“How To Talk To Your Kids About Cell Phones” with Pete Sutton - Transcript
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Kim: Hey everyone. I am Kim Caifano, A.K.A. The Middle School Mommer. And I am here to help you connect with your child during this season, as well as get you equipped to parent them well.
So - welcome to my channel. If this is your first time here, please be sure to hit subscribe and ring the bell for future notifications. And today, I am very happy to welcome my guest Pete Sutton.
Pete is the Pastor of Student Ministries at Compass Church and he has seven children, so he knows a thing or two about junior highers and this middle school stage.
Today, we are going to be talking specifically about technology and tweens and teens. So I wanted to speak into this topic, wanted you to speak into this topic because partly it's just kind of that classic topic that every parent has a question about.
I feel that a lot of parents, even if they have made decisions, they're not sure about the decisions they've made, they have lack of peace, or other families are doing it differently.
So what do you have to say? Like you have the room for 10 minutes and say there is a room full of parents sitting here. What is it you want them to know?
Pete: It's a topic that everybody has to deal with and it's hard to avoid it. I remember when my kids were in middle school in sixth grade and we didn't give our kids phones.
But I remember going to the parent meeting, you know, to begin the year and one of the parents asked, “You know, if we are needing to communicate with our kids, how do we do that? Do we call the school? Do we send him? How do we do that?” And he said “Well just call your kids phone.” and the mom said back, “Well Mikey doesn't have a phone.” He says, “Why? Like 80% of the kids here do so, you know, we kind of expect parents to give their kids a phone at this stage.”
And I was blown away. In sixth grade, I wouldn't give my kids something that's worth $300 to just tote around the community in sixth grade, but it was a surprise. And then we've got our kids asking for technology, phones, and my kids will say “Then what if I need to call you?” and I said, “Well, you said all of your friends have phones, so just borrow one.”
But we have decided that there's no “the right age” to give our kids phones. We feel like there's a “right stage”. There's a right point in each one of their lives where a couple things come together.
They have a need.
Like I wouldn't give a kid a phone if they didn't have a need for it, it's not an entertainment tool, it's not something just to pacify them when you're on a long car ride. It is and can be a very dangerous piece of technology and so there has to be a need.
There has to be a level of responsibility.
There needs to be a level of expectation that our kids can meet. And for our kids it’s things like taking care of their room, their laundry, not losing their Chromebook. When we see those kinds of behaviors, we know that they're, you know, ready to manage that phone.
The third piece is always communication.
Are our kids open to communicating with us? Because if we are given this piece of technology and you know how technology is, it has a tendency to suck us in and isolate us. And people, especially in early adolescence, can isolate and they become withdrawn, absorbing this little digital world and then communication gets cut off.
So we said, we want to make sure that our kids have open communication patterns with us. When we sit down at the dinner table, and we're taking them to or from an activity in the car, while we're hanging out the house, we want to have a really solid communication relationship so we can talk to them about hard things because hard things are going to come up when your kid has a cell phone and technology.
And so those are the three things that we said have to happen for us to give our kids a phone, and our kids know that. They really kind of rallied on the responsibility piece and they really grew on the communication side of things and when the need popped up, they got a phone.
Some of our kids got phones at 12, some of our kids got phones at 15. There was no rhyme or reason to it. I have older kids that didn't need phones, you know, ten years ago, they were 16, 17, 18. It definitely has to do with each kid's readiness.
And then when you give a kid a phone, I think it's super important to recognize that it's not just about the phone, it's about what's on the phone. They have access to movies, music, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and probably a million apps that I'm not aware of to varying levels of risk.
Some of the experts today are saying that really young people shouldn't be given a phone until at least later junior high school. Even some experts say and most experts agree that 16 is about the right age for kids to begin engaging in social media.
Kim: And when you say experts, are you talking about psychologists or what are you saying?
Pete: Yeah, psychologists, sociologists. A lot of the studies, the clinical studies that have been done on the effects of cell phones, the usage, the amount of time spent on it, the temptation to be up all hours of the night, watching things or checking your phone, having it by your bedside. There's a lot of studies that have been done that show how detrimental that is to kids' health.
And so we have to draw the right boundaries around that. We have a rule in our house, phones don't go upstairs, they are for the main floor only. They charge them on the main floor, they keep them on the main floor. They don't take them upstairs, don't take them in the basement.
And when our kids have friends come over, we tell them “Hey, phones stay on this floor.” Same rule. It's super important that they're not charged next to their bed. No middle schooler is living an urgent life that needs that. No high schooler has needs that are that urgent. And we're teaching our kids to draw boundaries or teaching them self-control.
I think of it like as you're preparing your son or daughter to learn to drive. I think you should take the same approach with the cell phone. Right? When your son or daughter gets their driver's permit, they'll take a class, they'll learn about the car, how to use it, how to maintain it, how to drive, how it operates, the rules of the road. Not only that, but then they have many hours that they'll spend behind the wheel with you, right next to them or a drivers instructor. And oftentimes they had that break, right?
And that's super important for them to learn to drive because you're sitting next to them, you're coaching them, you're encouraging them when they make a mistake, you're helping them not to feel anxious or defeated.
There's a level of protection there of security that you're developing and their driving skills and the better you do that, the more confident they will be at driving. I think it's the same thing with a cell phone. We don't just hand our kids a phone like we wouldn't hand our kids the keys to the car.
When we hand him a phone, it's going to be, hey, we're going to do this together. We're going to learn about the phone, we’re gonna learn about phone etiquette. We're going to learn about boundaries, where the phone goes and where it doesn't go, how the phone works best and how it doesn't work best.
We're going to talk about how this phone changes who you are, your identity, like a driver's license, it brings freedom, right? If a kid has a driver's license and a car, even more freedom. When I give you this phone in today's world, that's a tremendous amount of freedom and it has to be the responsibility they’re ready for.
So, just handing them the phone is like giving a sixteen-year-old the keys to the car without going through driver's ed or behind the wheel and saying, “Good luck! Don't hurt yourself or anybody else.” Chances are something will happen.
Even right down to the social media apps, if you're going to give your son or daughter Instagram, for instance, don't just make them account and put it on the phone and tell him, “Hey be good, don't look at bad things.” Make an account and put it on your phone. Anytime they want to check Instagram and their account, they can come to you and you do it together. This is the behind the wheel portion of learning to use a cell phone and they learn with you.
And then at some point you put that account on their device and you keep it on yours. Now, you're getting to share content. You're going to see what they're searching for. You're going to see the messages that come in. You're going to be able to, but now you're not doing it side-by-side, you're just simply a step further apart. Then you turn off your notifications and you trust them with that app, but you don't just ignore it.
Then the check becomes, “Hey, let's sit down and look through your Instagram. What are you posting? What are you..?” And we have rules with that. We're always going to be friends or connected in some way with those social media apps with our kids. And they're going to have fake Instagram, “finsta” accounts and that happens, but it happens less and less when there's open communication.
That's actually the most important thing with technology today and cell phones in particular is keeping that communication open. Spending ample amount of time with your son or daughter, not focusing on the phone, but building rapport, having real relationships. Because when they feel safe to talk to you about all sorts of things, the phone is no longer the most contentious thing that you can talk about.
For a lot of kids, when Mom says, “Hey can I see your phone?” Maybe there's not a lot on there but it's the idea that it's a vulnerable thing. You know, I've got my life under my seat, it's my friendships and then there is this invasion of privacy so to speak, and it's not, but that's definitely how they view it. This is their world. So building that kind of rapport where you're able to talk about tough things with your son or daughter besides the cell phone makes itself not so contentious.
So again, making sure that there's a need, there's a responsibility, and that there's open communication.
Making sure that you're kind of treating it like a driver's license and that as you take those steps with that piece of technology, that you're doing it incrementally and giving more responsibility where there's more responsibility demonstrated.
So much that I think some of the experts today even say that. In fact, I've got a good friend who's an author, Jonathan McKee, who recently wrote a great book on cell phones, technology, and social media, and that type of thing has no real senior year, right? He's helping his kids get to a point where in their senior year of high school there's no rules. There's no curfew, no rules on the phone, no monitoring. It's how you're making these decisions on your own, and if we can get our kids to that point, when there are 17, they're going to make those decisions in our household.
They're going to make mistakes, but they're going to make them in a safe environment where if they fail the stakes aren't as high as when they fail off in college right? Where we can see their moods kind of rise and fall and we can catch them and say “Hey what's going on? How are you doing? Something happen?” And give them the freedom to fail, which is pretty significant during adolescence.
We also create opportunities to walk them through it and teach them how to process failure and mistakes, teach them how to apologize and, you know, own their mistakes and that's pretty huge. And so with technology, it's a great tool, a great opportunity to engage with our kids in a whole new way. Don't look at it as an obstacle, as an evil to be managed, really look at it as an opportunity to engage with your son or daughter in a brand-new way.
Kim: As you can tell everything he's saying I'm kind of like, oh my goodness, I'm learning right along here. And I'm kind of like, oh, some of the mistakes we've made that there's always a fresh start, right? It's not too late because yeah, we did make the mistake of giving our child a phone, kind of giving him a few rules and then letting them run with it for probably, I don't know, a week or so. And then we started checking group text and things like that, and it was just like, oh, goodness, like what were we thinking? He didn't know how to conduct himself, you didn't know how to have self-control and go off on his response to his group of friends.
A lot of what you shared, I feel like we're simply covering the topic of cell phones at this point, which I am more than fine with, I feel like we could talk an entire hour. I think that there is so much more to explore in terms of, what about Snapchat, and what about you know.
I think mostly what I'm hearing you say is a couple themes that I just want to extract here. That you really do need to take it case by case with each child, it's not necessarily like at the age of you know like on your whatever 13th birthday.
Pete: Everybody has their driver's license at 16 year and everyone gets their phone at 12.
Kim: Yeah, it's not that it's more of a response. Looking at how responsible they have been in their lives. But then the communication piece is huge.
I think for the reasons you stated as well as like we check in with our middle schooler when he's on his phone a little more than we would like, I just say to him, “Is it because I had a like a busy work day and I wasn't giving you as much attention as you needed?” I work from home and sometimes that is his answer. He'll be like, “You know what? Yeah, I had nobody to talk to and my friends weren't available,”. So kind of, you know, being there, Being somebody they want to hang out with, so that their phone is not their friend, their only friend.
Pete: Andy Crouch wrote a great book called Tech-Wise Family and in it, he cites a study where they asked teenagers “Today if they could change one thing about their mom or dad, what would it be?” And the number one answer was that they wish their parent was on their phone less.
Kim: Oh my goodness. That’s so convicting. Like their parents. They want their parents…..
Pete: Right? Well, how many times do we nag our kids? Get off your phone, right? And if they could say it out loud, if they felt comfortable saying it, they would say back, “Hey mom, dad, get off your phone.” And we're giving them that example. We're giving them a model to follow and I think it's something to keep in check.
Kim: Well, I want to honor our time and wrap up this interview. So as you can tell, there is a wealth of information here, I have some resources that I recommend on my site so if you want a little more information on this just go to middleschoolmommer.com. And in the meantime, thanks for joining us today.