My daughter is a growing teenager and we enjoy watching movies together that I loved when I was her age. Some of the movies – dialogue and plot – have aged poorly. Sometimes we cringe together at the sexism that I just didn’t understand as a teenager. Sometimes she finds things hilariously old-fashioned. But after watching the 1984 film Footloose, she thought, “I wish I was born when you were a teenager.”
I didn’t expect that.
As we got deeper into the subject, she was specifically referring to the ending, when the high school students come together to transform an old mill into their prom. And, she added without me prompting her, there were no phones to take up the teenagers’ time and energy. They didn’t have to search Pinterest for ideas! It wasn’t any less fun just because it wasn’t immortalized on TikTok!
Writing this week’s cover story with my colleague Jackie Valley was particularly interesting for me because the question of how much time and energy teenagers should spend on their phones is something I am constantly concerned about.
We live in a big city where my child has a lot of autonomy (even taking the subway to and from school at a young age). She needed a phone – I know not everyone agrees – and at a younger age than I would have liked.
I’m also stricter – my daughter confirms this – about phone use than most parents I know. I think that’s partly because I know more about the risks because of my job and this story.
In almost every interview, my heart stopped at least once when I heard how many mistakes parents make. I am one of those parents who gets things wrong.
Still, I feel better after this story. I’m doing a lot of things right! But more generally, this is a discussion that we as a society didn’t really have a few years ago, at least not to the extent that we are having it today.
What struck me most was from an education director at a media literacy organization. He said it’s not an absolute statement that social media is bad and only abstinence is good. It’s about finding the balance and teaching young people to consciously use it to enrich their lives, but not at the expense of life itself.
I can’t imagine the discord in our house if I tried to swap the ubiquitous smartphone for a flip phone today (one of my first mistakes), but newer parents continue to learn from us.
And I think one of the things my own child realized during our cinematic journey back to the ’80s is that prom would probably be a lot more fun without a cell phone.
