[ed. Or... 'How to Build a Helicopter Parent.]
Something similar happens when you give your child a phone.
On this Substack and in pop culture right now, a lot of people are thinking about what a phone does to kids, especially vis a vis social media. What are they watching? What are they missing out on? How are phones making them The Anxious Generation?
“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”
Nancy is the author of The Problem with Parenting, so she thinks a lot about the parenting zeitgeist. Unfortunately, she concluded, “Even those of us who try to be normal cannot be normal when we have the technology.”
Parents have always worried, of course. But until about 15 years ago, we had no option but to learn to live with it. When my mom let me walk to school as a kindergartener—I know, call the cops—she could see me until I turned the corner. After that, she had to wait till about 3 o’clock before she would see me again. In between, she had no contact. No tracking. No alerts from the school. She didn’t even pack a note in my lunch, because during school, I was sort of off her radar, and she was sort of off mine. That didn’t mean she loved me less. But it did mean that she assumed I was fine without her watching or contacting me.
Think about how great that must feel: Simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do. Ahhhh.
Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years”—the number of the number of kid-tracking devices is exploding. Globally, what is already a $100 billion market is expected to reach $500 billion by 2030, according to Verified Market Reports. And these devices don’t just give the location, the report added. Today’s parents are demanding panic buttons, fall detection, and apps that automatically unlock the door for their kids, or turn on the lights.
That’s a lot of stuff that parents feel they need to know or do anytime their child isn’t with them.
The thing is, though: Trust is a muscle. It has to be exercised to get strong. My mom, who quit her job to stay home with me and my sister, somehow chilled for six hours a day, and then for several more after I ate my snack of cookies and milk (cow’s, whole!), and often went back out to play. In that way, she, like most of the other parents back then, learned to believe in me, our neighbors, and even her own parenting. All were good enough to keep me safe. Her trust muscle grew, because it got daily exercise, thanks to the social norms of the time.
Phones stop that from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch. That’s one reason some parents are worried about school phone bans. A friend showed me the letter from her first grader’s school begging parents not to text their kids throughout the day (usually via watches), even if they were going to be a little late to pick up. Even if they felt like sending a heart emoji.
For the school, the problem is that this is distracting. For the child, the problem is that it keeps pulling off the Band-Aid of self-sufficiency—the ability to be out in the world on their own, handling life. (Lack of that independence is a huge part of what is making kids anxious. More about that in another post. Actually, more on that in my whole book!) Focusing back on parents: It’s bad for us, too, because we get no chance to build that trust muscle. Instead, we keep seeking—and getting—addictive hits of reassurance that our kids are fine, they’re safe, they’re where they should be, and they’re feeling our love. Only constant connection soothes us.
I consider that arrested development…of us.
In The Anxious Generation, Jon explains attachment theory. Basically, kids need at least one adult in their life who is their rock—someone they know will always be there for them. Their home base. Being sure of that home base allows them to go off-base and explore.
As soon as kids can crawl, they scooch off to the dog or toy (or Ming vase), glancing backward sometimes. Yup, mom’s still there. When the dog barks, they scurry back. On-base, they’re comforted. Off-base, the learning occurs. Off they go again.
”This process happens dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month, and within a few years, children become less fearful and more likely to want to explore on their own—perhaps by walking to school or a friend’s house with no help from an adult,” writes Jon. “As the child develops, she is able to internalize the secure base. She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.” Here’s his diagram of it:
But a phone means the child is less likely to internalize that secure base, because they never have to truly detach, and neither does the parent.
A few years back I read an article someone wrote about raising Free-Range Kids that interviewed a mom who loved her long hours alone at the creek as a child – an experience she wanted to give her own daughter. And thanks to technology, she said, she could! She got her daughter a smartwatch and sent her out—as if this couldn’t have happened without one. One time when her daughter’s bike chain fell off, the girl was instantly able to reach her dad, who hurried over and fixed it. This made the mom extremely grateful for the phone.
But to me, that’s the opposite of the mom’s experience as a child. Alone without a phone, she’d have had to fix the bike herself or wheel it home. Either way, she’d have solved the problem through grit or ingenuity. Dealing with that problem would have shown her what she’s made of—and would have shown her parents too.
Instead, the parents got to be the problem-solvers. While that gave them the immediate satisfaction of being there for their child, they didn’t get the long-term satisfaction—and the crucial experience—of seeing their kid succeed (or struggle and still be fine) off-base. Without that, parents aren’t getting the feedback that would allow them to let go a little more. They’re also deprived of the greatest joy of being a parent, which is seeing your kid do something on their own. (...)
Without the opportunity for real separation, we parents are like the kids who don’t get the “dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month” to go off-base and explore on their own. We’re missing out on our half of that attachment cycle—the half no one thinks about: us letting go, us being afraid, us having them come back, feeling comforted by their return, and then allowing them to go off again. We and our children are both unused to letting go. This may explain why so many parents are still tracking their kids at college.
by Lenore Skenazy, After Babel | Read more:
Image: Yana Paskova/NYT via
[ed. From the comments:
"I'm not disagreeing with the argument that technology makes parents more anxious and overprotective / over-involved with their children, but I think this essay misses the *major* factor in how smartphones negatively affect parents, parent-child attachment, and child mental health.
Parents who are addicted to their phones are more likely to IGNORE their children for their phones, to be less attentive, to be snappy with small kids when they try to attract their parents' attention away from the phone. It's part of a larger pattern of "technology" and "modernity" (broadly speaking) separating parent and child, especially in the critical years of brain development and attachment formation in the first three years of life.
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-lost-girls-and-boys (...)
The first “smartphone” was introduced in 1994, and the first iPhone in 2007. While researchers such as Jean Twenge and Jon Haidt have done a good job of discussing how smartphone use has negatively impacted children and teenagers’ mental health, they oddly—to my knowledge—do not discuss how smartphone use by parents might be playing a role: from 2006 to 2009, the number of 30-49-year-olds who were on social networks rose from 6% to 44%.
“I see many children on the streets of New York in their strollers, facing away from their mothers or nannies who are on their cell phones or who look disengaged themselves; they are anything but present. The babies have a glazed look in their eyes, which is the result of feeling disconnected from the person who is central to their secure attachment. This kind of emotional withdrawal is the basis for depression in older children, adolescents, and adults. In my consulting room I see the same look in the eyes of my adult patients who have experienced absent mothers.”
