The child who went missing from my home on a Saturday night last fall, let’s call him Jonathan. Jonathan! I cried, from my front stoop, into the dark. Jonathan, you out here? I kept looking, tripping on the sidewalks around my property. Hey, hi—Jonathan?
You don’t yell what you think you’ll yell, it turns out, in scenarios like this. You don’t yell help, at least not at first. Nothing tells the neighbors you don’t have your shit together in permanent ink like help. Besides, part of me was still sure this couldn’t happen to me. I thought: He’ll appear any minute. He’s in the backyard. Or under someone’s bed. Eight-year-old boys are not too old for hide and seek.
But soon I had looked everywhere, and I still couldn’t find him. I started to feel true bodily panic. Do not cry, I thought. There were still more kids in my house. They were finished with their pizza, and wanted to know: Was there going to be dessert?
Everything that went wrong that night had to do with the phones.
As my oldest kid approached the tween zone, I thought I was prepared to deal with phones. I thought this because I’d spent so much time reading and talking about it. Who can blame me? Tech as universal scourge on the next generation is such a fertile conversation topic, combining grumbly nostalgia (in my day, the phone was on the wall!) with real concerns. Like the fact that phones are addictive for children. And seem to cause depression. The worst-case scenario with TikTok, from my understanding of the news, is that it kinda hands China the ballgame. Best-case scenario: Your kid starts twitching.
Those are just the broad takeaways. I suspect that all of us parents—whether we’ve given our children phones or not—have our personal stare-at-the-ceiling fears, when it comes to technology. Mine range from vain (is Roblox turning my kids into boring people?) to unnerving (why does extra TV time seem to make them mean?) to existential (if my son has never had to call a house and ask to speak to his friend, how will he fare at a job interview in 2030? Will there even be jobs in 2030? Or just floods and the metaverse?).
Despite all my reading and talking, my approach to tech has mainly been to wing it. Some days it isn’t pretty. There have been times I’ve physically snatched an iPad, hissing, “You know what?” Other times, I feel like I’m doing okay. My oldest is data-driven, allergic to being patronized. So, at the risk of going too dark, I’ve shared news stories about the effects of phones on teens with him. When he asks—inevitably, repeatedly—when he’s getting one, I am honest. I say: Not until the last possible second. Those are fun nights!
But on those nights, even as I feel the unfairness of both our positions—it’s a fight that just waits right there, never truly resolved—I also think: Okay. You’re handling it. I believed I’d thought of every angle, until the playdate.
What happened that Saturday was not out of the blue. I’d started letting my son have kids over a lot that year. It was third grade, the boys rammy but still sweet. Carving out the rhythms of gossip to adorable effect, but still hype as hell for Capri Suns.
There were problems with these playdates. Often, they started as soon as I picked up a kid in my car. The second the child was buckled in, out came their phone. I would listen to my son try to cobble together a conversation, either to distracted yeahs or just… nothing. Bold nothing. This dynamic would repeat itself throughout the playdate. The only thing worse than eight-year-old boys being loud in your house? Them being silent. In one season of playdates, I witnessed all of the following: My son in his room, drawing, while a friend sat on his bed, gaming on his phone. Two friends texting about my son while he sat across from them, unaware. My son walking up to a bunch of his friends on a Monday, reporting, “Hey guys! It was my birthday this weekend,” and nobody looking up.
Watching this stuff, it’s like someone is taking a pedicure buffer to your heart.
My son is lucky, though; he still has friends who don’t have phones. He has friends who do have phones but know how to put them down—and honestly, we should study those kids, because lots of adults can’t do that. Sometimes I can’t even do that. And while I’m at the nonjudgmental thing, let me say: I have zero angst towards parents who get their kids phones, at any age. Wait Til 8th and phone-free colleges and towns sound like utopia to me, but in many families—especially in families where parents work long hours, or don’t live in the same house—phones are key to logistics.
All this informs the playdate problem. I want to foster balanced, gratifying friendships for my children without disrespecting other parents’ choices. That’s why I don’t feel I can say, when I have kids over, “Hey guys, no phones.” Beyond reminding my own children of the rules that apply to them, I don’t even feel particularly good saying that “we don’t do” TikTok or YouTube. These are kids; you know what their follow-ups are: Why? Why not? I don’t know how to answer those questions without seeming to denigrate their family’s choices. Phones bring another house’s rules into your home in a way nothing else ever has.
The night Jonathan disappeared began with a caucus. This was a larger group than I usually had over—seven boys, including my son. Four had phones. Three did not. I’d thought ahead on ways to deal with this. Pizza. Snacks. Air hockey. I would spring for the exorbitant rental fee on the latest Marvel release.
Nothing worked. Soon enough, each of the four were entombed in their own phone activity. The non-phone three stood in front of them, selling the advantages of in-person friendship. How often do we get to all hang out, was among their arguments. It’s more fun to do something together. If we watch a movie, everyone will be included.
I’m in the kitchen, like: Just file my heart down.
The non-phones suffered a blow when one of their troops defected to the other side. That is: To watching someone else’s phone over the owner’s shoulder. Now the non-phones were down to two. They were losing. Things looked grim.
I remember thinking I should try to help them out, that I should go and get—what? I can’t remember. Something analog I thought would hold their interest—probably Pokémon cards.
Whatever it was, it was upstairs.
When I came back down, I said: “Where’s Jonathan?”
Jonathan was one of the phone boys. He’d been on the couch. Now he was gone. And no one in the caucus knew to where.
I looked at the other phone boys. “Can you text him?”
They didn’t know his number.
Jonathan was fine, in the end. Safe and on his way home. His mom had texted him that she was outside, ready to pick him up, and he had simply walked out of the house, without a word to the other kids or me. A misunderstanding. If we’re casting physical blame: I was the one who left the room. Still. In my day, could this kind of scare have happened? Absolutely not.
But my day’s not coming back. So I need a plan going forward. Elizabeth Milovidov, senior counsel for The Lego Group, where she promotes and implements digital child safety rights, has several suggestions. First off: Get rid of the guilt. “Your house, your rules,” she says. And the rules should be explicit. “Kids come in, you tell them to take off their shoes, their shoes are all muddy. Then you can say: Phones in the basket! They’ll be right here, the whole time. I can even charge them for you. If your mom is calling, I’ll bring it over.” You can even, she adds, “gamify” the concept: The first one to touch their phone loses, et cetera. And in all things, Milovidov cautions, keep the tone positive. You’re not anti-tech; you’re pro-them having an immersive, creative time at your house.
When all this fails, Milovidov says, she herself is not above flexing the boring-mom factor. “Join them—if they won’t get off Roblox, sit down and start playing with them,” she says. “I love to get in there and just do nothing but jump up and down. My kids are like, ‘Mom, you’re ruining the game.’” So you have to ruin a few games to save a childhood, sometimes? Yes—and own that role, Milovidov says. These were her parting words to me, mother to mother: “Whatever you write, make sure parents know: You have the power.”