If My Kids Shouldn’t Be On Fentanyl, Why Should They Be On TikTok?

Smartphones were supposed to make things easier. But they have made parenting — and life — far more difficult, instead.

Photo by Valeria Blanc via Canva.

Remember the old days?

Back in the 1900s and early aughts, when we sometimes met up with friends out in the world, and if they didn’t show up at the appointed hour, we had no idea what was going on? We didn’t know if they were just RINGL8 and OMW, or if they’d been hit by a 🚌, or if they’d forgotten about us entirely.

We just had to stand there. And wonder. And wait.

Man, I miss those days. When we waited for things. When we weren’t constantly flooded with minute-by-minute updates of basically everything. When we didn’t always know what was going on, and that was okay because nobody else did, either.

We still don’t know what’s going on most of the time, but we think we do. We think we’re benefiting from the waves of random information that assault us daily. We think we’re communicating more. We think our apps are improving the user experience of our lives, making everything more seamless, more streamlined, more goddamn efficient.

We think we’re saving time, saving energy, saving money.

But when you stop to really think about it — which, let’s face it, we don’t do all that much anymore — smartphones have made our lives only somewhat easier and vastly more difficult. Many of us, particularly us “old folks” (i.e. over 35) who survived adolescence and early adulthood without a smartphone, are just beginning to come to terms with the enormous trade-offs that come with carrying the so-called “world” in your pocket.

And particularly those of us “old folks” who have kids.

I know I’m not the only parent trapped in a perpetual gridlock with my pre-teen over the age at which she will be allowed a phone and the age at which she will be allowed to access social media. As a child who is part of the “native generation,” who grew up swiping and Googling and taking selfies, denying her a phone of her own is, by her logic, kind of like denying her a limb.