It's the Adults, Not the Kids!

“In every culture, young children want the objects of grown-up desire.”

Public Domain: Roman Odintsov/Pexels

During a recent Q&A session following a presentation I’d given about curbing digital media use, an audience member who identified as a grandmother asked what she could do about her own adult children’s smartphone addictions. She said she worried about her grandchildren’s excessive screen time, but at least they got a reprieve when they came over to her house. Their parents, on the other hand, were on their phones all the time. Did I have any advice on influencing adult behaviours?

Her question hit me hard because I knew my answer would disappoint her. I said, “No. You can’t change someone unless they want to be changed.” I suggested giving the parents my book and bringing up the topic of too much screen time for discussion in hopes of piquing their curiosity, but ultimately, her influence was limited to her own home. I encouraged her to continue offering a screen-free environment to her grandchildren, who clearly need it.

The question sparked some thoughts that I’ve been mulling over ever since. Perhaps we’ve been focused on the wrong issue, fretting about the amount of screen time that kids get without turning the magnifying glass on ourselves—the parents and role models whose daily habits set the tone for a child’s life. Maybe the pressing question is not, “How do I get my kid off her phone?”, but rather, “How can I get off my own phone so that my kid doesn’t see that as normal?”

As I listened to the woman, I was struck with the thought that this whole societal catastrophe of excessive screen time eroding real-life interactions and experiences has very little to do with kids and everything to do with the adults who raise them. This is an adult problem, not a kid problem—because if the adults didn’t have trouble putting down their phones for prolonged periods of time, it’s less likely that the kids would.

This isn’t about blaming (parenting is a tough business at the best of times). This is about identifying the root cause of an issue in order to resolve it most effectively. But it is undeniably complicated and uncomfortable. Let’s dig in.

Phone as Objects of Desire

When the problem is framed in this way, it almost looks more serious and alarming than ever. Adults are supposed to be role models, voices of reason, exemplars of balance. But when they spend most of the day staring at their phones, it is hypocritical to yell at their kids for doing more or less the same. It’s the infamous “Do as I say, not as I do!” situation that no self-respecting child will ever believe. As a parent, you cannot not model; your actions are the most powerful form of instruction, and nothing else really matters.

“In every culture, young children want the objects of grown-up desire,” Sherry Turkle wrote in Reclaiming Conversation. Can you think of an object that is more coveted in the average adult’s life right now than their phone? It’s taken everywhere and consulted constantly.

To an adult, this may seem logical and inescapable. Work and social engagements are all planned using smartphones, and countless other daily tasks rely on apps, from banking and paying for stuff to booking appointments to tracking fitness goals to ordering food to playing music, not to mention communicating with friends, family, and work colleagues.

But from a child’s perspective, the adult is just on their phone all day long. The child doesn’t know what tasks the adult is accomplishing. The child observes how the adult’s facial expressions and demeanour are affected by whatever he or she sees on the screen, how it induces sadness or laughter or anxiety. The child may feel sidelined by the device while it dominates the parent’s focus.

What do they learn? They grow up believing that they, too, need this magical thing. Once they have it, they become highly possessive of it, lavishing time and attention onto it, which compromises their ability to experience real life. The cycle perpetuates itself, and you end up with yet another generation that would rather give up sex, vacations, alcohol, dogs, and exercise than be separated from their phones. Monkey see, monkey do.

Public Domain: Sunvani Hoàng

It's not unlike diet. If a kid grows up in a house where the parents eat healthy food at every meal, they are going to do the same by default. In fact, it would be hard for that kid to have a bad diet because junk food is not readily accessible. Screen habits are not that much different. In a home where adults are rarely on phones and always present for conversation, prioritizing eye contact and in-person, physical activities, a child will learn to do the same.

Confronting Hypocrisy

How often do parents hesitate to create firm boundaries around screen time because they feel guilty about their own excessive phone use? I suspect that many adults are as permissive as they are because they do not want to face the discomfort of acknowledging their own addiction—and then doing something about it.

They shy away from asking what author Paul Greenberg finally confronted when he gave up his smartphone: “What had I given my device that I could have given my son?” The answer: Like the average American, just under four hours a day.

Put that way, it sounds awful.

The consequences are severe. This represents an abdication of mentorship that parents owe their children and that kids desperately need. We all sign up for this task when we bring children into the world. We must raise them, like it or not. It’s the unquittable job. Sure, some deadbeat parents have always checked out in ways that horrify mainstream society, but for some reason, phones are now letting parents check out more than ever—and it has become disturbingly socially accepted to do so.

From Hyperviligant to Inattentive

Turkle has pointed out that parental behaviour these days is odd. When children are not at home, parents hover like helicopters, tracking their whereabouts and texting incessantly. When kids are in plain sight, parents give themselves permission to turn to their phones. “This is our paradox. When we are apart: hypervigilance. When we are together: inattention.”

This ruins opportunities for critical life lessons. “A child alone with a problem has an emergency. A child in conversation with a grown-up is facing a moment in life and learning how to cope with it,” Turkle wrote. But she talked to many teens who complained about their parents looking at their phones instead of at them, which made them disinclined to broach difficult topics.

I believe that kids are desperate for active parental presence (as opposed to passive, when a parent is nearby but disengaged). Kids need to be quizzed about their days, have stories teased out, asked questions about their thought processes. They take time and persistence to open up (especially monosyllabic teenage boys!), but they do eventually. Even when they don’t, they will on a subconscious level recognize the parent’s attention as a form of devotion.

New Doesn’t Always Mean Better

Suzi Kim/Unsplash

Technology enchants. It lures and seduces, and often causes adults to forget what they know about life and must pass on to their children. Too often, what is “new” becomes confused with “progress”, and parents fail to question what is lost when we hand over so much of our daily lives to these fancy and mind-bogglingly powerful devices.

Is there a solution? Yes. Get off your phone! If you’re a parent, model the habits you want to see in your own child. Interact with them, go outside, be in the real world. And at risk of sounding like a Luddite, consider moving more activities and communications offline where kids can see what you’re actually doing (think paper planner/calendar, alarm clock, paper books and newspapers, etc.). See my list of Adult Screen Resolutions for a New Year.

Let’s stop harping on the kids. It’s not their fault. We are the ones who are supposed to know better, and it is time for us to start taking more responsibility for the patterns we establish and normalize in their eyes. We owe it to them.

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