If you give a tween a phone, she’ll eagerly agree to your pre-determined parental restrictions…at first.
When you enforce the bedtime restriction, she’ll beg for “a few more minutes” before surrendering her phone for the evening.
When you return her the phone in the morning, she’ll ask you to preload the phone numbers of a few of her besties.
Then she’ll want to text all of her best friends to make sure they all know she now has a phone.
When she texts her friends, she’ll realize they have access to their phones at different times of the day.
When she realizes the agreed-upon parental restrictions now make it difficult for her to connect with her friends in a manner she deems acceptable, she will start petitioning for more time. Her petitions will turn into full-on complaining. She might even get carried away and start rolling her eyes and sighing loudly when addressing other family members. She may even end up calling her sister an unkind name.
When she’s done, she’ll probably think her actions were justifiable. You will disagree and require her to surrender her phone for twenty-four hours as punishment for her bad behavior. You’ll find a hidden spot in the back of your dresser drawer to hide the device until time has been served.
Next day, she’ll probably have an early-out from school and use the extra time and lack of parental supervision to dig through your drawers, find the phone, charge the phone, then text and call her friends with unencumbered inhibition.
She’ll attract the attention of her older sister, who will call you at work to let you know about the tween’s technology-related transgressions.
Then you’ll be mad.
Really truly angry.
You’ll assign an additional ninety-six hours to her punishment, move the phone and its charger to the locked family safe, and require increased chore completion and a genuine apology from your tween.
She’ll finally earn back her phone, stand back and look at it. Looking at her phone will remind her that, at some point, she’ll have to put it down so…she’ll ask to renegotiate the pre-determined parental restrictions.
(Format borrowed from If you Give A Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff)
Does your tween have a phone?
