246 by Tiffany Shlain

Author:Tiffany Shlain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

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That’s not to say they aren’t ready to go back to screens Saturday night. They love being both offline and online. We hoped that getting Odessa a phone wouldn’t change that. Most of Odessa’s classmates were given smartphones at their fifth-grade graduation in 2014, as if it were a rite of passage. Thirty-one percent of kids ages eight to ten have smartphones, and 69 percent of eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds do. We weren’t ready for that, and we didn’t think Odessa needed one. The issue of getting your child a smartphone is like peer pressure for adults. Everyone’s doing it.

At that point, we were five years into our living 24/6 experiment, and we’d all really grown to appreciate that protected time without phones. The idea of giving Odessa unfettered access to a supercomputer disguised as a phone the other six days gave us pause.

Instead of a smartphone, we gave her a mobile flip phone for calls and texts. (I hate how flip phones are referred to as “dumb phones.” Let’s just call everything what it is. A flip phone is a “phone” and a “smartphone” is an “addiction machine.”) We created a flip-phone contract (based on Janell Burley Hofmann’s funny and astute smartphone contract, available online) with terms of use, and all three of us signed it in a ceremony at our kitchen table using an ink pen with a long pink feather attached. Very official. And that was that.

Four years later, a freshman in high school, Odessa rarely used the flip phone. It was hardly ever charged and often left at home. Ken joked that he’d consider it a miracle if Odessa picked up when he called. She explained that she just doesn’t like talking on the phone. She didn’t always like to be reachable. (Author and Internet law scholar Brett Frischmann says we’ve moved from helicopter parenting to “drone” parenting, surveilling our kids’ every moment through their phones.) I used to love walking home from school by myself in the ’70s for that same reason: some time to myself. I also think Odessa thought her flip phone was pretty useless because it didn’t do what all her friends’ smartphones did. I get that, too.

By the time Odessa was in high school, we knew we were close to the precipice. We wanted her to have what she needed to thrive. We also didn’t want to do the wrong thing.

A number of events eventually made us take the plunge. She got stranded several times, once needing to borrow a phone from a mother she didn’t know. She was put at a disadvantage on assignments from school because her public high school teachers assumed all kids had smartphones. Another time we couldn’t reach her when she needed a ride home from a Model UN conference. She walked through the streets of San Francisco as it got colder and darker, convinced she could walk to the destination across town, because she couldn’t find a cab or call a Lyft or an Uber. That one was scary.

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