When Chase was little, we’d find him at our kitchen table drawing maps of the world and making lists of every country on Earth and its capital. He’d pass entire afternoons writing his own song lyrics, and we’d collect little poems he’d left all over the house.
When he turned thirteen, we bought him a cell phone because he desperately wanted one and we wanted to make him happy. Slowly we watched him fade away. He stopped drawing maps and reading and writing, and we stopped finding poems around the house. When he was with us, I could sense his need to be there instead. So even when he wasn’t on his phone, he was gone. He was just hovering among us. His eyes changed. They became a little duller and heavier. They’d been the brightest eyes I’d ever seen, and then, one day, they just weren’t. In his phone, Chase had found a place easier to exist in than inside his own skin.
That was tragic, because inside the itchiness of our own skin is where we discover who we are. When we are bored, we ask ourselves: What do I want to do with myself? We are guided toward certain things: a pen and paper, a guitar, the forest in the backyard, a soccer ball, a spatula. The moment after we don’t know what to do with ourselves is the moment we find ourselves. Right after itchy boredom is self-discovery. But we have to hang in there long enough without bailing.
There is so much about phones and children that parents worry about. We worry that we are raising children with commodified views of sex, lack of real connection, filtered concepts of what it means to be human. But I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming.
I was once talking to a Silicon Valley executive who had played an integral role in the creation and proliferation of cell phones. I asked how old her kids had been when she’d bought them phones. She laughed and said, “Oh, my kids don’t have phones.” “Ah,” I said. Don’t get your kids high on your own supply. Those who made the phones are creative people, and they want their children to become people who create, not just consume. They don’t want their children searching for themselves out there; they want them discovering themselves in here. They know that phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.
Abby and Craig and I talked about Chase’s slow fade incessantly, but we didn’t do anything about it. I knew in my gut that Chase was becoming addicted to his phone and that this was interrupting his growth and peace. But I was afraid that if I took the phone, he’d be left behind and left out. He’d be so different from the others. It took me two more years to remember that fear of being different is a terrible reason for a parent to avoid doing what her child needs her to do.
When Chase was a freshman in high school, I asked him to take a walk with me. As we made our way down our driveway and to the sidewalk, I turned to my bright, beautiful boy and said, “I make a lot of mistakes parenting you. But I only know they are mistakes in retrospect. I’ve never made a decision for you that I know, in real time, is wrong for you. Until now. I know I’m not doing right by you—letting you keep that phone in your life. I know that if I took it away, you’d be more content again. You’d be present. You might have less contact with all your peers, but you’d have more real connection with your friends. You’d probably start reading again, and you’d live inside that beautiful brain and heart of yours instead of the cyberworld. We’d waste less of our precious time together.
“I know this. I know what I need to do for you, and I’m not doing it. I think it’s because all of your friends have phones and I don’t want you to have to be different. The ‘But everybody’s doing it’ reason. But then I think about how it’s not all that unusual for everybody to be doing something that we later find out is addictive and deadly. Like smoking; everybody was doing that a couple decades ago.”
Chase was quiet for a while. We kept walking. Then he said, “I read this thing that said that kids are getting more depressed and stressed than ever because of phones. It also said we can’t talk to each other as well. I notice those things about myself sometimes lately. I also read that Ed Sheeran gave up his phone.”
“Why do you imagine he did that?”
“He said he wants to create things instead of looking at things other people create, and he wants to see the world through his own eyes instead of through a screen. I think I’d probably be happier without my phone. Sometimes I feel like I have to check it, like it controls me. It’s like a job I don’t want or get paid for or anything. It feels stressful sometimes.”
“Okay,” I said.
Chase and Tish both decided to quit social media and use their phones only for texting. We’re going to wait until high school to get Amma a phone. We do not want to give her a job while she’s so young. We want to give her the gift of boredom so she can discover who she is before she learns what the world wants her to be. We’ve decided that our job as her parents is not to keep her happy. Our job is to keep her human.
This is not a story about phones. This is a story about Knowing.
Brave parenting is listening to the Knowing—ours and our children’s. It’s doing what’s true and beautiful for our child no matter how countercultural it seems. It’s about how when we know what our children need, we don’t pretend not to know.
I have been raising my daughters to be feminists since they were in utero. I knew the world’s training would begin the second they were born, and I wanted them to be ready. Ready meant having an internal narrative about what it means to be a woman that they could weigh against the world’s narrative. I did not have an alternative narrative as a child, so when the world told me that a real girl is small, quiet, pretty, accommodating, and pleasant, I believed that this was the Truth. I breathed in those lies, and they made me very sick. Children are either taught by the adults in their lives to see cages and resist them, or they are trained by our culture to surrender to them. Girls born into a patriarchal society become either shrewd or sick. It’s one or the other.
I wanted my girls to know this: You are a human being, and your birthright is to remain fully human. So you get to be everything: loud quiet bold smart careful impulsive creative joyful big angry curious ravenous ambitious. You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.
It’s a lifelong battle for a woman to stay whole and free in a world hell-bent on caging her. I wanted to give my girls whatever they’d need to fight for their full humanity. Truth is the only weapon that can beat the pervasive lies the world will tell them.
So I’d place headphones over my watermelon belly at night and play audiobooks about brave, complicated women. After they were born, I’d rock my daughters to sleep with stories about women who had broken out of their cultures’ cages to live free and offer their gifts to the world. As they grew, we’d go for walks and guess the careers of the women passing by: “I bet she’s an engineer, a CEO, an Olympic athlete!” When another mother jokingly mentioned my daughter’s bossiness, I’d say, “Isn’t it great? She’s a leader.” When my girls lost a game and became furious, I’d say, “It’s okay to be angry.” When they started school and began to consider dimming and shrinking themselves, I’d say, “Keep raising your hand, honey. You can be your bold, brilliant self out there in the world. You can be sure of yourself and still be a girl.”