Your Teen’s Phone is Not a Privilege or a Reward
As much as you don’t want to admit it, a phone is not a “reward” that you’ve bequeathed your child with
My oldest son is sixteen. He’s had a phone since he was twelve, with gradually increasing levels of freedom on the phone.
When my son’s grades began to slip, we looked at how he was spending his time and a lot of it was on his phone. After a discussion with him about why we were doing this, we put automatically-enforced time limits on social media, games, YouTube, and his creative apps. To our surprise, he seemed relieved.
After a week or so, he was negotiating to get some time back on his creative apps (he hopes to be a voice actor someday and spends a lot of time practicing accents, recording himself, playing with sound effects, and learning how to manipulate his voice). He wanted time to do the thing he loved, but he didn’t even bother asking for social media, games, and YouTube.
“I don’t know. I don’t really miss it that much,” he said when we asked. “Plus, I’ve been getting all my stuff done without being stressed or rushed and that’s been nice.”
The fact that his grades began to rise almost immediately (it was the right time in the semester for one or two good assignments to make a…
