Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
You may be asking the wrong person here, since essentially you are seeking advice on how to be the parent I wasn’t. The spawn are so plugged into the matrix that it is a surprise they didn’t come with chargers. (Or maybe they did. We just assumed that tube was the umbilical cord.)
Everything in my fibre wants to resist the narrative that mobile phones are responsible for all that is wrong with our children: anxiety, sleeplessness, poor concentration, depression, Harry Styles. It seems so much like all those other moral panics we remember, such as violent videos, rock ‘n’ roll and the millennium bug. I want to remind people that when I was growing up we had videos telling us how to survive a nuclear attack.
The bible for this new panic, Jonathan Haidt’s persuasive The Anxious Generation, refers to “the great rewiring” of teenage brains. Mind you, Haidt also blames the lost hours of unsupervised outdoor play before we all become anxious parents. But I’ve read Lord of the Flies and there was a lot of outdoor activity there. Even so, the man has at least half a point.
So, how to cut your kids’ phone usage. As I’ve said previously, why are you looking to a journalist for answers? We are the original ADD profession. But let’s be honest. You already know what to do, you just can’t face doing it. You don’t want the next Cuban missile crisis in your own home. This stuff escalates fast. You thought Heartbreak Ridge was in Korea? Try taking an iPhone off a 14-year-old with Fomo.
The answers are out there.
Don’t give them a smartphone till they are older.
Cut the home WiFi from a certain time – although that could cramp your Netflix habit.
Set your children’s devices to lock after a particular time or so many hours of usage, although you’ll probably need to get them to show you how to do it.
Ban phones at the table. Hold out for another year or two with a dumbphone. Maybe get a puppy to divert them, though many breeds do not come with WiFi.
But you knew all that. You just don’t want the rows or the worry that you are condemning your child to be left out because they don’t have Insta or Snapchat. You worry you are basically condemning them to being like that weird kid who didn’t have a television when we were still in school and who was playing Scrabble or listening to Radio 3 when we were all cackling over some scene in The Young Ones.
Of course Radio 3 and Scrabble are better for them, but they may not see that if they end up excluded from an entire social scene. They’ll just succumb to anxiety and Harry Styles later on and for different reasons.
The fact you aren’t strong enough to do this alone is why the key to cutting your kids’ phone usage is to cut everyone else’s first. So stop worrying about what your child is doing and focus on ruining it for everyone else first.
Campaign to get phones out of schools even though the main damage is done outside school hours when they are alone in their rooms. Get parents to agree to an 8pm phone watershed. Lobby for a school-wide ban on social media for under-16s and institute random checks of their apps. Or, better still, get the government to do it. That’s what we do when we don’t fancy managing something ourselves.
But before we go any further, how’s your own phone addiction going? Do you sit among friends idly scrolling through X or checking the football scores? Do you find yourself playing Candy Crush during work meetings or being reprimanded by your wife for skimming TikTok while you are meant to be watching TV together? Don’t blame me, I didn’t want to watch White Lotus anyway. As we sit here pontificating on the way these devices have retrained young brains, let’s just consider how much we too have been rewired.
Our children may indeed have it worse, yet too many of us are not much better. Sadly, I know I’m not. Perhaps the first step then, is to lead by example. I saw a video on how to wean ourselves off the phones on TikTok, or maybe YouTube. I’ll just find it… don’t go away… you still there?
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here