This essay description is a pseudonym.
My daughter is one of those children that the US surgeon general warned us about. Our nation’s children are “unwitting participants” in a “decades-long experiment.” Social media use poses mental health risks for young people, 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 encourage 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 perform these tasks—and so much more.
When my daughter walked into the classroom through an inflatable arch on her first day of high school, I took comfort in the fact that I could make it. Like most parents, I associated the phone with safety, not danger. I didn’t know social media developers were manipulating her next slide, or that her “human future” was being sold to the highest bidder, enriching the richest corporations in human history.
I learned the hard way – through my daughter’s lies, manipulation, slipping grades. Through the “zebra stripe” markings sketched across her arms.
Her sixth grade school photo 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 lips stacked selfies. Head tilt, half face, full body selfie. Selfie in bed. Her camera roll documents my child’s downward spiral. Crying selfies, puffy-eyed selfies, unable-to-leave-the-bedroom selfies.
In the spring semester, my daughter was poor in school. I took him for a psychiatric evaluation, assuming he had ADHD. The afternoon sun filtered through the faux wood shutters, casting light streaks over her ever-present black hood. The doctor’s questions began predictably. Having trouble focusing in class? Completing homework? Sleeping? Then the interview took a turn for the terrifying. Do you think your life is not worth living? Have you ever harmed yourself? Do you wish you were dead?
I opened my child’s profile, every “yes” bursting my guts.
The doctor diagnosed my daughter with depression and anxiety. Further testing showed that gaining the approval of her friends 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 didn’t alert me to the pervasive phone trends among high school students. I have since learned that my daughter is among the first generation of 10-14 year olds active on social networks. For these girls, the suicide rate has increased by 151%, self-harm by 182%. Her treatment assumed that her struggles were individual, as opposed to structural. In our country we prescribe drugs to solve this social crisis.
Not knowing these dynamics at the time, I allowed my daughter to continue her use of social media. One day, I received a message from another mother. I stared at the screen, wondering why this mom had sent me a graphic selfie. Then I recognized the mole on the woman’s breast. My child’s mole.
My daughter gasped when I showed her the picture. She handed him the phone. I discovered that she had bypassed the confines of the screen and was using social media until the wee hours of the morning. She sent the image to someone named PJ on Snapchat. He claimed to be a 16-year-old boy, but his response was so graphic that I suspected someone older. The phone was a two-way street, I realized with horror, with platforms adults could use to kidnap and traffic our children.
I called a family meeting with my daughter, her dad and stepmom. My daughter used to delete her social media accounts and give up her phone until the beginning of the school year. As the summer months passed with travel, personal meetings, and family time, my daughter came back to herself. The dark circles under her eyes faded. The sighs, shrugs, and rolling eyes stopped. She got up in the morning. She laughed. Sometimes he even let me hug him.
It was hard to get him back on the phone before seventh grade, but we had a deal. I wanted to reinforce her good behavior. I made new rules: no social media, no gadgets in bedrooms, phones off at 8pm. We charged our phones on the kitchen counter. I bought alarm clocks and sound machines. We endured the digital detox. My daughter started soccer. My insomnia resolved. We joined a gym and worked out together.
But within a few months, my daughter recovered. Little lies. Big lies. Another text came from a friend’s mom with selfies of our girls steaming and making out with guys I’d never met at the mall. We had another family meeting.
“This may sound crazy,” said my daughter’s stepmother. “But maybe she doesn’t need a phone.”
The words flooded my mind. How had I never thought of that? The phone was destroying my daughter, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. I had remained faithful to her idea, her ideal. I picked up the phone again.
My daughter was furious when I told her she had lost her phone until high school. She didn’t want to be that child, the only one in the class without her phone. But as the anger subsided, she began to come back to herself. Then, within a few weeks, signs of her addictive behavior began to reappear.
I found iPhone chargers in the outlets by her bed — to charge her AirPods, she said. She threw her body on the ground to prevent me from searching under her bed. One night, as I lay in bed chewing, it hit me. I remember my daughter had two the phones. When I had accidentally broken the Mini on a weight machine during our workout, I bought her a new iPhone 13. I had caught 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 to one I see you gesture. I was frantic, but displayed a calm confidence, even a little humor, as I searched her backpack and drawers, patted her pockets, entered her room unannounced, trying to catch her red-handed. My daughter remained calm throughout my search. I began to think I had gone completely mad. I bought a metal detector.
Then one evening, I entered her room. My daughter bolted upright and messed with her comforter. I ran to the bed, put my hands under the covers. A charging cord! My fingers traced its length on the attached phone.
We stared at Mini lying in my arms. The Snapchat app glowed beneath the shattered screen. She looked at me. Her eyes opened, then filled with tears.
That night, my heartbeat pounded wildly against my pillow as I scrolled through her social media. Her exchanges were desperate with need. She pleaded with people to respond, especially a boy named Damien. When he didn’t answer, she said she was depressed, sex, sent a picture of her breasts.
I found the answers from my sister in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which explores how and why our attention spans are waning: “The phones we have and the software that runs on them are purposely designed by the smartest people in the world to caught up and keeping our attention to the maximum.” Of course. At such a young age, my daughter was vulnerable to this manipulation. She assessed her worth within a system where she was both attention dependent and attention starved. She had adopted an algorithm where provocative content wins: “If it’s angrier, it’s more attractive,” writes Hari.
The social experiment in our home is being replicated in homes across the country. As parents, we want to keep our children safe. We want them to call us if an active shooter comes on campus. But the greatest danger lies WITHIN the phone, not outside if it is.
One reason our kids are so addicted to their phones is because we are addicted to our phones. My friends complain about insomnia but can’t imagine leaving their phones out of the bedroom. Addressing my child’s phone usage has meant addressing me. I have to refrain from texting while driving. I’ve stopped rushing to the charging station every morning to see if I’ve missed a message.
At the end of the seventh grade, my daughter is that child. Without her phone, she’s the kid who dribbles her soccer ball around the living room, rides her skateboard down the street, runs the lap of honor, joins the track team. She is the child whose hands make wild gestures as she chats with her friends, who braids 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 shoreline as my daughter and I surfed a glassy wave that rushed us ashore. “Again!” she said jumping to her feet. She is addicted to the feeling of the water swirling under her belly.
My daughter is not an only child. I recently met a woman who confiscated her 11-year-old son’s phone when she found out he was having sex. Sick middle-schoolers build community and pay attention in class now that school is forcing them to put their phones away — a trend that’s catching on fast. British children are largely learning in “a mobile phone-free environment” since the Department for Education’s mandate.
We need both individuals AND system changes to control the use of our phone. I am curious to see where these changes will take us until my daughter enters middle school.
Until then, I’ll keep the phone.