HayU Blog

Why another article about the perils of parenting smartphones?

My promise:  I won’t make you feel badly (or even worse) about the screen habits of your children. 

There is no parental state of tech grace, no perfect balance to be won between us, our children and their devices.

Here’s what friends and loved ones tell me about their family battles over screens:

I’m tired of apologizing for all the tech freedom my kids have.

Why should I feel ashamed for not using screentime and downtime limits?  They’ll just hack the limits anyway.

I’m so beyond sick of fighting with my kids about it.  It’s not worth the conflict.

Tech is here to stay so they have to figure it out themselves anyway. 

So what if the phone is in her room overnight?  Where do you think it’ll charge when she’s finally in a college dorm room?

And the final refrain: I wish the schools would do a better job of limiting tech so it wasn’t all on us.

I recently surveyed some local middle and high school students about their respective school rules around tech in search of something akin to a best practice.  My limited and utterly subjective findings:  no school regulates tech quite the same, just like we don’t parent it the same way in our respective homes.

Since we all do tech differently, can we forgive ourselves right now for feeling conflicted and thereby parenting pre-teen and teen tech use inconsistently?

Join me in a parental pledge of flexibility:  We hereby reserve the right to change our minds about ever-changing tech.  Repeatedly.

Some lucky parents have kids who occasionally venture outside in the sun, hold jobs, complete chores, turn in homework and even sleep enough hours that we don’t fear damnation by National Sleep Foundation and condemnation by the CDC.

This next part is for those of us whose kids are no longer able to do any of those great things consistently. These are the ones we worry about the most, who enrage us with their screen habits and make us feel parentally impotent.  Deep down, we feel we’ve failed them and lost control.

The collective gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands may continue, but in truth it’s never too late to reel in tech with our kids (until they move out and break our hearts).

You will suffer acutely when you first institute any unwelcome tech changes. It’s our children’s jobs to inflict such anguish.  You’ll be accused, perhaps quite deservedly, of unforgivable hypocrisy and arbitrary rulings.  They’ll also remind you that you are in fact The Worst Parent Ever, and that none of their friends suffer any such unjust limits.

Just follow these impossibly hard steps to limit tech overload:

1. This is when you double down and tell them how fiercely you love them. You can even confess how badly you wish you could say YES to everything they want.  Alas.
2. When they scoff at your indisputable data on age-based sleep hygiene, it means you have their attention.  You don’t have to convince them you’re right, but you will have to unpeel the devices from their gnarled fingers until said devices are nesting for the fleeting night beside yours–perhaps somewhere in the kitchen, or locked in a safe you bought at Costco or Sam’s Club for a completely different purpose.
3. I dare you to declare you’re experimenting with family tech for the next two weeks. That’s right, you really can adjust based on how everyone feels and behaves, including yourself.
4. Once you determine which rules prove sustainable for everyone in your home, cling to them unless and until they stop working.  That’s probably when it’s time to reevaluate and adjust.
5. Incorporate any tech allowances you can stomach.  Maybe it’s more screentime on Friday and Saturday nights. Toss those authentic bones whenever you can.
6. Finally, if you dare attempt to dumb down your child’s smartphone with a few limits, don’t be ashamed to ask for help.  You’re not inept just because it takes you several hours and multiple field trips to your local Apple or android store.  You’re officially battling a device engineered by an army of geniuses to defeat you.

If you’re currently feeling just as badly or even worse about your tech parenting than you already did, I’ve failed you.  You have not, however, failed your children on tech–at least not permanently.

Keep fighting the good tech fight while you’re still lucky enough to win the heavyweight title of The Worst Parent Ever.

~Matthew Hayutin, M.Ed.

Founder & Partner at Hayutin