May can be a tough month for parents of fifth graders. At least it was for me. My daughter was in fifth grade last year, and I remember how, right around this time, chatter about the dreaded “graduation gift” started revving up.
I say “dreaded” because I did not want to give my daughter an iPhone. I knew that was the way many families in our town did it. I was friends with the parents of kids who were just a few years older than mine, who had gifted iPhones for this occasion. And, of course, I had my daughter’s on-the-ground intelligence: Everyone gets an iPhone before middle school, Mom.
I had two problems. One: I was deeply concerned about the impact of a smartphone on my daughter’s well-being. And two, I was a founding member of a movement in my town with parents who shared this concern.
The previous spring—not long after The Anxious Generation was released—I had helped launch a Wait Until 8th pledge for families at my kids’ school. Within less than a year, our little elementary school ranked among the top 25 schools in the nation with the most pledges.
My small parent-activist team kept going. We connected with parents in our district’s other elementary schools and coached them on launching pledges of their own. We joined forces with a Rye-based nonprofit, IRLNY, to funnel our community’s disparate pledges into a single, unifying platform: the Larchmont-Mamaroneck Chapter of IRLNY. (Today, I am the proud editor of communications for our local chapter.)
But now it was almost June, and graduation was coming in hot. “Any gift ideas that are not Apple products?” one parent texted to my mom-friends thread.
I decided to go preemptive. I bought my daughter a phone—immediately.
It just wasn’t an iPhone. Through my advocacy work, I had discovered a number of kid-safe Android devices. We settled on a Troomi because it looked sleek and had the basic talk, text, and camera features that “everyone else” had in middle school. It did not have the two features prohibited by my community pledge: unrestricted internet browsing and social media.
My daughter was a good sport. She thanked me when the phone arrived, and she told her friends how great it was, even though I could sense a twinge of embarrassment. She dutifully plugged it into the charger in our kitchen each night.
And then it was graduation day. I’m not sure what it will be like for girls this year, but here’s how it went down in my town: Less than an hour after the ceremony, the selfies started. Every time a graduate opened her gift, she took a picture of herself holding the iPhone in the mirror and texted it to everyone else. Ping. Ping. Ping.
My daughter was devastated. Our plans for the afternoon—to take the family out to lunch, to bask in this milestone spring day—died. She was just too sad.
I was sad, too. And furious. I was furious with Apple, with the world—and with myself.
As parents, we’re told our number one job is to keep our kids safe and healthy. But what happens when that mission collides with the cultural norms of your kid’s world? Was it ok to make my daughter the sacrificial lamb of my cause? Did my crusade to shift the tween-tech landscape justify her pain on that day of days?
We decided to take the summer “off.” I told my daughter we weren’t going to make immediate decisions, but that we could revisit the iPhone question come fall. She returned the Troomi, and we spent the next few months thinking, observing, and reflecting. I encouraged my daughter to pay attention to how her peers were using their iPhones. What were they most useful for? How did or didn’t the phones affect the quality of their time together?
The new bell-to-bell ban relieved some of the immediate pressure to start middle school with an iPhone, but by October of sixth grade, my daughter was still feeling left out. So my husband and I sat her down for a talk. We told her our non-negotiables: no social media, no unrestricted browsing. And house rule #1: phone stays in the kitchen overnight. She agreed, and we ordered an iPhone.
How’s it going? There are pros and cons. On the pro side, our efforts to keep the phone “locked down” seem to be working. My husband deserves a medal for figuring out how to eliminate access to social media and unrestricted browsing. On the con side, my daughter still uses her phone far more often than I wish. I seriously underestimated how much tween girls would rely on the camera feature. (But of course it is for her what my point-and-shoot was for me!).
A few weeks ago, I attended an event in town with my friend, who was one of the first members of our “Wait Until 8th” parent group and had played an instrumental role in getting our community pledge off the ground. We struck up a conversation with a young parent seated across from us, and at one point she casually mentioned “that pledge” she had signed a while back. Were we familiar with it?
I said that we had helped to start it. The parent thanked us profusely. She told us that a bunch of parents from her kindergartners’ class had signed it as well, and that she couldn’t imagine navigating this stage without something like that in place.
As we like to say at IRLNY, it only takes 25-30 percent of a community to shift a cultural norm. I don’t know how much change will happen in my town between now and next year, when my son graduates from fifth grade. But I have a feeling things will be different.
