Brooding: kjezermorton's son has entered the seventh grade, which means that he finally gets his first phone. As milestones go, this one is not her fave. Read the full column for why giving her son his first phone feels like a trap
. Unless my son turns out to be an unusual person, he will probably grow to do the same. Maybe this is fine — most people would insist that it is, that all of this is normal, that I need to relax. But I’m. My phone has amplified my worst qualities and dulled my best ones. It has also done this to almost every other person I know. I realize that we rely on these things to exist in the world, but I refuse to believe that resistance is futile.
But another reason parents hate this topic and react defensively to provocations around it is that it touches on habits of our own that many of us can’t control. It’s interesting how much importance some parents of toddlers put on things like vegetable eating or wooden toys — things that, in both the short and long terms, make no difference to their kids’ development and are mostly to do with consumer choices and the development of “taste.
What I do care about is prolonging the time in my kids’ lives when they aren’t on standing reserve for their device. Sometimes the phone intersects with their day; sometimes it doesn’t. If days go by before a text is answered, no one should be upset. That is the reality that I, for a very short while longer, have the power to conjure.
This is the experience I’ve been able to maintain for my kids up until now, and for their sake I wish I could keep doing it. They don’t yet know the dull, nervous attentiveness that we all have for our devices. The sense that people are waiting to hear back, that we have important communicative work that needs to be done every waking hour of the day. As for the kids’ privacy, the sooner they learn that no digital trace they create is private, the better.
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