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Check Your Smartphones at the Door

By Barbara Evangelista, Publisher June 29, 2016
I've started a new policy at my house when kids come here to play.  I'm still feeling my way through it and sometimes forget, but my goal is to ask all kids to check their smartphones and iPods at the door.  If parents need to reach them, no worries – call or text, I’ll let them know their device is ringing. But I don’t want kids spending their time at my house hovered over their devices. I want them playing board games, having Nerf battles, getting worn out in the pool, watching a funny movie, playing tag and kickball and pickle, and generally having kid-type fun. But you know what my main concern is?  Kids sometimes don’t play nice when they’re gathered together and using their devices.  They try to one-up each other by finding the most shocking or titillating new video or, even worse, they use one of the myriad of social networking apps to send mean messages or inappropriate photos to other kids. 

There are many reasons why kids cyberbully but several of them are exacerbated when kids are together in a group. If they’re feeling bored or they want to look cool to their friends, why not pull out a phone and send a nastygram to an acquaintance?  It’s good for a giggle and makes them feel powerful. And then they think, “If she’s doing it, then I’m going to do it too so that I fit in with the crowd.”  You may think this isn’t happening but it does, and it’s happening right within your kid’s group of friends. A mom in my town posted last week in our local Facebook moms group that her son wasn’t invited to an end-of-school party hosted by friends. It happens, she told him, sometimes parents put a limit on the number of kids.  So how do you think this boy felt when he was texted a picture of the kids at the party, teasing him about not being there? All the moms in our Facebook group were horrified, and I’m sure they thought “My kid would never do that.” But give a 13-year-old a smartphone while they’re in a group of friends, and you’d be appalled and baffled at what he or she may do. 

Think about it. The brains of tweens and teens are not mature yet. In fact, they won’t be fully matured until their early 20s (and some may never mature, but that’s another topic). They’re driven by impulses, the need to impress, the need to have fun (or what they perceive as fun), and peer pressure. And we’ve put incredibly powerful tools in their hands, tools that can do massive amounts of harm via cyberbullying, sexting, and access to adult materials, such as porn, that they take at face value.  When I was a teen, my parents wouldn’t allow me to watch certain TV shows and the worst I could do when I was hanging with my friends was make a crank call. Now, we think it’s OK to put an unmonitored computer in the hands of our teens and let them talk online with strangers, send anonymous messages, post pictures of themselves to the whole world, and view untold amounts of adult materials. (Can you tell I’m not a fan of teens and smartphones?  I’ll be writing soon about why my teens will not be getting smartphones.) 

I hope it makes sense to you to have a “No devices” policy in your home. If I’m the only house with this rule, I’ll probably scare all the kids away and I’ll be petrified about what my kids are getting up to at other homes. But maybe, just maybe, my house will end up being the go-to place because kids will know that they’re freed from online ugliness and pressure and can focus on having real, honest-to-goodness kid fun. Why not give it a try?