Why teenagers choose their phones over us
And why that hurts, even if it shouldn’t
Jonathan Haidt argues that smartphones are a leading cause of soaring mental health problems among young people in America. While a lot of people in the academic community believe his research, put forward in the The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, is flawed, the book has sold millions. I keep wondering: Is his success because he’s right—even if the research doesn’t show it yet?* Or is it because we parents have a lot of deep existential worries, and taking away our kids’ phones feels easier than confronting those?
I got a reminder of this idea on Monday as one of my daughters sat at our kitchen island deeply engaged in something on her phone. I had just gotten back from a conference and was brimming with ideas I wanted to share: people I had met; questions we explored; funny videos of my friend Mike’s moves on the dance floor. I was eager to connect with her and to share, and also thought some of the insights might spark her interest, even help her think about the world in broader terms.
TikTok, however, had the upper hand.
In the moment I went through a range of emotions that was impressively broad and uniformly negative.
I started out angry (because I always start with anger):“Could you put the phone down when I am talking?”
This shifted quickly to passive aggression: “Actually no, finish your conversation” (can you even call multiple chats and snaps a conversation?).
Eventually, landing on resignation, I walked out of the room (refraining from saying so many things I was thinking).
As I left the kitchen, I wondered why I was so pissed off. I was deeply uninterested in anything my mom had to say when I was 16. I hate it when people interrupt me when I am trying to send an email or text or pay a bill. And let’s be honest: my conference, to her, was going to be boring. But then the reality dawned on me: I wasn’t fuming because she was on her phone. It was because she was picking her phone over me. And that felt shitty.
As you know, I just finished writing a book about teens, and I know full well that my goal as her parent is to help her be independent. Her friendships and relationships will be a critical pathway to that end. As author danah boyd so eloquently writes, teens aren’t in love with tech. They are in love with each other. Tech is just the medium. She wasn’t picking her phone over me. She was picking her friends over me. And that is as it should be.
Before smartphones this in-the-moment choice was less obvious. Sure, I spent hours on the phone with my friends. But if I was in the kitchen or in the car or flopped on a couch, I didn’t have much choice but to talk to my mom. No longer. Our kids have the option to pick their friends a million times a day, which can feel like a million little dagger-reminders us of our fading prominence in their lives.
Two things can be true: I can want a fully independent kid and feel the sharpness of these moments. I can want her to not need me and hate the moments that highlight how we become tangential, less essential, every day. We start as the brightest star in their universe and that fades over time.
It's on me to manage the fallout of feeling hurt. I have plenty of ways: talk to friends, walk dog, dig into work, unpack with husband, go running, Slow Horses, beer. But it’s also on me to make sure she’s not on her phone 24/7 (because for now, she would be).
In this moment, I still have some agency and I use it to set limits, to remind her that she does need to engage with her family, and that making time for other things is critical to being healthy and happy in the long term (cue the eye roll).
I try not to shame my kids (prior example notwithstanding) for their tech use or impose blanket bans, but rather help them build self-regulation so they learn to moderate their use. Both my kids have time limits on all their apps, which we set together, and which they follow (they frequently beg me for more time on weekends and at sleepovers, which suggests they have not yet hacked a way around these or they are way more strategic in their thinking than I give them credit for). I can readjust these limits anytime, including when I see them sink into the Vortex of TikTok or witness that they are not doing the range of things they need to develop well—homework and sports, piano and drama, but also watching tv as a family—no phones there either—walking the dog, doing the dishes, talking to my mom on FaceTime, reading.
Crucially, they’ve never been allowed phones in their bedrooms after 9 (9:30 when they got a bit older).
For a while, soon after they got their phones at 11 years old, we reserved the right to read anything we wanted as they navigated the choppy terrain of having a powerful, expensive new tool, and the evil that is massive middle school group chats (which I discouraged, and they both hate). It's worth noting that we also need to know what they are doing on their phones. Social media and messaging with friends is one part of it, but there are far darker places on the internet places which may warrant more dramatic interventions.
Finally, my husband and I are clear that we bought the phone, we pay the plan and we have every right to take it away if we see fit. We haven’t had to yet.
I may not be able to control my heart breaking a tiny bit every time she chooses them over me. But I can make sure she’s building a balanced life—lots of connection with her friends, through tech and IRL.
There were a million warnings before Haidt that tech was messing with some key developmental necessities of childhood: sleep, free play, time around friends, time with extended family and community, not being so distracted all the time. But Haidt hit a moment of peak parental anxiety with a sledgehammer message: it’s the phones. In journalism, this is gold: the intersection of the message and the moment. Many of us are seeing our kids sucked into TikTok or taking pictures of the ceiling for Snap streaks and worry: what will all this do to their brains? Their bodies? Their sense of self?
But take away the phones, do all the worries go away? Do they have the mindsets and skill to navigate a very uncertain world? Will they fall in love, find a job, make and sustain good friendships? Will they pass their chemistry test? And will they ever want to talk to us again?
Phones are the thing we fight about because they are there. Remove them, and we still have to do the work of connecting and helping them build ways to make it through the world. It's a necessary first step to moderate their use. But don’t expect them to want to hear about your conference.
*Haidt’s response to Odgers.
My book THE DISENGAGED TEEN is out 7th January, and you can pre-order a copy here.