The byline on this essay is a pseudonym.
My daughter is one of those kids the US surgeon general warned us about. Our nation’s children are “unknowing participants” in a “decades-long experiment”. Social media usage poses mental health risks to youth, who use it “almost constantly”, causing sleep deprivation, depression and anxiety.
Before sixth grade, my daughter saved her dog-walking money for a phone. She found a used iPhone 13 Mini on Craigslist. I set expectations to incentivize getting good grades, keeping her room clean and taking out the trash. Little did I know that the iPhone would systematically undermine her ability to complete these tasks – and so much more.
When my daughter walked into class through an inflatable arch on her first day of middle school, I took comfort in the fact that I could reach her. Like most parents, I associated the phone with safety, not danger. I didn’t know that social media developers were manipulating her next swipe, or that her “human future” was being sold to the highest bidder, enriching the wealthiest corporations in human history.
I learned the hard way – through my daughter’s lies, manipulation, slipping grades. Through the “zebra-stripe” scars sketched across her arms.
Her sixth-grade school picture captures my daughter’s “emo” phase: the feather earring, Pink Floyd T-shirt and crooked smile. The innocence in that image was quickly replaced by the selfie. Peace-signs-over-puckered-lips selfie. Head tilt, half-face, full-body selfie. The selfie in bed. Her camera roll documents my child’s downward spiral. Crying selfies, puffy-eyed selfies, unable-to-leave-the-bedroom selfies.
By spring semester, my daughter was performing poorly in school. I took her for a psychiatric evaluation, assuming she had ADHD. Afternoon sun filtered through faux wood blinds, casting light strips across her ever-present black hoodie. The doctor’s questions started predictably. Trouble focusing in class? Completing homework? Sleeping? Then the interview took a turn for the dreadful. Do you feel your life isn’t worth living? Have you ever harmed yourself? Do you wish you were dead?
I gaped at my child’s profile, each “yes” lacerating my guts.
The doctor diagnosed my daughter with depression and anxiety. Further testing showed that gaining her friends’ approval occupied 80% of her attention. No wonder she was failing math. It was a miracle she was passing any of her classes at all with only 20% of her brain available for school.
The doctor prescribed therapy and Lexapro. While these were helpful, the doctor failed to alert me to the sweeping phone trends among middle school students. I have since learned that my daughter is among the first generation of 10-to-14-year-olds active on social media. For these girls, suicide rates have risen 151%, self-harm 182%. Her treatment assumed her struggles were individual, as opposed to structural. In our country, we prescribe drugs to solve this social crisis.
Ignorant of these dynamics at the time, I allowed my daughter to continue her social media use. One day, I received a text from another mom. I stared at the screen, wondering why this mom had sent me a graphic selfie. Then I recognized the mole on the woman’s chest. My kid’s mole.
My daughter gasped when I showed her the photo. She handed over her phone. I discovered she’d circumvented the screen limits and had been using social media into the wee hours of the morning. She’d sent the image to someone named PJ on Snapchat. He claimed to be a 16-year-old boy, but his response was so graphic I suspected someone older. The phone was a two-way street, I realized with dread, with platforms adults could use to kidnap and traffic our children.
I called a family meeting with my daughter, her dad and her stepmom. My daughter would delete her social media accounts and give up her phone until the start of the school year. As the summer months passed with travels, in-person hangouts and family time, my daughter returned to herself. The dark circles under her eyes faded. The sighs, shrugs and eyerolls stopped. She got up in the morning. She laughed. She even let me hug her, sometimes.
It was hard to give her phone back before seventh grade, but we had a deal. I wanted to reinforce her good behavior. I made new rules: no social media, no devices in bedrooms, phones off at 8pm. We charged our phones on the kitchen counter. I bought alarm clocks and sound machines. We endured digital detox. My daughter started soccer. My insomnia resolved. We joined a gym and worked out together.
But within a few months, my daughter relapsed. Little lies. Big lies. Another text came from a friend’s mom with selfies of our daughters vaping and hanging out with boys I’d never met at the mall. We held another family meeting.
“This may sound crazy,” my daughter’s stepmom said. “But maybe she doesn’t need a phone.”
The words rippled across my mind. How had I never thought of it? The phone was destroying my daughter, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. I’d remained loyal to the idea of it, the ideal of it. I took custody of the phone again.
My daughter threw a tantrum when I told her she’d lost her phone until high school. She didn’t want to be that kid, the only one in class without her phone. But as the tantrum subsided, she began to return to herself. Then, within a few weeks, signs of her addictive behavior began to resurface.
I found iPhone chargers in the outlets by her bed – for charging her AirPods, she said. She threw her body on the ground to stop me from searching beneath her bed. One night, as I lay in bed ruminating, it hit me. I remembered my daughter had two phones. When I’d accidentally broken the Mini in a weight machine during our workout, I bought her a new iPhone 13. I’d seized the 13, but she could still have the Mini.
“I sold it to a friend at school,” my daughter said when I asked her the next morning. She couldn’t say to whom, or for how much.
“I’ll find it,” I said with an I-see-you gesture. I was frantic, but displayed calm confidence, even a little humor, as I searched her backpack and drawers, patted down her pockets, entered her room unannounced, trying to catch her in the act. My daughter remained calm throughout my searches. I began to think I’d gone completely mad. I bought a metal detector.
Then one evening, I came into her room. My daughter bolted upright and shuffled her comforter. I rushed to the bed, ran my hands under the covers. A charging cord! My fingers traced its length to the attached phone.
We stared at the Mini lying in my hands. The Snapchat app glowed beneath the shattered screen. She looked at me. Her eyes went wide, then filled with tears.
That night, my heartbeat tapped wildly against my pillow as I scrolled her social media. Her exchanges were desperate with need. She pleaded with people to reply, especially a boy named Damien. When he didn’t respond, she said she was depressed, sexted, sent a boob pic.
I found answers via my sister in Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus, which explores how and why our attention is collapsing: “The phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention.” Of course. At such a young age, my daughter was defenseless against this manipulation. She assessed her worth within a system where she was simultaneously attention-addicted and attention-starved. She’d internalized an algorithm where provocative content wins: “If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging,” Hari writes.
The social experiment in our house is being replicated in homes across the country. As parents, we want to keep our kids safe. We want them to call us if an active shooter comes to campus. But the greatest danger lies within the phone, not outside if it.
One reason our kids are so addicted to their phones is because we’re addicted to ours. My friends complain of insomnia, but can’t imagine leaving their phones outside the bedroom. Addressing my child’s phone use has meant addressing my own. I have to restrain myself from texting while driving. I’ve stopped rushing to the charge station every morning to see if I missed a message.
As seventh grade ends, my daughter is that kid. Without her phone, she’s the kid who dribbles her soccer ball across the living room, rides her skateboard down the street, makes the honor roll, joins the track team. She’s the kid whose hands gesture wildly as she chats with her friends, who plaits her hair and falls asleep reading a book.
These days, we use my phone together to coordinate hangouts, listen to audiobooks, sing along to her songs and mine – Shakira and Sade, Ice Cube and the Fugees. Last weekend, we drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to visit family. June gloom hugged the coastline as my daughter and I bodysurfed a glassy wave that rushed us to the shore. “Again!” she said, leaping to her feet. She’s addicted to the feeling of the water rolling beneath her belly.
My daughter’s not the only kid. I recently met a woman who seized her 11-year-old son’s phone when she discovered he was sexting. Students at the Illing middle school in Connecticut build community and pay attention in class now that the school makes them put their phones in rubber pouches – a trend that’s quickly spreading. British children are largely learning in “a mobile phone-free environment” since a department of education mandate.
We need both individual and systemic changes to check our phone use. I’m curious where these changes will take us by the time my daughter enters high school.
Until then, I’ll hold the phone.