Mom shares why she took away her tween’s cell phone—and a plea to other parents

Parenting has never come with an instruction manual. But one thing that millennial parents are especially struggling with is how to parent kids with cell phones and social media. None of this has ever existed before. It’s completely unprecedented. And one mom is sharing her completely relatable angst in a viral TikTok video where she shares that she took her tween daughter’s phone away after realizing she regretted giving her kids smartphones at age 10.

“I have an 11-year-old and an almost 13-year-old and I regret giving them phones and I need to talk it through, because I know there’s going to be other moms on here who feel the same way as me,” @the_geriatricmillennial, AKA Kailey, said in her post.  “I got my kids phones when they were 10, and it was really for my peace of mind. It was to allow them a little bit more independence to go roam the neighborhood, go to friends’ houses — I wanted to know where they were at all times. I could track them, they could call me whenever they needed.”

Kailey said the phones helped her deal with some of the ways that parenting today is different from how it used to be: No one has a landline, parents don’t tend to get to know one another, and with the technology to basically place a tracking device on her kids, she felt calmer.

“I felt a lot safer if my kids had phones and I could know where they were at all times,” she said. “They can call me, I can call them, I can see where they are. If they aren’t answering, I can find them.”

But things didn’t stay so rosy for long.

“I struggle with this decision so much,” Kailey continued. While she enjoyed the convenience of having an easy way to communicate with her kids, she quickly started to see the dark side: how kids communicate with each other. “Kids having phones too early — I am seeing firsthand just how judgemental they can be. So much so that last night, I finally said, ‘I’m done with this.’ I deactivated my 11-year-old’s phone and took it away. I don’t know when I’m going to give it back.”

She explained the problem: “It’s my fault. I bought the phone. But it’s become the norm for all kids to have phones. I have all these apps to monitor my kids’ stuff, but what I’m noticing is it’s not so much the social media—you can block the social media, that’s easy. What it is is hormonal girls being jealous.”

Kailey continued, “Let’s use my daughter for instance. She’s out with one of her friends and one of her friends posts to Snapchat—my daughter doesn’t have Snapchat but another person has Snapchat and they post on it—but another person sees that she’s with her and they start getting jealous, so they text my daughter, ‘Why are you with her?’ My daughter starts to feel bad, and then she has to make up a lie because she doesn’t want to hurt that person’s feelings, because she didn’t know they were gonna see that she was with that person.”

We’re exhausted (and having middle-school war flashbacks) just reading that.

“There’s so much that goes into it, and there’s always jealousy with teenage girls—there’s always gonna be that layer—but when we were younger, we didn’t have access to say what we wanted, whatever was on our mind, right then and there,” Kailey said. So true. 

She finished her video with a plea to other parents.

“I know there’s got to be other parents out there, especially moms of girls, who are struggling with this the way that I am. We can’t keep them from having phones forever, so what do we do?” she asked. “Phones and social media—those are all a part of society, and they’re all a part of the teenage experience now, but at what expense? We as parents need to band together and agree that we’re not going to allow it until 14, 15, 16—I don’t know.”

What the experts say about kids and cell phones

Last fall, Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos told NBC parents should “wait as long as possible” before giving kids their own cell phones.

“I think the more we can hold off on giving kids technology—the longer, the better,” Santos, the professor behind Yale’s most popular course and host of the podcast “The Happiness Lab,” said at the time.

Children ages eight to 12 who have phones spend just under five hours a day glued to their phones, and teenagers rack up nearly eight hours of screen time per day, a 2019 report from nonprofit Common Sense Media found.

That screen time isn’t typically used for creative activities like coding or making digital art. Instead, most young people spend most of their phone time on social media or watching videos, Common Sense head of research Michael Robb wrote in an analysis of the report. This is likely to encourage poor mental health—in ways that affect kids differently than adults—and distractions in the classroom, Santos says.

In a Pew survey published earlier this year, nearly three-quarters of U.S. teens say they feel happy or peaceful when they don’t have their phones with them, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. Pew also found that despite the positive associations with going phone-free, most teens have not limited their phone or social media use.

The poll was conducted from Sept. 26-Oct. 23, 2023, among a sample of 1,453 pairs of teens with one parent and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.