Help! I’m addicted to my smartphone, so how can I tell off my kids?
I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with half an onion chopped on the board in front of me. I look away from my phone. My youngest daughter is staring at me expectantly.
"What darling?" I say.
"You said you’d make me a snack ten minutes ago," she replies.
I look at my phone again and see a video of a woman hoovering her already immaculate cream carpet. I’ve logged out of my real life but for how long? What snack? And what is the onion for?
"Sorry," I mumble shame-faced, and put the phone back to charge.
In the front room the tween is on her dad’s phone - she hasn’t yet got her own, but the prospect is looming as she gets ready to start secondary school next year. It’s something that's keeping me awake at night. It feels wrong. Too soon. Yet also inevitable.
"Get off that thing!" I shout menacingly, "You’ve been on it at least thirty minutes."
She’s having a FaceTime with her best friend. This is common and involves the two of them watching YouTube, and then commenting half heartedly to one another on what’s happening. I don’t understand why they do this as I don’t speak to anyone apart from my mother. If anyone else calls me for AN ACTUAL PHONE CONVERSATION it sends me into a panic.
"It’s not fair!" she screeches back.
My younger daughter is on an iPad (where did she find it?), and seems to be playing online bingo. Is that okay? I go back to chopping the onion, but have a nagging feeling that there’s an email or a message that I’ve left hanging. Something about a collection for a teacher. Or a deposit for a new window. The woman’s carpet looked so clean and I wonder what product she was using. I grab the phone and check the post - there’s a link in the stories if I can just find it.
"Mum the snack!!!"
"Get off the phone!" I bellow.
I’m shouting at myself. It feels out of control.
This is an everyday scenario from my life as a mother addicted to her phone. It’s clear that I need to model the right behaviour to my children or I have no hope of them not becoming addicted too (arguably they are showing signs - not being able to stop picking screens up, grumpy and angry when the screen time comes to an end, and the continuous complaining when they’re not on a screen - i.e. saying that they’re bored).
Smartphone use amongst children, and the harmful effects phones can have was the subject of a panel I went to this week to publicise the release of the Channel 4 documentary series - Swiped - The School that Banned Smartphones. Children from a secondary school in Essex took part in an experiment where they stopped using all devices for 21 days to see how their cognitive function and overall mental health was impacted without screens.
Emma and Matt Willis, the presenters of the show, also gave up their phones as part of the experiment. In fact attendees of the panel event were asked to give up their phones for the duration of the screening. This was when I realised how bad my addiction had become. I declined to hand it over. What if there was an important piece of work that needed to be done? What if I needed to check the woman with the beige carpet to see if she’d shared more hero products? How would I ever find out how to apply contouring to my cheeks? I instead sat through the panel with my phone nestled in my bag. Not a good look.
In fact I just checked my settings, and it said that Thursday last week I picked up my phone 136 times in one day. 11 times an hour and that was on a day when I was writing to a strict deadline! What the heck was I doing? I’d like to say that I was looking up important facts for an article but NO I think I was possibly reading tips on how to make a gingham bow decoration for my Christmas doorknob, or I might have been entering a Google vortex trying to find out what Lisa Marie Presley’s first husband looked like (I’m reading her memoir and it’s excellent by the way).
For me it’s often scrolling on social media that saps my energy the most, but the panel detailed harrowing stories about children who had seen inappropriate content. The kind of content that adults wouldn’t want to see either. I kept getting this visual in my mind of how vulnerable children are, how we are seeing them growing up more and more quickly, and how we in our hearts we know that tech is a key factor in propelling them into an adult world (and a world with dark and frightening undercurrents).
What happened to the children in the programme when they stopped using phones? Well you’ll have to watch it yourself, but you don’t have to be genius to see that too much screen time and access to inappropriate content is not going to be good for their development.
Rangoon Chatterjee, doctor, author and podcaster, who is also featured in the documentary, talked about some simple guidelines he’d introduced in his own home - so not having phones at mealtimes, not having them one hour before bed, and limiting access to social media - so he doesn’t allow Tik Tok for his tween daughter. Interestingly it’s not just about boundaries around time on the phone it’s also about thinking about the type of phone you give your kid too.
I spoke to Daisy Greenwell founder of Smartphone Free Childhood, who said: "You don’t need to dive straight into a full fat iPhone. Start them slow. There are quite a few good options…phones that have the benefits of modern connectivity without the risks of unrestricted internet/social media access."
What do you do if you’re a parent and addicted? (I actually think the sound of a phone without social media is terrifying but might be good for me!) Well I guess the first step is actually realising that you have a problem. So this week I’ve been more mindful around my phone. This sounds airy fairy, but I’m challenging myself not to pick it up so many times. In fact, yesterday I only picked it up 91 times which is an improvement on 136.
The thing is my kids need snacks. They need to feel their mum is engaged and not checking out at every opportunity. I don’t need to find out about carpet cleaning products right now. There are onions to be chopped. I saw a food influencer talking about a recipe a couple of days back.
Hang on I’ll just check on my phone. I promise I won’t take a minute.
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