The phone debate: Protecting our child or embracing tech at age 11

When it comes to technology, I’m a one-man moral panic, writes Greg Bruce.

THREE KEY FACTS

• In his massive best-seller The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues “the new phone-based childhood” is harming children.
• Haidt recommends not giving your kids a smartphone until high school.
• Psychology professor Candice Odgers, in a review of Haidt’s book in the journal Nature, writes that its “repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science”.

The dilemma is this: Either we get our 11-year-old a phone and accept her mental health is going to be ruined by it in the way all the scary books and documentaries tell us she will be, or we don’t get her a phone and make her life a misery because all her friends have one and you can’t do anything without a phone, and don’t we realise we’re actually making her unsafe and it’s ruining her life and why do we always do this to her and she hates our guts.

I can’t remember how long ago she first started lobbying for a phone, but I can remember my wife saying, “Maybe when you’re 12,” and it feeling like that was so far away as to be meaningless.

I don’t know what I thought would happen in the intervening years – that she would become a different person or that Zuckerberg and Musk would join forces to repair the internet or someone would invent a drug that could counteract smartphones’ psychosocial impacts or… whatever it was, it was ignorant and misguided, because now she’s about to get her first phone and I’ve never been so scared.

I let all my kids talk me into all sorts of stuff that gets me into trouble. One recent weekend, I allowed them to spend more than $200 of our money, even though we’re on a spending freeze and in the middle of a cost of living crisis. In other words, I’m a permissive parent.

But when it comes to technology, I’m the opposite of a permissive parent. When it comes to technology, I’m a one-man moral panic.

What’s my problem? What do I fear will happen? Hard to say. This isn’t a research-driven, empirical data response – it’s a knee-jerk reaction, based on years of listening to scary anecdotes and talkback radio and feeling concerned about my own lack of control over my phone-based impulses.

When my wife raised the prospect of getting our daughter a phone for Christmas, I made a joke and left the room, not because I thought she wasn’t serious but because that’s how I deal with discomfort. I assume my phone use is responsible for this.

I’d hoped my avoidant behaviour had made the issue go away, but later that day my wife forwarded me a link for a website called Safe Surfer, which came with the tagline: “Protect the mental health of our young people through technology, education and advocacy.”

What Safesurfer allows parents to do is to turn off all the “bad” tech stuff on the phone, so we can give our daughter a device she can use only to make calls, send texts and take photos.

I ignored her message, but she followed up a few minutes later with a link to a Samsung smartphone. This time it came with a message, which read: “This is a compatible phone.”

The terseness made it clear avoidance was no longer an option, so I opted for deflection instead. “That escalated quickly,” I wrote.

“Not for me,” she replied. “I’ve been following Smartphone Free Childhood New Zealand for a while and this is one of their recommendations.”

I’d never heard of Smartphone Free Childhood New Zealand but knew better than to say so, because she’d just roll her eyes and remind me of all the times she’d told me about it.

I wrote back: “I’m terrified. Paralysed by fear. But if you think we should…”

And that was it.

Maybe this has less to do with my concerns about technology and more to do with what it’s forcing me to confront: that my children are growing up and becoming less dependent on me – and the natural corollary of that, which is that I’m getting older and increasingly irrelevant, and moving ever-closer to the rest home I have no doubt they will one day confine me to, in which my sole joy will be the cellphone I assume will by then be implanted in my head.

Big Tech will get all my children eventually, as it has got the rest of us, with its seductive marketing promises about an ideal life engaged in the infinite scroll while lying smilingly on a clean white couch in a minimalist New York loft apartment. The question is: How long is it possible to protect them from Zuck and Elon and their minions? And the answer for us appears to be: just a little bit longer.