Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,46

and reading and writing, and we stopped finding poems around the house. When he was with us, I could sense his need to be there instead. So even when he wasn’t on his phone, he was gone. He was just hovering among us. His eyes changed. They became a little duller and heavier. They’d been the brightest eyes I’d ever seen, and then, one day, they just weren’t. In his phone, Chase had found a place easier to exist in than inside his own skin.

That was tragic, because inside the itchiness of our own skin is where we discover who we are. When we are bored, we ask ourselves: What do I want to do with myself? We are guided toward certain things: a pen and paper, a guitar, the forest in the backyard, a soccer ball, a spatula. The moment after we don’t know what to do with ourselves is the moment we find ourselves. Right after itchy boredom is self-discovery. But we have to hang in there long enough without bailing.

There is so much about phones and children that parents worry about. We worry that we are raising children with commodified views of sex, lack of real connection, filtered concepts of what it means to be human. But I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against a wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt’s guitar and start strumming.

I was once talking to a Silicon Valley executive who had played an integral role in the creation and proliferation of cell phones. I asked how old her kids had been when she’d bought them phones. She laughed and said, “Oh, my kids don’t have phones.” “Ah,” I said. Don’t get your kids high on your own supply. Those who made the phones are creative people, and they want their children to become people who create, not just consume. They don’t want their children searching for themselves out there; they want them discovering themselves in here. They know that phones were designed to keep us addicted to exterior life and that if we never dive inward, we never become who we were meant to be.

Abby and Craig and I talked about Chase’s slow fade incessantly, but we didn’t do anything about it. I knew in my gut that Chase was becoming addicted to his phone and that this was interrupting his growth and peace. But I was afraid that if I took the phone, he’d be left behind and left out. He’d be so different from the others. It took me two more years to remember that fear of being different is a terrible reason for a parent to avoid doing what her child needs her to do.

When Chase was a freshman in high school, I asked him to take a walk with me. As we made our way down our driveway and to the sidewalk, I turned to my bright, beautiful boy and said, “I make a lot of mistakes parenting you. But I only know they are mistakes in retrospect. I’ve never made a decision for you that I know, in real time, is wrong for you. Until now. I know I’m not doing right by you—letting you keep that phone in your life. I know that if I took it away, you’d be more content again. You’d be present. You might have less contact with all your peers, but you’d have more real connection with your friends. You’d probably start reading again, and you’d live inside that beautiful brain and heart of yours instead of the cyberworld. We’d waste less of our precious time together.

“I know this. I know what I need to do for you, and I’m not doing it. I think it’s because all of your friends have phones and I don’t want you to have to be different. The ‘But everybody’s doing it’ reason. But then I think about how it’s not all that unusual for everybody to be doing something that we later find out is addictive and deadly. Like smoking; everybody was doing that a couple decades ago.”

Chase was quiet for a while. We kept walking. Then he said, “I read this thing that said that kids are getting more