I am in the thick, too, with a 14 year old finishing 8th grade (I also have an 11 year old and a 7 year old). I must be a little older than you because I didn't have social media until I was in my late 20s, which is when I started using Facebook (which I no longer use except for minimal business purposes). However, even by my mid-late 20s, people began to use blackberries. I found them to be so annoying. We would be trying to talk, and the person would be glued to whatever was happening on the phone. Then smartphones took it one step further. I was a little later to the smartphone world getting my first in 2014-2015, but I don't use social media, so for me, it's little more than messaging, maps, music, and podcasts, and most of the time sits unused. My husband and I were old enough to see the dangers in devices and social media before we started having kids in our 30s, and we knew from the beginning that screen time would be as minimal as possible. As the years have passed, we have only grown more militant about this, particularly as we learn that college students are unable to read entire books or watch movies without looking at their devices. In a generation, we have re-wired children's brains, and parents just take it as: this is the way things are now. For my son, our restrictions have been difficult. His entire baseball team has had phones for several years. We finally relented this spring when he turned 14. He got my old iphone 7, and I upgraded. I have the phone basically locked down with screen time, and I removed the apps like safari, as well as access to the app store. He can listen to music, text with his friends, and take photos. It does give him freedom and makes him feel a little less left-out, but he still pressures me for more. I get that at 14 kids do not want to feel different or left-out. I also get that he thinks our house is boring because we don't have video games; the kids don't have computers in their rooms; and they have never had their own ipads. On the other hand, he was able to read Tale of Two Cities in the fall of 8th grade and my kids can sit through multi-hour dinners and hold conversations with adults. I'm not sure what will happen in the future or whether my kids will rebel against my rules. But I do hope that when they are in college and they are able to focus on their work and read entire books, they will look back and understand why we did what we did.
This is an excellent article, and somewhat reminiscent of my own childhood. I greatly appreciate your work, as I grew up in the first two decades of the twenty-first century with no smartphone. A flip phone is still my main method of communication, and I can always recognize others who were raised in a similar way. It is my hope that we digital selectives can create a culture based on these principles.
Hi thanks so much for your article which I will keep returning to. I think I am the only parent I know who has an 11-12 year old (first year of secondary school in uk) who doesn’t have any kind of phone. I have one question about the old broken phone you let your kids use for music. My younger daughters who are 8 and 10 particularly love listening to and dancing to music which they do using my smartphone: the smartphone is a problem in the sense that when they just want to go off into the house to listen and dance on Spotify I invariably find them lying on their bedroom floor - often with their younger brother (5) - staring at the screen which has either a static artist’s photo or has short music video clips. You say you use a broken screen smartphone for your kids’ music but surely it’s just like a normal smartphone as it has to be connected to the internet and therefore has other functions, including internet searching and access to apps like Tik Tok and You Tube via a browser? I would love my kids to just have access to music without having the whole suite of smartphone utilities - like when we were kids with a tape deck or ‘ghetto blaster’. Do you have any suggestions for workarounds on this? Keep up the fabulous work x
My 14 year old (no phone, no social media. we have a landline to great success) has a Mighty 3 from Amazon https://amzn.to/43d9SMy
It's basically an MP3 player. We download music to it and then he has full access. No screen (which made him feel lame at first, but he quickly got over it). Mighty seems to know what's up too. They just sent an email about "screen free summers."
My daughter (now 10) has a super basic CD player in her room. She has 3 CDs she’s bought she listens to all the time and a bunch of older random CDs she can listen to when she wants. My 8 year old has one too but she’s not as into music yet. I anticipate at some point they’ll want more music access, but we’ve been so clear around screen guidelines and reasons I think it’ll be something we can communicate. (Like you can watch a music video on real TV, not a device in your room you’re borrowing.)
my teen has a walkman and an old ipod 😊 i’ve been moving away from spotify esp for the kids, so my inappropriate content there. also, you can turn off the short video clips on there!!! 11/10 recommend especially if kids are seeing them…some i have seen are downright pornographic 😱
Thanks so much for sharing these rules! Has owning a video game console ever come up with your 3 kids? I have a 7 year old and it’s all he talks about, apparently it’s what all his friends and his cousins do all the time. 😂 and we want to delay owning a console as much as possible. I love the idea of having our house as a buffer zone and he can play elsewhere, but it’s constant battle right now. I was wondering how your experience has been?
Hello. They have asked for one at various points over the years, but it's never been a serious option, so they've sort of given up. We did go through a phase of occasional online games (Minecraft and, very briefly, Roblox, years ago) until I realized how inisidious it can be, and now the rule is a hard "no video games in our house." They understand I won't budge on this, which has helped to reduce arguing. Melanie Hempe of Screen Strong writes compellingly of video games' effects on kids, if you ever need to bolster your resolve!
This will be interesting for us because my husband makes video games for a living! And we both are gamers who enjoy video games as art. So games are definitely a part of our lives. Our kid is definitely too young for them yet, but when he gets older we’ll have to think about how to share our love for the art form while also being aware of its bad side, especially since a lot of the games that are popular with kids right now are designed for retention above all else.
Stick with the no! It's a phase. I have 10 & 14 year old boys. They used to ask all the time in those early elementary school ages for video games. Now, I can't even remember the last time it came up.
Same! They do get to play with friends and cousins at their houses, but I like that it's (very) limited and we don't have to manage it constantly at home.
This was a great read and very interesting to see how other parents manage screens. My children are 12 and 10, boy and girl and just about everyone their ages have phones already. They have Apple tablets enabled with strict Screen Time preferences (I utilize every option provided for restrictions) yet I still feel like it’s too much, even though it’s significantly less exposure than their peers. They’ve only had Roblox for the past year or so because they would literally have no friends during summer since everyone else would be playing and talking while playing - so if you couldn’t play, you wouldn’t really be apart of the convo.
My son has been begging for a phone and I already decided 14 was my number but the older they get the more I feel like pushing it to 16. I’m from the, you needed a college email to use FB era, so I really struggle with embracing tech and wanting to protect them. Thanks for sharing this take.
Thanks for sharing; love reading your stuff. Question - you said the kiddos use a shared desktop for texts. I like that idea. Whose phone line are they texting from? Their own numbers or the parents’? Thank you.
Hello. They're texting from my cell number / email, which is tied to my Apple ID. But it's set up so that those messages go to the computer and don't come to my phone, and anything I text from my phone does not appear on the computer. It works well.
How have parents been burdened with all this monitoring and and worry without complaint? How are single moms supposed to cope? Their kids are getting chewed up and spat out.
A couple of questions: what's happening on school nights that don't have screen-er-tainment? Have these rules created a default in your family that when someone gets up in the morning, comes home after school, or gets back from an errand they don't sit down at a screen? Many schools nourish the screen-as-default mentality, my kids get to a classroom and pull out a laptop before they have any idea what is going to happen at the class. We struggle- adults, young adult children, and teens, in my house with this at home as well. At some point they are going to have their own devices and unrestricted access to the internet, sounds like for your oldest it's coming up in a couple years. Let me know how things are looking about 6 months after that. Not to be ominous, but to my first point, the more you can sink in non-screen rhythms and habits, the more foundation they have to stand on when every single one of their friends is plugged into 3 devices at once, scrolling in bed.
Hi Megan. The answer is yes, the default in our household is not to sit down at a screen, apart from homework time, which usually happens for 1-2 hours after the kids have wound down a bit after school.
With 3 kids, there are lots of after-school activities, and they tend to go to bed fairly early, so I often notice that there's not much extra time left that could be used on screens, even if we allowed them freely.
I'd love to get opinions from people who have daughters. My sons are 10 and 13, and I feel like I have a good approach with them. My daughter is almost 8 and I feel like girls would have different 'challenges'! (We're not there yet, but I know it will come sooner than later!)
I have 3 daughters. My oldest is twenty, middle is 12, and youngest is 9. It was so much easier to wait with my oldest. She bought her own phone and plan at 18. She is glad she had to wait and her only regrets are some things she got exposed to on an old iPod (I barely realized it had internet connection) as a teen.
My 12 year old is very eager for a smartphone, especially because this year at school, so many friends suddenly got them. It used to be she wasn't the only one. You need to be prepared to have teary-eyed conversations about this and empathize with how she feels while also loving her enough to hold your ground. I think its key that they really know how much you want them to thrive and be happy, but you are taking the long view, not the short one.
We got a landline this year and
she has lots of friends calling her on it. She's actually an incredibly popular kid. It's ironic that she thinks a smartphone would add anything to her life because the reason she's so popular seems to be that she's so full of joyful energy and adventurous curiosity that she likely would have lost if she had a smartphone. At her age, the girls have a lot of fights at school (so much drama!), but she's the one who has the courage to stand up for a bullied friend and stay friends with everyone through it all. She's spared all the online drama after school on group chats. Instead she gets landline calls and it's a better way of working out problems when you can speak with one or a few friends than using messaging or social media.
Sometimes when she's upset about not having a smartphone or even a tablet, I get discouraged because it's a big deal to her. And I can't give in because I know how sucked in she would get if she had these because I tried a limited use tablet before and it was a mistake.
But what I can't shake is the realization that she's such a great advertisement for why not to have tablets and smartphones. For example, she reads--despite having dyslexia--better than most of the kids who don't have it! She's fun to hang out with, she's creative. She's got the best shot at reaching her full potential compared with her peers.
So I don't know that I have lots of advice, except to say that, yes, the article's advice works for girls, too, and even spares them all kinds of heartache. The cost of the sacrifice you make in this will be carried far more by you than by your daughter, but she will think it's the opposite and won't get that until she's older. Then, if she's like my 20 year old, she will thank you!
I am in the thick, too, with a 14 year old finishing 8th grade (I also have an 11 year old and a 7 year old). I must be a little older than you because I didn't have social media until I was in my late 20s, which is when I started using Facebook (which I no longer use except for minimal business purposes). However, even by my mid-late 20s, people began to use blackberries. I found them to be so annoying. We would be trying to talk, and the person would be glued to whatever was happening on the phone. Then smartphones took it one step further. I was a little later to the smartphone world getting my first in 2014-2015, but I don't use social media, so for me, it's little more than messaging, maps, music, and podcasts, and most of the time sits unused. My husband and I were old enough to see the dangers in devices and social media before we started having kids in our 30s, and we knew from the beginning that screen time would be as minimal as possible. As the years have passed, we have only grown more militant about this, particularly as we learn that college students are unable to read entire books or watch movies without looking at their devices. In a generation, we have re-wired children's brains, and parents just take it as: this is the way things are now. For my son, our restrictions have been difficult. His entire baseball team has had phones for several years. We finally relented this spring when he turned 14. He got my old iphone 7, and I upgraded. I have the phone basically locked down with screen time, and I removed the apps like safari, as well as access to the app store. He can listen to music, text with his friends, and take photos. It does give him freedom and makes him feel a little less left-out, but he still pressures me for more. I get that at 14 kids do not want to feel different or left-out. I also get that he thinks our house is boring because we don't have video games; the kids don't have computers in their rooms; and they have never had their own ipads. On the other hand, he was able to read Tale of Two Cities in the fall of 8th grade and my kids can sit through multi-hour dinners and hold conversations with adults. I'm not sure what will happen in the future or whether my kids will rebel against my rules. But I do hope that when they are in college and they are able to focus on their work and read entire books, they will look back and understand why we did what we did.
This is an excellent article, and somewhat reminiscent of my own childhood. I greatly appreciate your work, as I grew up in the first two decades of the twenty-first century with no smartphone. A flip phone is still my main method of communication, and I can always recognize others who were raised in a similar way. It is my hope that we digital selectives can create a culture based on these principles.
Hi thanks so much for your article which I will keep returning to. I think I am the only parent I know who has an 11-12 year old (first year of secondary school in uk) who doesn’t have any kind of phone. I have one question about the old broken phone you let your kids use for music. My younger daughters who are 8 and 10 particularly love listening to and dancing to music which they do using my smartphone: the smartphone is a problem in the sense that when they just want to go off into the house to listen and dance on Spotify I invariably find them lying on their bedroom floor - often with their younger brother (5) - staring at the screen which has either a static artist’s photo or has short music video clips. You say you use a broken screen smartphone for your kids’ music but surely it’s just like a normal smartphone as it has to be connected to the internet and therefore has other functions, including internet searching and access to apps like Tik Tok and You Tube via a browser? I would love my kids to just have access to music without having the whole suite of smartphone utilities - like when we were kids with a tape deck or ‘ghetto blaster’. Do you have any suggestions for workarounds on this? Keep up the fabulous work x
My 14 year old (no phone, no social media. we have a landline to great success) has a Mighty 3 from Amazon https://amzn.to/43d9SMy
It's basically an MP3 player. We download music to it and then he has full access. No screen (which made him feel lame at first, but he quickly got over it). Mighty seems to know what's up too. They just sent an email about "screen free summers."
My daughter (now 10) has a super basic CD player in her room. She has 3 CDs she’s bought she listens to all the time and a bunch of older random CDs she can listen to when she wants. My 8 year old has one too but she’s not as into music yet. I anticipate at some point they’ll want more music access, but we’ve been so clear around screen guidelines and reasons I think it’ll be something we can communicate. (Like you can watch a music video on real TV, not a device in your room you’re borrowing.)
my teen has a walkman and an old ipod 😊 i’ve been moving away from spotify esp for the kids, so my inappropriate content there. also, you can turn off the short video clips on there!!! 11/10 recommend especially if kids are seeing them…some i have seen are downright pornographic 😱
i got the old ipod on mercari for $50 😊
https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/s/XpzB5yH0r7
Thanks so much for sharing these rules! Has owning a video game console ever come up with your 3 kids? I have a 7 year old and it’s all he talks about, apparently it’s what all his friends and his cousins do all the time. 😂 and we want to delay owning a console as much as possible. I love the idea of having our house as a buffer zone and he can play elsewhere, but it’s constant battle right now. I was wondering how your experience has been?
Hello. They have asked for one at various points over the years, but it's never been a serious option, so they've sort of given up. We did go through a phase of occasional online games (Minecraft and, very briefly, Roblox, years ago) until I realized how inisidious it can be, and now the rule is a hard "no video games in our house." They understand I won't budge on this, which has helped to reduce arguing. Melanie Hempe of Screen Strong writes compellingly of video games' effects on kids, if you ever need to bolster your resolve!
This will be interesting for us because my husband makes video games for a living! And we both are gamers who enjoy video games as art. So games are definitely a part of our lives. Our kid is definitely too young for them yet, but when he gets older we’ll have to think about how to share our love for the art form while also being aware of its bad side, especially since a lot of the games that are popular with kids right now are designed for retention above all else.
Glad to hear your updated view here! Helps me feel like we can keep going with our no video game rule!
Stick with the no! It's a phase. I have 10 & 14 year old boys. They used to ask all the time in those early elementary school ages for video games. Now, I can't even remember the last time it came up.
Same! They do get to play with friends and cousins at their houses, but I like that it's (very) limited and we don't have to manage it constantly at home.
Thanks!! 😊
This was a great read and very interesting to see how other parents manage screens. My children are 12 and 10, boy and girl and just about everyone their ages have phones already. They have Apple tablets enabled with strict Screen Time preferences (I utilize every option provided for restrictions) yet I still feel like it’s too much, even though it’s significantly less exposure than their peers. They’ve only had Roblox for the past year or so because they would literally have no friends during summer since everyone else would be playing and talking while playing - so if you couldn’t play, you wouldn’t really be apart of the convo.
My son has been begging for a phone and I already decided 14 was my number but the older they get the more I feel like pushing it to 16. I’m from the, you needed a college email to use FB era, so I really struggle with embracing tech and wanting to protect them. Thanks for sharing this take.
Thanks for sharing; love reading your stuff. Question - you said the kiddos use a shared desktop for texts. I like that idea. Whose phone line are they texting from? Their own numbers or the parents’? Thank you.
Hello. They're texting from my cell number / email, which is tied to my Apple ID. But it's set up so that those messages go to the computer and don't come to my phone, and anything I text from my phone does not appear on the computer. It works well.
Awesome, thank you!
How have parents been burdened with all this monitoring and and worry without complaint? How are single moms supposed to cope? Their kids are getting chewed up and spat out.
A couple of questions: what's happening on school nights that don't have screen-er-tainment? Have these rules created a default in your family that when someone gets up in the morning, comes home after school, or gets back from an errand they don't sit down at a screen? Many schools nourish the screen-as-default mentality, my kids get to a classroom and pull out a laptop before they have any idea what is going to happen at the class. We struggle- adults, young adult children, and teens, in my house with this at home as well. At some point they are going to have their own devices and unrestricted access to the internet, sounds like for your oldest it's coming up in a couple years. Let me know how things are looking about 6 months after that. Not to be ominous, but to my first point, the more you can sink in non-screen rhythms and habits, the more foundation they have to stand on when every single one of their friends is plugged into 3 devices at once, scrolling in bed.
Hi Megan. The answer is yes, the default in our household is not to sit down at a screen, apart from homework time, which usually happens for 1-2 hours after the kids have wound down a bit after school.
With 3 kids, there are lots of after-school activities, and they tend to go to bed fairly early, so I often notice that there's not much extra time left that could be used on screens, even if we allowed them freely.
This article might help to explain it: https://katherinemartinko.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-screen-free
I'd love to get opinions from people who have daughters. My sons are 10 and 13, and I feel like I have a good approach with them. My daughter is almost 8 and I feel like girls would have different 'challenges'! (We're not there yet, but I know it will come sooner than later!)
I have 3 daughters. My oldest is twenty, middle is 12, and youngest is 9. It was so much easier to wait with my oldest. She bought her own phone and plan at 18. She is glad she had to wait and her only regrets are some things she got exposed to on an old iPod (I barely realized it had internet connection) as a teen.
My 12 year old is very eager for a smartphone, especially because this year at school, so many friends suddenly got them. It used to be she wasn't the only one. You need to be prepared to have teary-eyed conversations about this and empathize with how she feels while also loving her enough to hold your ground. I think its key that they really know how much you want them to thrive and be happy, but you are taking the long view, not the short one.
We got a landline this year and
she has lots of friends calling her on it. She's actually an incredibly popular kid. It's ironic that she thinks a smartphone would add anything to her life because the reason she's so popular seems to be that she's so full of joyful energy and adventurous curiosity that she likely would have lost if she had a smartphone. At her age, the girls have a lot of fights at school (so much drama!), but she's the one who has the courage to stand up for a bullied friend and stay friends with everyone through it all. She's spared all the online drama after school on group chats. Instead she gets landline calls and it's a better way of working out problems when you can speak with one or a few friends than using messaging or social media.
Sometimes when she's upset about not having a smartphone or even a tablet, I get discouraged because it's a big deal to her. And I can't give in because I know how sucked in she would get if she had these because I tried a limited use tablet before and it was a mistake.
But what I can't shake is the realization that she's such a great advertisement for why not to have tablets and smartphones. For example, she reads--despite having dyslexia--better than most of the kids who don't have it! She's fun to hang out with, she's creative. She's got the best shot at reaching her full potential compared with her peers.
So I don't know that I have lots of advice, except to say that, yes, the article's advice works for girls, too, and even spares them all kinds of heartache. The cost of the sacrifice you make in this will be carried far more by you than by your daughter, but she will think it's the opposite and won't get that until she's older. Then, if she's like my 20 year old, she will thank you!
This was beautiful and so encouraging. Thank you for taking the time to think it through and share it!!
Here are a couple of articles about daughters. https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/can-you-raise-a-teen-today-without
https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/your-teen-will-have-friends-without