This is something of a followup to my previous entry about kids and phones. Coincidentally, earlier this week, I heard The New York Times columnist Pamela Paul on The Lost Debate podcast discussing this very topic with host Ravi Gupta. Throughout the conversation they reference an article of Paul's from November titled "It's Not Kids With the Cellphone Problem, It's Parents." I don't remember reading this when it came out, but I went back and read it after listening to the podcast. They are both pretty good and worth a read/listen.
If you read my last entry, you know I am quite concerned about my kids' becoming addicted to their screened devices, particularly Lil' S1 to his cell phone. (I'm concerned about this with society overall, but, as the saying goes, it starts at home.) So, I came into the episode expecting to be in lockstep with Paul on pretty much everything. However, I found I'm only with her on about 80% of it. Big picture, I agree with her, but there are a few things I think she gets wrong -- or at least doesn't give enough credence to.
But first let's say what she gets right: Cellphones and other similar personal devices should be banned from school, up to and including high school, full stop. There's very little upside to allowing them, and the downside -- that they are extremely distracting and impede learning in almost every possible way -- is massive. Paul is right that the parents are the problem here,* by not only abiding their children's device usage during school, but in some cases demanding it. The convenient "lies" that parents use to justify this are indeed just that.
*Aren't the parents pretty much always the problem, though, since they are, you know, the parents? On what societal issue are parents allowed to say, "Hey, that's not our fault, blame it on our kids!"
At Lil' S1's middle school, they have to lock their phones in a Yondr pouch* when they arrive and then get them unlocked before they leave. This seems like a decent way to do it. Kids can have their phones on the way to and from school, when they might need them and aren't in class, but can't use them during the actual school hours.
*For some reason, I always want to call it a bota bag, even though I know that this is something totally different.
And this is where I diverge a bit from Paul. She argues not just that kids shouldn't have phones in school but that they shouldn't have phones at all. I respect this position, and if it's what works for your family, then terrific, but I don't think it's realistic for society on the whole, and I don't think parents are wrong or "the problem" if they want their kid to have a phone.
Phones are bad, but they are also good, which is what makes them bad, as if they were only bad, we would just ban them like DDT and not even be facing this dilemma. But phones for kids have one huge thing going for them: They are incredibly convenient for parents. Paul acknowledges this, but dismisses it, or even implies it's a negative. I see this idea come up sometimes -- this notion that anything parents do for their own "convenience" is necessarily wrong if it adversely affects their children in any way -- but I don't understand it and don't subscribe to it. In life, after all, as Thomas Sowell once said, and I frequently repeat, "There are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs." If you substitute the phrase "sanity" for "convenience" above, you see what I mean. If you and your spouse are both working (which is common), and you have multiple kids doing multiple activities (also common), it can be very difficult and stressful to try to keep up with everything, and having the ability to track your kid, or call them, if need be, goes a long way in keeping your stress levels to a manageable level. Yes, it's not good for kids to have wide-scale access to cell phones. It's also not good for them to have parents who are at their wits end all the time.
This argument about parents just wanting their kids to have phones for their own convenience reminds me of the hardcore pro-lockdown scolds who said that parents just wanted schools to be open for the free childcare. In both cases my response is Yeah, so? Those are good reasons. A parent's mental well-being is super important, not just for themselves, but for their kids. I'm absolutely at my worst as a parent when I'm super stressed.
Another thing Paul does that I take some issue with is she frequently compares now to when she (and I, I can tell we're roughly the same age) was a kid. Those comparisons only go so far because the world has changed quite a bit. For example, back in 1985 there were a lot more two-parent families in which one of the parents (usually the mom) didn't work or only worked part-time, and they were the coordinators of their kids schedules, so there weren't the same difficulties as there are today. I mean, look at my situation, which is somewhat common today and was not very common forty years ago, in which my spouse is gone about six weeks out of the year (she just got back a few hours ago, actually), and I have to work full-time and be on top of my kids' schedules. Lil' S1 having a cell phone and Lil' S2 having an Apple watch are sanity-savers during these times. And I'm not even the best example. Single parents have to do that everyday of the year.
There's also another huge difference between now and when we were kids, and it's something Paul never mentions even though I was screaming it in my head while listening to her talk about her childhood: payphones. Payphones! They used to be everywhere, and now they're about as common as telegraph posts. But that's how we used to contact our parents: "Hello, you have a collect call from pick me up at the Gottschalks in the Lakewood Mall do you accept the charges?"* How are kids supposed to contact their parents now if they don't have a phone? Go around asking strangers if they can borrow theirs? It was easy to not have a cell phone when society was designed as if nobody else had a cell phone.
*Actually, I never did that collect call trick because we had a calling card I could use if I didn't have a quarter. But I had friends who would do it all the time.
Times are different in other ways too. One thing that Paul says is that kids can't actually learn to be independent if their parents are tracking their every movement, and I think this is just a failure to recognize that the definition of independence is changing. Everybody is tracking everybody. It's not just parents and children. I was just listening to a woman on a different podcast talk about how she and her girlfriends keep tabs on each other for safety reasons while they are on dates. I mean, my parents can track me now at age 46. We did Find My Friends once when I was visiting and never turned it off because there is no reason to. It's not like I ever even look at it. (Oh my gosh! They're at Trader Joe's!) I don't even really look at it for my kids either, to be honest, unless I need to for some reason. It used to be when I would go to a friend's house, my parents would say, "call us when you get there," now there's no need for that step. I don't see this as some sort of arrested development with today's youth. It's just how things are now for everybody, and we seem to be mostly okay with it.
The last thing I'll say about this is that I've just laid out a good case for getting a kid a low-tech flip-phone (or a watch like Lil' S2 has). There's still no good justification for getting Lil' S1 a smartphone. He doesn't need the internet and the apps and all that. He only has an iPhone because S's mom got a new one and gave him her old one, and then S did the same thing when that old one broke. That's the only reason, and it's not a very good one. This is where I have to tell myself the type of convenient lie Paul calls out in her article: This type of technology is the future, and so we all need to teach our kids how to use it, even if we don't like it. It's a half-decent lie, because there is a grain of plausibility to it, but it's a lie, nonetheless.
Alright, I think I've spilled enough virtual ink on this topic for now.
Until next time...
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