Greta always knew she would have to face her first year of high school without a phone. Her parents made their stance clear back when she was in elementary school, then banded together with a handful of other families in the neighborhood to stand firm.
“I know I missed out on hanging out with friends because I just didn’t know or wasn’t able to coordinate. And there were conversations I was not a part of,” says Greta, who is now 17 and finishing her senior year in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents finally relented the summer before Greta began tenth grade. “It was actually a huge deal, in junior year, when I was finally able to get added to this text thread that a group of girls had all started many years before. Getting added to an established group chat can be really hard.” Feeling clueless about viral videos and memes was also deflating. “Sometimes I pretended to know, although that can be embarrassing too. But honestly, my friends usually just explained it all to me, then they sometimes joked that ‘I live under a rock.’”
Waiting is far from a popular choice (more than 90 percent of American teens have a phone by age 14), but it is in the Zeitgeist. In social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s buzzy new parenting book, The Anxious Generation, he suggests that age 16 be the “new norm” for introducing social media and argues that delaying smartphone use to high school could be the solution to the mounting teen-mental-health crisis. Greta, of course, was barred from phone life well before The Anxious Generation became a micro-phenomenon. But her experience could be a case study straight out of Haidt’s playbook.
Greta told me she’s happy she muddled through middle school and ninth grade without a phone, even if it wasn’t what she wanted at the time. “I developed the ability to make fun for myself, to be curious about the real world, and I got extra time with my family. I think I’m better adjusted,” she says. These days, Greta is often the slowest to respond to text messages in her friend group. She once misplaced her phone at school on a Friday and didn’t notice it was missing until Monday. Her cool, composed, almost take-it-or-leave-it feelings about smartphones mirror the responses I heard from the dozen or so other kids I interviewed who were forced to wait.
Clare, Greta’s mom, explains why she set the limit: “Not having a phone helps kids reduce their reliance on immediate gratification. You can’t act on every impulse or get quick responses or answers. Wait for the gossip; wait for your mother who will be there eventually.” Patty, another Virginia mom, puts it this way: “I think there is a piece of childhood — the sense of wonder — that disappears when smartphones are introduced. I wanted to give my kid more of that without the heavy weight of comparison and FOMO and endless staccato-like interruptions.”
Few parent holdouts had much to say about the social and emotional upheaval their children would suffer through by going phone-free, though all were undoubtedly aware that in refusing their kids’ phone requests, they sentenced them to certain struggles. In the infamously catty social milieu of middle and high school, their kids would lack a form of currency that might ease the awkwardness — the ability to comment on a popular kid’s photos, to quickly and quietly text instead of call someone, to be part of the chatter while it’s happening instead of hearing about it the next day in the hallway.
Greta’s younger sister, Molly, is 15, in ninth grade, and doesn’t have a smartphone. “The hardest thing lately tends to be if a guy wants to ask me out. Recently I had friends tell me that a guy won’t ask me out if I don’t have a phone or a Snapchat, because it’s just not how they communicate. That sort of bums me out,” she says, then pauses. “But then again, if he makes the extra effort to actually talk to me in person, that’s what I want.”
When her friends are scrolling through reels or videos, sometimes Molly will watch along over a shoulder. “Then I see all the stuff I’m missing, but I guess because I don’t have it, I don’t really feel addicted to it or anything. It’s only once you have something that you feel like you can’t live without it.”
Molly and Greta haven’t fought their parents too intently for phones because they’ve always known there was no hope. But other teenagers I interviewed described constant fights and relentless campaigns lasting years and involving today’s teenage persuasion tool of choice: the powerpoint presentation. Sam, a 15-year-old outside Memphis, has made several slide decks. “I even made ‘Reason No. 4’ of why I should get a phone that my mom could track me really well, but it still didn’t do anything.” Another gripe he presented: Teachers often ask students to scan a QR code to access information they’ve posted in class, and he’s always out of luck. “Other kids would help me out, but it was such a pain. It was a big source of tension at home.”
Victoria, who is 15 and lives in East Lansing, Michigan, has also made a few presentations, including one focused exclusively on Snapchat. It emphasized how the app would help her build a community, strengthen her friendships, and expand her network to more kids in her grade. “I was pretty mad that the answer was always no, but I think I was more jealous than upset with my parents to be honest. Kids weren’t outright mean to me at all, but I did feel like there was some judging or condescension maybe,” she says. Victoria started asking her parents for a phone in fifth grade and pleaded “a million times,” she says. She ultimately got her wish a few weeks before the start of ninth grade. Before that, not having one was a steady source of social aggravation.
After school dismissal, classmates scattered to meet up at the local Rite Aid or the Biggby’s coffee, but Victoria didn’t know which location they’d chosen and often wound up walking home alone. “That sucked,” she says. She also felt awkward when peers asked for her phone number. “Group chats actually had to be created for me, because I just had an email address,” she says. “Now that I have a phone and have Snapchat, I don’t even know how I held on to some of my close friendships before. I sort of can’t believe that I didn’t have one for so long.”
Yet moments later, Victoria doubles back. “The thing is,” she says, “On the whole, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t awful, but it also wasn’t the best. Yes, I hated it, but it wasn’t that bad, if that makes sense?” She tells me that she’s less addicted to her phone than her friends who have had them longer. Her younger sister has been begging for a phone, and Victoria thinks she should wait longer. “It’s beneficial,” she says, “You can get a serious addiction.”
Teenage boys I interviewed spoke less of missed plans and social awkwardness and more about craving access to gaming and the discourse that surrounds it. Nathan, 16, who lives near Sacramento, used his Apple Watch to make plans until he got his phone just before ninth grade. He only felt he was truly missing out when his friends played the highly absorbing, multiplayer video games Clash Royal and Clash of Clans before school on their phones. The games require players to create strategies with real-world and AI opponents and to chat with other players within the game. “Sometimes when I was hanging out with friends, I’d use their phones to play,” he says.
All of the kids I spoke with — those with long-delayed phones, those still waiting — seemed to have developed a dual mentality. They longed for phones and envied friends who had them. At the same time, they saw that their peers had become addicted and casually policed them in the style of exasperated parents and teachers.
“Whenever someone is bored or uncomfortable, they pull out their phone,” Greta says. “If we’re all out and everyone is on their phone sometimes, I will say ‘Get off your phone’ and get groans from my friends,” adds her sister, Molly.
Alyse lives in Astoria, Queens, and believes she is the only eighth-grader at her school without a phone. Her mother, Anna, is an educator and says that student phone use has made teaching exponentially more difficult and “zombified” the kids, which is why she’s set a strong limit for Alyse. “It’s really not that big of a deal,” Alyse tells me when I ask her if she still minds, then goes on to sound like the anti-phone adults in her orbit. “I have realized that some of my friends can’t really interact anymore without their phones, and I don’t like that. And not having a phone gives me more time to do other things. I like to read a lot.” She tells me that kids sneak onto their phones during class and keep on pulling them out even after teachers call them out on the behavior. “It shows how addicted they are.”
Next year, Alyse will commute via subway to high school and she hopes to have some kind of device for communication and safety. “With all the craziness in the world, I’d feel better,” she says. But the desire to get a phone for social reasons — which she used to feel urgently — has faded. “I have really good friends, and it doesn’t bother me. They don’t make a big thing about it.”
Then there’s Sarah, who uses they/them pronouns, is 15, and is finishing ninth grade in Manhattan. Sarah can trace the origin of their phone-free life to one fatal misstep. Sarah had an old, SIM-card-free iPhone that wasn’t connected to the internet and that they used to play games. But one day Sarah’s little brother got his hands on it and moments later, it was in the toilet. Sarah’s parents replaced the phone with an iPad, and Sarah has been asking for a real, connected phone ever since. At one point, Sarah’s parents told Sarah that if they got their grades up, they could have a phone — but Sarah never managed to meet their expectations. Over the years, Sarah has learned to live without a phone — even managing to find their way home after getting lost on the subway. And Sarah says that since high school started, they’ve never felt judged by peers for not having a phone. Middle school was different: “In eighth grade, a lot of people judged me, but that’s just middle school,” Sarah says. “My middle school was a breeding ground for bullying so, honestly, I did not care what people said back then.”
Still, Sarah can’t help imagining what their life could have been: “Maybe things would’ve turned out differently if my brother didn’t take my phone and drop it in the toilet.”
The names of some children and parents have been changed to protect their identities.
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Liz Krieger , 2024-05-30 13:00:03
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