiquitous smartphone for a flip phone (one of my early mistakes). But newer parents continue to learn from us.

And I think some of what my own child has recognized in our cinematic journey back to the ’80s is that senior prom is probably a lot more fun phone-free.

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