Drew Barrymore doesn’t give her kids phones; Experts agree with her

“I wished many times as a child that someone would tell me no,” she wrote. “We didn’t have railings.”

Now the mother of Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, says she was shocked to find her girls in a world that is just as permissive because of the technology in their constantly at hand.

“Now that I’m a mom, I can’t believe I’m in a world that I know correlates with my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon,” she said. “Children should not be exposed to this much. Children should be protected.”

A psychologist says boundaries are essential, even if kids don’t like them

Robert D. Friedberg, a clinical psychologist who studies anxious youth, says that setting boundaries — including around technology, social media and phone use — helps reduce children’s anxiety by setting expectations and strengthening family structure.

“Setting a limit or saying no to kids is key,” he said. While children and teens may not like limits, those limits serve them well in the long run, Friedberg added. “I remind parents that the root word discipline means to teach or instruct.”

Barrymore says she’s willing to shoulder the burden of disappointing her children if it means protecting them.

“I want to let parents know that we can live with our children’s discomfort of waiting,” Barrymore wrote. “We can be defamed, and we know we’re taking what we now know is a safer, slower, more skeleton approach.”

Barrymore even uses a technique to help her stick to her rules.

“I can imagine the kids being mad at me, but I’m not going back to my rules,” she wrote. “Instead of trying to fix them, I can let my kids experience that discomfort and figure out how to deal with it and move past it.”

Limiting exposure and gradually increasing phone privileges is important

Pediatrician and mom Whitney Casares advises parents to “limit your child’s access to social media and phones as much as possible.” It’s also essential to lead by example by implementing time away from your own phone, she added.

When you decide to introduce a phone or a social network, “dosage is really important,” Friedberg said. “Parents can start with low media or phone access with their teens, see how it goes, then adjust up or down depending on the effect.”

Barrymore said she gave Olive a phone for her 11th birthday, but within three months she became worried about her daughter.

“I was shocked by the results,” she wrote. “Life depended on the phone. Happiness was built into it.”

That left Barrymore “missing the human I knew in my daughter,” and after three months she decided to take Olive’s phone away, “not because she did anything wrong, but because she still it was not time”.

When she’s ready to reintroduce the phone, Barrymore wants a limited device.

“I personally believe in the three T’s and M’s of a mobile phone – talk, text, track; music, maps, memories (photos) – and that these devices were meant to be phones,” she wrote.

Encouraging in-person connection in children is also important

Barrymore isn’t the only parent concerned about the impact of group texts. When people chat via text instead of in real time, there’s the potential for “miscommunication, intimidation and negativity,” Casares said.

“It’s a lot easier to call someone a mean name or talk hatefully over a text than it is to their face, and it’s a lot easier to forget that they’re human and have feelings,” she said.

To help contextualize the texts, Barrymore printed out all of Olive’s messages to demonstrate that “this is not a black void that they travel through,” she wrote.

Parents can also remind children that relationships should be “productive, mutually satisfying and helpful, as opposed to hurtful, unsatisfying and unproductive relationships,” Friedberg said. Ask open-ended questions like “Is this relationship building you up or tearing you down?” can help children identify harmful communication patterns, he added.

As for Barrymore, she’s using her own experience of being exposed to too much, too soon, to prevent the same from happening to her daughters.

“We must protect our children,” she wrote.