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Mary Rooke

Mary Rooke

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One Item You Have To Keep Off This Year's School Supplies List

A fellow mother whose daughter shares a class with mine sent me a message recently asking for advice about whether it was time to give her kids cell phones. She was seeking my counsel because she knows I have four daughters, and my husband and I have a bit of a reputation on the subject.

What I told her was simple: The digital environment isn’t healthy for any of our children. Our daughters will eventually get cell phones, but none of them are old enough right now to handle the social or emotional baggage that comes with these devices.

Our girls attend a small, private Catholic school that follows a classical model. But even in this more sheltered environment, the modern world snakes its way in because most parents allow their children to have phones. 

Last school year, a girl in my daughter’s 7th-grade class was pranked into thinking a number texting her was a boy she liked. For about a week, she was led to believe the boy liked her back. It all came to a head when her best friend told everyone the boy wasn’t real and it was just her pretending to be him the whole time. As you can imagine, the girl was devastated. Not only did she have to endure the humiliation in front of all her peers (picture the entire lunch room laughing at the 13-year-old), but it came at the hand of her closest friend. 
You would have thought other students wouldn’t fall for this trick. But they are teenagers. Another student, the new boy who has had a rough go making friends, was also pranked with an imaginary friend. Again, the conversation continued for about a week before he was told in front of the entire middle school that it was a hoax.

This doesn’t even count the conversation in the class group chat that resulted in a girl crying because she was voted most annoying, or the secret codes they make up to talk about people behind their backs right to their faces. 

To an extent, some of this is typical social learning that you will find anywhere. While I believe a level of bullying, if you want to call it that, is an essential social protector that keeps the fringe from turning a class of otherwise normal kids into furries who pee in litter boxes, technology strips children from the consequences of their harmful behavior. It creates a shield for the emotions they are inflicting on their peers. In the end, they don’t feel the remorse that comes along with hurting someone else. 

It’s not about creating a bubble-boy world where they don’t experience hardship. Adversity is an essential building block for success. It’s about allowing them time to break from it and process the bullying in a way that strengthens them. 

When our daughter came home from school telling us about the boy who was pranked into thinking he had made a friend, my first thought was, “Thank God it was a classmate and not a predator.” These children don’t even have the sense not to respond to a text from someone they don’t know. They have no idea what power they hold in their hands, but their parents do; they lived through the Wild West of the internet age, which is why it’s so shocking that so many allow their children unfettered access to it.

It makes me want to scream: “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?”
Now, with the new school year quickly approaching, it was once again time to sit down with our daughter to discuss why she still wasn’t ready for a cell phone. I dreaded this talk because she always seemed disappointed despite our reasonable explanations. This year, she wasn’t. She was relieved. After seeing what her classmates experienced, she decided she didn’t want the burden.

I know how lucky we are that our daughter understands the “why” behind our decision. Many of our friends gave in to the constant begging because they were worried about their kids “fitting in.” But the proof is in the pudding. Their kids are all either completely obsessed with their devices, unable to carry on a conversation without looking down at the screen, or anxiously waiting for the fresh hell that waits for them in their toxic group chat. 

Parents need to understand that there is a battle for their children, and the moment you give them a phone, you’ve lost them to a world of scandal, anxiety, and depression. It’s not our job to befriend our children while they are young. It’s our responsibility to protect and nurture them from our highly toxic culture that only serves to make them suffer. Even if it doesn’t feel this way now, when your children become adults, they will be more thankful for their peaceful childhood than upset that you didn’t give them a phone too soon.
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