I wish I could throw it into the sea.
That’s what I say to my daughter about her phone, at least twice a week.
When I say it, I usually have my hand down by my side, holding my own phone.
Every evening, I go into my daughter’s room to take hers and lock it away while she sleeps.
Then I lie down next to her, and we watch a few videos to unwind. On my phone, of course. Sharks, maybe. Some nail-tapping ASMR thing she inexplicably loves. A new TikTok dance that she really, really doesn’t want me to try.
My daughter wakes up early, even before I do. I hear her tiptoeing out of her room and padding across the living room floor to fetch her rested phone from the box where it sleeps.
It’s usually my signal to pick mine up for the first morning scroll.
She goes back to bed for a while, checking her Snap, and scrolling her Pinterest feed. What did she miss, while she was sleeping?
I lie in my bed, just for a few minutes before I wake my partner and the dog for a walk, checking the headlines, scanning for any urgent updates, and scrolling my Instagram feed. What did I miss, while I was sleeping?
I wish I could throw it into the sea.
“For God’s sake put that down,” I say, when I get back from the dog walk, and my daughter is ready, showered and fragrant and in her school uniform, but sitting on the edge of her bed, scrolling.
Then I walk out of the room, checking my messages. Work WhatsApp? Book emails?
I prop my phone up against the Alexa speaker while I make breakfast. Alexa’s playing me the news headlines, while my phone is poised to alert me if anyone has anything to say about anything.
The toast is in. I’ve wrestled an old, dormant phone from my little boy’s hand. He’s been playing Minecraft on it while we’ve been out. “Homework,” I say. “Dictionary?" He says, pointing at the phone.
My daughter wants a lift to the bus stop. She’s left it too late for walking.
Phone and I drive her, while maybe, if I’m lucky, she tells me something interesting that she saw online that morning.
I drop her at the bus stop, where a line of tweens and teens stand in the cool Autumn morning, heads bowed to their hands.
One of them – my daughter’s friend – looks up and smiles. Then lowers their head again, to the phone.
I wish I could throw it into the sea.
I know that friendships are curdling in the apps.
I know that comparisons are being made between bodies, clothes, shoes, hair, bedrooms, in all the “platforms” that seem to do the opposite of what platforms do – lift people up.
I know that hours, literal hours, are disappearing into that screen.
I know all that because what’s happening in my daughter’s phone is happening in mine.
"What did you do," my son asks me, "before we had phones?"
And I can’t quite remember, but I know we had our own ways of wasting time. I know when I was my daughter’s age, my mum was yelling at me to stop watching TV when I should have been doing my homework, or when I’d spent too long lying on the lounge on a Saturday morning, watching music videos and cheeky cartoons, still in my pyjamas at 11am.
I know I got my first iPhone when my daughter was a tiny newborn, and it felt like a lifeline to the outside world. But also, that my kids have never known it to not be within my finger-reach.
"You don’t have a phone," I remind my son, with a touch of self-righteous pomp, as he tries to sneak towards the box where the dormant one lies.
Of course, he snatches it, while I am looking at my phone.
What did we argue with our parents about, before there were phones?
Because at least 80 per cent of the shouting in our house is about them.
Look up from your phone. Put that thing down. You've had your tech time for today.
I wish I could throw it into the sea.
Parents hate phones and parents love phones.
They have made our lives easier in a million tiny ways.
That mum at the playground, looking down at her black mirror?
She’s answering a work email so she can be here, at the playground with her kid, instead of in the office. She’s making a doctor’s appointment for her mother, a dentist appointment for her son. She's assuring her boss that she'll meet that deadline, and she will, tonight, when the kids are asleep, on her phone. She's reading the day's headlines because she never gets to watch the news. She’s texting with an old friend she never gets to see any more since they both had babies and life became a blur. She’s checking the school app to see if tomorrow morning is reading groups, and she’d ordering groceries because going to the supermarket with toddlers is like trying to complete an obstacle course while being attacked by ferrets. She’s reading this story, and nodding in recognition. She might press 'share', and message it to another friend, the one who's addicted to her phone. It you, she'll type.
So parents love phones, but also, we hate them because while we were looking down at our comforting screens, they went and swallowed our kids.
I know I am not alone in saying that if I gave my children the choice of doing anything, anything in the world, lying around with their phones would win. For hours.
And we laugh, and we say 'me too' but the truth is, parents carry a lot of sadness about it.
Because that Dove ad is accurate. The one where the little girl is twirling and dancing and climbing trees and building things and playing games, and then, she gets her phone and she sits down and she... begins to disappear. For the girl in the ad, it's literal – the imagery she's exposed to begins to erode her sense of self, and leads her to an eating disorder.
It feels like worse-case scenario, but only one of many, many others.
Because that teen, with her head in her phone at the bus stop?
She's messaging her friends, and she's sending them a picture of her face, and then they are sending her a picture of their face. She's scrolling by a video that shows her how to make slime from some glitter and her dad's shaving foam and she's also scrolling by a video about how to create the perfect brow arch, glowy skin, tiny waist. She's being served ads for cool trainers, and also ads for skinny tea. She's loving all the fire emojis coming her way from the boy in her class, but she also knows that last year, he set up a group chat about a friend of hers called BETHANY'S A SLUT, and put Beth's head on images she knows all the boys are looking at, because she's seen them. She doesn't want it to be her turn though, so she 'likes' his messages. She's making sure not to leave any of her friends on read because she knows it's only a matter of time til she gets blocked. And she's texting her grandma. And listening to music. And watching shows her parents told her are inappropriate, earbuds in.
I wish I could throw it into the sea.
It's our fault, and it's not our fault.
Just ask the human and AI geniuses of silicon valley, the ones who designed these things to addict and obsess us and to always want more, more, more from us. More attention, more time, more dollar-dollar bills. There's no chance that this portal to Everything Interesting In The World Ever is about to close over and fade away.
Our kids are not strong enough to resist it and neither are we.
It's all we can do to create rules and barriers around their use. Lockboxes and tech-free Friday night and curfews on scrolling and filters on porn. And the rules get broken and the parameters shift and you reset and adjust.
But in my house, when I put my daughter's phone to bed, my partner often asks me why I don't put mine out of reach for the night, too?
And I laugh at him, and I feel a little wave of panic in my chest.
Because, I wish I could throw the phones into the sea.
But the truth is. If I did, five minutes later I would be wading in to the icy water, jeans soaking wet, taking great gulps of air to dive down and run my fingers across the sand and shells until I felt their smooth faces and comforting weight in my sodden hands. And I'd pluck them right out.
And ask, 'Anyone got any rice?'.
Image:
Love watching TV and movies? Take our survey now to go in the running to win a $50 gift voucher.
