It’s easy and also at times entirely understandable to hate on these phones but I look at the way my young son uses his device and wish we could all emulate him.
What you perhaps see in the video of him above is a.n.other teenager glued to his device and transfixed by the lure of the digital beyond. Corrupting and distracting and delivering doses of dopamine on repeat. Like Kaa hypnotically seducing his man-cub mind and metaphorically coiling python pressure tightly around young bones to crush all his creativity.
That’s not what I see though. I see a guy who, after so many years of practice, finally became a reader and a texter, can have some agency over his own social life and him arranging a pizza night here with his pal is bloody wonderful to witness.
For this guy, his having a phone has proven to be a profoundly connective, creative and reassuring experience. And I’d never have forecast this either being the case or being so easy to parent.
His slowish, chuggy old iphone X is expanding his world just enough and - I’m going to say it - is proving very educational and not only for him. We’re all learning new aspects of him through how he makes it work for him.
The phone stays downstairs on charge overnight, that’s a house rule. There are no games on it or social profiles, just plain ole messages and some music. Sorry neighbours, but at least it’s into an unplugged microphone that he’s belting out KISS / Beatles / Chappell Roan songs through his bedroom wall, hey?
There’s a special pocket at the front of his backpack which he zips it up inside each day to take off to college in the education taxi and I deliberately don’t charge up his canteen credit so he has to text me and plead for funds around midday. I’m cunning like that.
When he has something important to say, he uses it to communicate his request or his news, whatever the something is, then puts the phone away. He isn’t glued. He doesn’t take it out with him wherever he goes, not even on days out, and I didn’t even need to intervene here; he regulates all this himself.
There are times when it’s just the two of us living here and the phone provides security when I have to leave him home alone to work away from the house. This has been a massively anxiety-provoking, jittery journey for me and a long one which, on many levels I was not / am not ready to make. It varies depending on the hormonal tide how risk averse or tolerant I feel in any day.
Although it’s a sometimes precarious situation in places where the signal is unreliable - like Tuesdays when I teach up on the hill in a remote Hogwartsy School on the South Downs - steadily we’ve learnt that this phone has cultivated trust to grow between us. Trust which has him stretch his comfort zone and me stretch and flex mine which has the tighter ligaments.
The first time I left him home alone on a dark winter’s night - to attend a life drawing class barely a mile along high street cobbles - heart chambers thumped hard in my chest and sent the taste of scratchy graphite fear up into my throat. In deafening radio silence, I was sprinting back through the blackness. He hadn’t texted back for two hours. He was dead or worse still. Perhaps laying lifeless on some wet, cold verge having been struck by some car after leaving the house to come find me.
It had started out well enough, that evening, him sharing a couple of succinct text exchanges which pinged on my screen at the easel and pushed my cheeks up high enough to see from under my glasses. ‘ok’ .. ‘I am’ .. ‘no I won’t’ .. But then nothing/ nada/ niente for one hundred and twenty long artistic minutes. As I nervously dismantled someone else’s body into pink flesh shapes on a page. Limbs, buttocks and lumbar regions, all dismembered into grey lines whilst my mind fought hard to hold him whole and in one piece.
When I rasped and gasped my way through the back garden gate, I found the house in an eery darkness. All but for the bright yellow glow of kitchen. And my eyes made out the side profile of a figure battling with something aloft over his head. His head tipped right back, his arms jolting something above him. A scarlet river of red squirting down into his throat. Tomatoey redness oozing from a bottle of Heinz tomato sauce. He was on a cheeky raid.
I rapped my knuckle on the window. "‘Jake, what are you DOING?’ He tried to quickly disappear the evidence not realising that I could see in. I descended so rapidly in this unlikely moment from peak state fear into heightened comedy and absurdist appreciation. It was exquisite, the turbo transition between these two deeply felt states; I was high on the smooth red, bloody river of relief!
Being in the house alone has been a journey alright, but we’ve made much progress since Ketchupgate and being left by himself gives him a real sense of belonging in adulthood and an independence that he otherwise societally doesn’t often get to feel.
This feels particularly relevant to say right now as the college term just ended yesterday and the wiiiiiide expanse of a dusty care desert looms long and stretches over to a hazy and uncertain September horizon in the distance. Somewhere over on the other side there’s there’s an educational tribunal lodged which I wrote about here and it’s quivering in today’s heat.
There have been a couple of episodes of phone-based bullying to contend with. Not at all simple to navigate with disability and blurred comprehension but positive interventions were made and, whilst they felt sticky at the time, were fairly typical boundary-pushing scenarios.
One of these situations came from the aggrieved and possibly jealous sibling of his learning disabled friend. It felt really important to treat and handle this one sensitively because, frankly it’s a lot when someone’s extra needs fill a lot of the finite family space and squash your own. Emotions spilling over being symptomatic of an overstretched system.
In the main though, him having a phone seems to be a genuinely healthy situation and this has really surprised me. I didn’t anticipate how this would be, but honestly, it all feels so gratifying to watch him schedule a weekly FaceTime call with his grandma, send birthday gifs to his brother’s friends, make up poems and copy out song lyrics to his PT and youth group leaders. The phone gives him huge creative expression.
Perhaps I’m a lone voice here, applauding what Dr Anna Lembke refers to as the modern day hypodermic needle in terms of its addictive lure, but if we could all just behave with ours as he does with his, that would indeed be something. I aspire to be more like him.
His phone - the way he uses is - clearly enhances his mental health rather than the opposite. He uses it with restraint to build and maintain social bonds. To stay in touch with siblings who live elsewhere, his aunt and uncle overseas and friends. He gets to share his own news. News like yesterday’s dramatic new hair style which he was gasping to reveal to everyone he knows and you’ll possibly have seen if you follow my insta.
Perhaps the very worst phone thing that he does is research, and this is our collective gripe, because his one obsession / habit is to research deceased celebrities, actors and musicians. Their birth and death dates he commits to memory and then relates these to us with an enthusiasm we’re unable to match.
Probably the most visibly creative thing he does with his phone is he takes stunning photos. Currently lots of black and white portraits and hi-key shots of himself. Michelle whose shop Hector’s he works in each Thursday, tells me he has a keen eye and takes beautiful interior shots of the clothes, fixtures and fittings. He also disarms the staff with his directness and gets great candid moments of them going about their work.
I recognise that to parent neurotypical teenagers and manage phone usage is a whole different story entirely and likely bears little resemble to much of the above. I’ve not watched Adolescence and I’ve no other teenagers in the home; my other children are all well into their twenties now and their worlds, well, they’re able to move about in their worlds much more freely than he is in his own.
Do you think we’ll all be growing one extra long, glowing digit like E.T. here in response to our excessive phone tapping? As an evolutionary response. I understand it’s a problematic and polemic topic to consider. And I don’t envy parents now having to contend with very young children, pre-teens down to toddlers, and their exposure to devices that contain the flattened, fizzy version of a world and I say a world as it often isn’t ours. I’m already out of touch with the reality of how it is to safeguard little ones in 2025, to run the digital gauntlet and hand hold them to self actualise before they self virtualise.
That sensation of the fizzy glow I feel on the pad of my finger when I have to hold it down to press on the screen for a prolonged time, to record an audio or video. I hate that feeling. It feels bad tingly and weird. It feels wrong wrong. And doom scrolling is a devastation.
And yet, here I am about to tread across yet another long summer without care options for him and I’m noticing that I find consolation in that small, slick, black slice of circuitry. And that I’ve slightly let go of my phone fears with this man-cub of mine. In fact, more than that, I think we’d be doomed without it.
Welcome to any new subscribers, however you’ve arrived here. Here’s where my mind has been lured this week. Actually and virtually ..
on wormholes, Mrs Dalloway and that phrase ‘be nice to me or you’ll end up in my novel’.Anna Wharton and a post that had me rolling up my metaphorical sleeves to work out where I stand on the rolling up of skirts in schools and girl garments in general.
It was never acceptable at the time. A line from A Flat Place by Noreen Masud. An account of a living exhibit - of actual humans from Senegal - in 1929 northern Britain. And how this racist othering happened yet was simultaneously protested back at that time too. And reflecting on all that’s violent and preoccupying today.
The Last Anniversary and only two episodes left to watch. I rarely sit to watch TV but
coaxed me with her weekly lists which absolutely replace the Sunday papers, you’re so right!Listening to Dr Caroline Boyd on
discuss maternal anger and intrusive thoughts. 1 : 2 women post partum is a flippin’ huge number. NOBODY spoke of this back when I had my four babies 19-26 years / centuries ago and, now that I’m finally not ‘touched out’ I’m giving myself a hard hug for all the white-knuckling old me had to do. Particularly after having a baby with a disability.Dahlias and a first dalliance with these tubers I bought and planted back in the spring. It’s not my garden but I’ll be taking them with me when I leave.
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