The decision every family faces
We had a dilemma. The same dilemma so many families arrive at eventually. Do we buy our child a phone?
It is a sensitive question, and everyone has an opinion on it. Specialists have opinions. Other parents have opinions. Our own families have opinions. And in our house there was another layer, because her siblings already had phones, and she really wanted one too. So there was a lot going on beneath what looks, from the outside, like a simple decision.
For us, the deciding factor was safety. In our family, the tradition had always been that you got a smartphone when you started high school, and until now the newest phone user in our family had never needed one, because she had always caught the bus with her older siblings. Then her last sibling in line started high school, and suddenly she was making the trip alone. Twenty minutes each way, every day, with no one beside her to keep her company or help her problem solve if something went sideways.
So we did what felt right at the time. We bought her an iPhone, set up location sharing, and told ourselves this was the sensible choice. And honestly, it was. We made the best decision we could with the information we had.
What we did not fully appreciate then is that she was in a different stage of brain development to her siblings. They got their phones in high school. She was younger, right in the middle of the consolidation years, when the brain is busily wiring in whatever it practises most.
To be clear, the effects of a phone on a developing brain are a concern at every age from zero to eighteen. No stage gets a free pass, and the high school years are their own critical window of growth and pruning. But the younger the child, the more those effects compound, because so much more of the brain's wiring is still being laid down. The same phone, at a different age, lands on a more impressionable brain. Looking back, that explains a lot of what we noticed next.
What we started to notice
Over the year that followed, we started to notice something shift. Her focus was different. Her attention was different. The phone was no longer just a safety tool sitting in her school bag. It had become something she reached for constantly. The apps she was showing us were so loud and so flashing and so relentlessly gamified that I could barely look at the screen. And that was what she was getting used to. That was what she was starting to crave.
The part that stayed with me most is that she noticed it herself. She told us she felt like she got lost in it. Not lost in a dramatic way. Just quietly pulled in, over and over, without really choosing to be. She was aware of how much time she was spending on it before we ever raised it with her.
A conversation, not a lecture
So we sat down and had a conversation. Not a lecture. A conversation.
We talked about her brain, and how it grows in stages. From birth to about five, the foundations are being laid. From around six to eleven, the brain is consolidating, which means it is strengthening the habits and pathways it uses most and quietly letting go of the ones it does not. From twelve to eighteen comes a period of enormous growth and pruning. She is in that consolidation stage right now. Whatever she practises every day, her brain is wiring in as the default for later. Scrolling. Checking. Waiting for notifications. Hunching over a screen. Or reading, moving, talking, creating, and being bored long enough to think.
We talked about the physical side too. Her posture and her back. Her eyes, and how we blink far less when we stare at screens, so our eyes do not get the lubrication they need. We talked about the emotional side, and the social side, and the simple fact that time on a phone is time not spent doing almost everything else.
And we talked honestly about how these apps are built. Many of the people who design these products limit their own children's access to them, because they understand exactly how they work. Companies bring in behavioural specialists to make apps as engaging and as hard to put down as possible. The game mechanics are everywhere now. Every app. Every scroll. Every streak and reward and notification.
Through all of it, there was no shame. No judgement. No you do this and you do that. Children do not want to be told what to do. They want to learn, grow and understand. So instead of rules being handed down, it was simply this. Here is what your brain is doing at this age, and here is what the phone is quietly getting in the way of.
Something happens when a child hears that. She was not being punished. She was being trusted with real information about herself. And she decided, genuinely and enthusiastically, that she wanted to look after her brain.
So we went to Officeworks together and bought an old millennial flip phone. I felt a proper wave of nostalgia standing there, because I once had one exactly like it. Mine was pink.
What surprised us most
Within two weeks, she was barely touching her phone at all. She was not looking at it. She was not charging it. Half the time she did not even know where it was, because the pull had simply gone. She was not thinking about the apps anymore, and she was not waiting on notifications, because the want itself had changed.
And in the middle of all that, she was having fun. She was learning a device that actually asked something of her. No touchscreen. Real buttons that you have to read carefully. Shortcuts you have to figure out. Every single letter typed the long way. IYKYK.
For me, as a millennial, all of that was second nature. For her, it took real time and real effort to learn, and it was honestly the cutest thing to watch.
She still has the smartphone. It comes out for photos when we go somewhere special. But the constant checking is gone, and that low hum of worry about what she might be missing is gone with it. We are so proud of her. And I keep coming back to why it worked. It worked because she was brought along in the conversation, not managed from outside it.
We are not experts. We are doing our best with the information we have, like everyone else. But we are lucky to live in a time where there is genuine research on wellbeing, technology and the developing brain. So we read, we learn, and we make the best decisions we can with what we know today.
If you would like to go deeper, I have put together a short summary and conversation guide, with some talking points for having this discussion with the young people in your life, whether that is at home or in your classroom.
And if you would like to talk about any of this in more detail, send me a message via socials, on Instagram @termtalkpodcast, LinkedIn ndibernardo or reach out via email, nicola@termtalk.com.au. I would genuinely love to hear from you.
Ciao for now,
Nicola Di 💙