'My son says, he doesn’t want a phone because he wants to be free.'
WHEN MY KIDS WERE BORN, in 2005 and 2009, and I mounted photo after photo of them on Facebook with overworked captions, I envied them being born into a digital world. Lucky kids, they also had me—a chic internet habitué, not some Luddite rube afraid of her own shadow online, terrified of selfies and convinced she might restrict her household to 20 minutes a day “on the internet,” as if anyone in our time ever fully gets off.
I looked on proudly as the kids walked around our block, trying out my Google Glass , easily mastering the flash-in-the-pan device I’d managed to wrangle as part of a pilot program. I imagined they’d both become virtuosos at digital culture, social media, online research. They’d create formidable, indomitable avatars with vast powers and an absolute immunity to scams, trolls, and disinformation. Their avatars, one day, would heroically match wits with J.K.
And then somewhere along the line, as he tells it, he privately decided that if he were going to maintain his integrity in middle school, he would have to stay away from phones. He set himself certain tasks in his education, and he calculated that he couldn’t give up nearly seven hours per day—the national average—to phones and other screens.
For me this was a headache. His friends, when they were looking for him, had started to text me. And when he went off on his own for hours, I had no way to find him. We’re used to everyone being reachable; my son is, as a rule, not. Periodically we tried to coordinate using public phones. Occasionally he’d borrow a phone from a friend of his so he could call me, but he’d keep the conversations very short—like an international call in the old days.
Oh, was I sorely mistaken. As I learned on his birthday, my son had decided three things about smartphones. 1. They’re infantilizing, a set of digital apron strings meant to attach you to your mother. 2. They compromise a boy’s resourcefulness because kids come to rely on the GPS instead of learning Scout skills. 3. They make people trivial.
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