3 Things Your Teen Needs to Know About Their Phone

“The worst thing about the modern generation is phones.” I know of an adult who says this, pretty routinely, to kids. But… really? It doesn’t strike me as a helpful comment.

She’s got a relatable viewpoint though, because a great many parents feel very, very overwhelmed about kids and phones. And tired. And like they’re failing.

For starter there are decisions to be made, and lots of them. Like when to give them a phone, whether it’s better for the kid or parent to fund the phone (and plan), what monitoring activities a parent should take. Contract or no contract? So.many.logistics. And they do matter.

But these are the surface things - they’re window dressing. They’re management tools around the core issue. The real question is, what’s behind these? I suggest there are at least three things….

1. It’s about relationship.

Teens are on phones a great deal (9 hours a day?), and we may be managing and policing their every use. But ultimately, phones are about relationship. They’re a tool that helps broker relationship.

We can teach our kids to step back and ask, “how am I going to use this tool? How will it affect my relationship with myself and others?” Because the relationships are more important than the tool itself, or anything happening on it. How a phone affects a person’s relationship with God, himself, and others is a crux of the issue.

And what of the teen’s relationship with the phone itself? It will be a lifelong relationship. What characteristics does he want to define and describe that relationship? Reflecting on the phone from this viewpoint is a valuable step.

It’s worthwhile to help teens recognize when their phone use is impacting their relationships, and what to do when the impact is negative.

(For more on this concept, see my recent interview with Amy Brown.)

2. It’s about wisdom.

Many parents’ long-term vision for their kids is for them to be wise, and phones are excellent tools to teach wisdom. We want our kids’ wisdom to be sourced in the Word, because it alone is unchanging - whereas the rest of culture changes.

So it’s helpful to remind our kids where wisdom comes from, and in conversations about phone use, teach them to ask themselves, “what is the wise thing to do?”

In my recent interview  with Bethany Kimsey, she mentioned a simple phrase she often uses in her household to prompt a conversation on wisdom.

“There’s good and there’s bad, but that’s not our cue.

Rather: what is the wise thing to do?” 

As we teach our kids to consider wisdom in their phone use - and link that wisdom to sourcing in the Bible - we can help them enact long-term practices that will guide their actions and guard their (and others’) hearts.

3. It’s about the heart (and needs to be rooted in trust)

If we root our kids’ phone use in relationship and we teach them phones are tools to practice wisdom… then we can help them remember that phone use - like all their activities - is an outworking of what’s happening in the heart. If a heart’s full striving, anxiety, FOMO (discontent), envy, or sloth… then all these things will come out in the phone use. The phone can expand heart challenges and complicate them, but it can’t generate them. Virtue and vice are rooted in the heart.

When we understand phones are vehicles revealing the heart, we can help kids build anchors in phone use that are rooted in virtue. We can tackle issues like insecurity, FOMO, bullying, boredom-use, sexual temptation, addiction concerns at the heart root.

And starting at heart level lets us build trust. We can help our kids see the dangers and temptations - and why they’re so pernicious. We can help them navigate and walk them through tricky and tempting situations. We can remind them that there’s a lot of stuff on the web that you can’t un-see or un-hear. We can teach them why we want them to err on the side of caution. They can learn these lessons from us while still under our roof - lessons no monitoring software can teach.

One parent I interviewed said: “For every new app parents use to monitor their kids’ phones, some new ‘go around’ app new comes out to thwart it. I don’t want the false sense of safety that something (external) is stopping my kids from doing what they shouldn’t be doing. I want to give them a heart-level foundation.” It left me thinking!

Which of these most inspires you - relationship, wisdom, or heart - as you work with your teen about their phones?

PS. For ideas to help you manage your family’s phone use, see my free resource, 10 Parent Helps to Oversee Teen Phone Use.

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