“That’s It! No Phone!” No—What Matters Is What the Child Does With It

– How should we introduce children to technology? You and I talked about how important the subject is and came up with the idea of asking parents and relatives. Quite a few people took part in the survey. Did anything in the answers surprise you?

– Some things surprised me. For example, how many people say:

“I have no problem with my children’s screen time.”

I don’t think that’s quite true. This is my job, I talk to a lot of families, and so far I haven’t heard a single one say they have no problem with it.

– Me neither. Everyone I’ve talked to about it, and I myself as a parent, definitely feel we have that problem.

– Exactly… How honest were they in their answers? Really, every person who comes into my office says they have a problem. It’s one of the first questions, without fail:

how do I limit their screen time?

– Same with me—a lot of people commented that this is the big question. Why is there no specific recipe, no practical tips? Which is a bit odd after a series of more than 10 pieces. True, there’s no exact recipe—step one, you turn off the phone after an hour; step two, you set aside 27 minutes a day to talk with your child…

– That’s exactly it! Purely technologically, we can give guidelines—you as a tech specialist, I as a psychologist—on what to do. Step one, two, three. Use Google Family Link, monitor what the child is doing. You can do loads of things! Lock their screen after a set time.

But how will that child take it if the recipe is repeated mechanically?

How will the family take it? All of this is individual and very relative.

For example, a young couple comes to me, the baby is tiny, 5 or 6 months old. They’re constantly fighting, constant drama, and they can’t figure out how it came to this. They’d decided the baby’s birth was the problem.

They’re both gamers. At some point they decided the baby had to be kept away from screens, but that way they’re harming their own pleasures and the good time they used to have. They’re unhappy with what’s going on—and the baby isn’t the problem!

In other words, for every family this screen program is very authentic and particular.

– At the same time, we all know that a child under 3 shouldn’t have access to a screen. What should a family like that do so it doesn’t wreck the relationship but still finds a healthy barrier for the child?

– There’s no way the child can be kept entirely away.

Should the parents throw out their computers?

You and I watched television every evening—what’s wrong with us?

– So we shouldn’t worry so much?

– We shouldn’t become obsessive. In the sense of exactly this pettiness we fall into when it comes to the digital and the screen.

“That’s it! None at all!” No, that’s not a solution—balance is. But it’s a hard solution.

What is very important to me is that beyond the quantitative dimension—how much screen time the child has—you have to look at the qualitative one too. What is this child doing there?

– Why are we all so afraid?

– I don’t think we’re all afraid, but yes, there is an anxiety around digital reality. It’s as if we don’t know what to do when we have a problem.

It’s as if, when you run into difficulties with the digital, you always have to look for someone else who understands it better than you.

That’s a serious anxiety, especially regarding what happens to our children. I think that’s actually the core of it. Our senses, sight, are one of our most powerful instruments—the object called “the gaze.” That’s how we exchange with each other, among ourselves.

We stick to it, we sink into this digital reality. At moments it becomes far more real than the real one.

And while we, having also lived in analog, have some mechanisms for realizing that this is a parallel, not-so-real world, for the children growing up in the digital generations it is reality, the natural environment, their normal habitat.

– And we as parents have to show them the rest—otherwise who will?

– They swim in both universes.

– I know quite a few children who swim only in the digital one.

– Yes, and the other way round. There they’re present a little differently—with their imaginary bodies, with their avatars. In the digital world a child can build a football team, defeat mighty giants, titans of sport. And in reality have certain limitations—a disability, or a neglected state of health, obesity.

They’re present there with their imaginary bodies. I’ve thought a lot about this—about precisely this anxiety. Françoise Dolto speaks of the unconscious body image. It’s as if what we see—both in ourselves and in our children—is very vividly displayed in the digital, it’s projected there, and the gaze isn’t always easy to bear.

Being constantly under someone’s observation is quite disturbing. That’s why we have a serious problem with online bullying. School bullying existed before, but it was confined to the building; you always had a chance to escape. Whereas now you carry it in your pocket and you can’t get away.

– Should we make “offline life” more attractive? Can we, or is it too late? Is it possible to have children playing in the street again? For me that’s yet another huge difference in the lives of the latest generations.

– There are children like that now too. But it seems they bother us.

Here we’re talking about changing attitudes. What do children do? Not only in the digital world, but in the outside, real world as well. I keep hearing people yelling at children because they’re playing outside the playground. Yes,

it doesn’t matter where they play. Yes, children are noisy.

I get on public transport. Excuse me, but how can we expect teenagers to be calm and not show aggression when we constantly scold them and tell them off for being noisy and bothering us?

– We supposedly want to help them. But if we go back to the parents, who ought to be the most active in their relationship with the young, there are two touchy questions that split the respondents almost down the middle. Do children use electronic devices in the two hours before sleep, and do we stop them during dinner? I confess I’m on the “bad” side on both. Sometimes watching something meaningful together and discussing it is healthy time spent together, or so it seems to me.

– Of course! Again it comes down to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the screen.

It’s much more important to know what we’re doing on a screen than how long we’re doing it.

I’m not even talking about children—the first “digital-native” children are long since adults. Scrolling for two hours is one thing; listening to a podcast is another; talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend is a third; a fourth is doing organizational tasks, writing your homework, watching lessons. There’s a huge difference.

In fact, the health problem with screen exposure is neurological at the youngest age—from 0 to 3. But even there we can’t isolate them! What we can at least do is watch the length of each session. It’s one thing to let them watch a little song for five minutes while you dish up the food and serve it, and something else entirely to let them dig through YouTube unsupervised. Three-year-olds do it quite often, because that’s how they’ve been taught to eat.

It’s one thing to use technology to help you, to make your life a tiny bit easier, and something else entirely to turn it into a pacifier.

– How can we sense where we are on that divide?

– Honestly, we don’t sense it.

– Maybe that’s exactly what we’re afraid of—that we won’t notice when we’ve crossed the line?

– We usually resort to the digital as a pacifier when we already have other problems.

– And we need to look into those more than we need to limit the minutes on the phone.

– Yes. Technology isn’t the problem; it’s a tool.

– One we clearly don’t use well, though. This is another motif that ran through all my interviews and the survey—that we get information from everywhere and it doesn’t help us; on the contrary, it stresses us, makes it hard to navigate and makes parenting harder.

That was the answer in the survey that astonished me—how can parenting today be harder than a few generations ago, when out of 10 children born, 2 or 3 survived?!

– For me, the big problem with technology lies in the gaze. That’s what makes things hardest for us and drives up our anxiety.

What do most parents of children in the first grades do? My children are already 15 and 17; it doesn’t matter whether they have a phone at school. But for parents of first to fourth graders, when they hand over their child, it matters a great deal to have control over safety and security. The phone is a tool for that. Only how do they use it? I’ll track when you went to the cafeteria, to the toilet. That’s terribly burdensome and stressful, not only for the child who is under constant observation but for the adult too. A resource you’re constantly tied to, and it raises your own personal tension.

– How do we find our bearings in this sea of information and start swimming in it more consciously?

– It seems to be the same as with the other sea of information.

– Yes, but we worry more about this one, which is good. With the other one we aren’t nearly as aware—that’s one of the big reasons this site keeps going. We read and accept whatever comes along, however it comes. At the same time, as parents we’re much pickier, supposedly careful, and still the sheer volume of information doesn’t help us—quite the opposite.

– Because we’re very skilled at disorienting ourselves.

Why does parenting seem harder to today’s parents than it did 50 or 100 years ago? Precisely because you get lost.

One person tells you: do this. A moment later you’re watching a TikTok clip about how no, that’s not how you change a diaper, do it this other way, it’ll be easier. You start flipping this child around like a broiler chicken and you’re not sure what exactly you’re doing with it.

Suddenly, from all this information flooding the parent, this child—something that is yet to become a subject, to become a person—turns into an object we operate on.

How shall I put your diaper on? How shall I feed you? How much quinoa should I give you? How should I cook it?

Here too is the question of the desire for a child, and how, as technology advances, we start to see a child as our right rather than our desire. Saying “I have a desire” is one thing; saying “I have a right” to a child is another—the semantics are quite different.

Flooded with information, the parent loses their authenticity as a parent.

Instead of managing the information and using it for their own and the child’s benefit, they start serving the information they receive. “I’ll try this, and this, and this!” Without following up on the result. The information simply makes you keep reacting, keep acting, while you have no time to become aware of yourself in your own authenticity.

– My personal recipe is that at some point you close your eyes to what you’re reading and turn them toward your child—see for yourself whether the baby is better off drinking water or not.

– Exactly! Giving water during breastfeeding, say, depends a lot on the quality of the milk. Some mothers have extremely nourishing milk, but not in large quantities. Others have a lot of it, but it isn’t as nourishing. Yes, babies in the second case won’t need water, but those in the first definitely will. As the saying goes, we’re walking cucumbers—mostly water.

– Whereas online you’ll come across shared experience that says you absolutely must give water, or that you must never do it.

– We could raise so many more questions the same way. For example, how to introduce solid food so as not to trigger a food allergy. That question opens 15 pages of Google results. How can you manage, drowning in all that information! How can you catch your breath and notice that this child doesn’t want carrots but prefers pumpkin?

When we use digital sources of information, it’s important to think critically. That’s something we seem to forget.

– The difficulty here is that you develop critical thinking on subjects where you’ve built up knowledge. Suddenly, as a parent, you find yourself in a completely new situation where you simply have no reference points, and no time to find them.

– You need someone else to guide you.

Why are we afraid of the digital? We always have to look for someone else whose knowledge we can rely on.

Alas, in the digital world that person is missing. When there’s a problem, the person I turn to is a technician. He’s my age, with my knowledge; he just has a few extra skills to help me and back me up.

– Which used to happen somehow naturally—when you have friends with older children, you talk it over with them.

– Or you pick up the phone: “Mom, how do I make bean soup?” What do we do now? TikTok! Ah, so that’s how it’s done.

– And if you land on a good recipe, fine. If not, the family won’t be eating beans again any time soon.

I find it very interesting that quite a few people in the survey said that in digital times the father’s role is much more important. Why do you think that is? My naive explanation is that we have a greater need for someone to set limits.

– Your explanation is absolutely correct, because it’s precisely the father—sometimes consciously, sometimes not—who imposes and introduces laws and prohibitions.

If we look at it from the psychoanalytic paradigm, he’s the one who tells the child: you can’t marry your mother, she’s my wife. And that’s the first prohibition, the one that interrupts the uninterrupted connection with pleasure, with gratification.

Yes, you’re right. Precisely

amid this constant need to gratify ourselves in some way, fathers are the ones who give us structure.

That’s from the point of view of the unconscious and psychoanalysis. But there’s a much more practical side too. Dads are more technically literate. Since way back, the father has been the one who drives and repairs the car, who can handle tools, drills. And it seems this carries over to the digital as well.

– But we say fatherhood is more important today, and yet online it’s something like 10:1—mothers’ forums, threads, conversations, searching for information. The conversation about fatherhood just isn’t there. Why?

– We mothers find it hard to let go.

– Or do we fathers give in?

– When she has taken over everything and banished him to the couch, how could he not give in? This is an awareness on the part of the maternal body, not just the paternal one. Here we’re already leaving the logic of the digital.

When a child appears, it automatically becomes a symptom, a sign of its parents’ relationship.

There are two main scenarios. When the parents are in a partnership—the mother still desires the father, there’s an expressed interest, the father takes care of her, treats her well, there are healthy, genuinely partner-like relations. Then the child—its behavior, the way it acts, the way it lives—is a reflection of that parental couple.

In the other scenario, the child becomes the mother’s symptom. She takes it, puts it between herself and the father and says: “I got what I needed from you, I have no more desire for you, I’m only interested in the child.” Full stop. What can he do? And why should he? So in the evening she deals with the child, the child doesn’t make noise around him because it’s on the phone…

That’s why we have such a great need for this paternal function—to introduce order.

– Which again requires us to talk about it more, so that we fathers become aware of that role too. Which isn’t happening, in my view.

– The paternal function doesn’t always, and doesn’t have to, be introduced by the biological, physical father. It doesn’t even have to be a man at all. The paternal function that introduces boundaries doesn’t have to be embodied in a specific person. It can be an institution, an external structure. It can be the school saying: “We have certain rules here.” It can be the nurse at the nursery saying: “I’m sorry, it isn’t hygienic to bring in stuffed toys.”

This limiting of the mother’s pleasure so that it doesn’t flood the child—all of this can be framed as the paternal function.

Yes, lots of internet forums bring mothers together. But it also seems that we mothers need to vent. To talk more. Whereas fathers are the ones who act. But the decline of the paternal function makes things very difficult.

– In the same vein—with phones, for example, it turns out we have an absolute consensus when it comes to younger children. In the survey, 94 percent say there’s no place for phones at school. They’ve also been banned by law for 10 years. And yet it’s clear there are phones at school. In other words, as a society we can’t set such boundaries for ourselves even on something we agree on.

– Again we come back to the object called the gaze—you lose control. We’re always surprised, very alert, negative, and we strongly demand measures whenever there’s a case of violence in a kindergarten. Everyone starts squawking—we want video surveillance, cameras everywhere.

I’ve worked in a kindergarten. There was one little child whose mother was an activist for installing video surveillance, and the child didn’t want to sleep at the kindergarten. I could see something was bothering the child, so I asked what was going on. “I don’t want them to watch me!” “Nobody’s watching you, everyone’s asleep.” “No, they’re going to put up cameras, I don’t want them to watch me.”

Children are extremely anxious about being constantly watched.

And if this child managed to synthesize it and put it into words, others become aggressive, start suffering physically, crying, getting stomach problems. It’s linked to the constant surveillance, to the constant, unwavering gaze.

– A completely different subject that I find very interesting, and that in my view hasn’t even been opened up in society, is artificial intelligence in this context. Now we’re all talking about it, “playing” with it, and it turns out that two-thirds of the survey participants, myself included, haven’t told their children at all what it is or what it’s for, let alone shown it to them. What’s the right way for parents to approach this?

– It’s a bit

like with social media—once again the children are several laps ahead of us and know more than we do.

It seems important to me to approach it as a tool, which is how I’d like us to look at digital reality in general. AI is something that can make our lives much easier, but it’s a tool.

What matters, when we talk to children and when we ourselves use it, is to be aware that it isn’t infallible. That it was made by humans. And, again, to use it with a dose of critical thinking.

– To me the big risk here is that they’ll like it, they’ll fall in love with the easy way, it’ll write their homework for them, because the system often allows it. And that will hamper their development if they get used to using it too young.

– Exactly. The question is how we communicate to them how good this tool really is. As with food. Everything in a certain dose is medicine; in another it can be poison.

– But with social media we’ve accepted that they shouldn’t be accessible under 14, or under 16 on some platforms. It’s obvious that this is easy to get around, but we’ve accepted some rules. Should something like that happen with AI? Because it’s something everyone will have to use to succeed, whatever they take up.

– I certainly wouldn’t be the person to take the position that it should be banned. On the contrary, in my view

we should all have free access, but with conscious accompaniment of children.

– And still, from what point? From 3 or from 10?

– That’s a very hard question. I’d like to answer “right away,” because progress and evolution don’t stop. They keep going.

From a purely social and emotional point of view, I want to say from 7 or 10. As a parent who understands that you need help writing homework, integrals and so on, I’d like to tell you from 15 or 16. From the position of a mother who wants to get to the laundry instead of having them hanging on her leg, I’d like to tell you from 3.

I’d lean toward letting it be accessible, but with awareness.

– In my view, also by offering enough alternatives. Maybe that’s happening—in my survey three-quarters of people say their children read for pleasure. My sample isn’t representative, sure, but… For me it’s essential to show the meaningful alternative of the classic values.

– Yes, but there’s another alternative here too. I have two teenagers, already 15 and 17. If you saw them, you’d think their heads had grown into their phones, because every free moment something is being done on the device. And they do read, but in that way.

It’s very paradoxical. The younger one has some difficulty with language in terms of reading and writing. But he absorbs information and reads by listening. All the apps, podcasts—that’s how it reaches him. He listens to the classics; I was very surprised when I heard he was listening to Balzac. Come on, at 15 it would never have occurred to me?!

The older one, meanwhile, follows journalism and politics all day. That’s what interests him.

Again we come back to quality, not quantity.

– Which again depends on us, because he wouldn’t have got to Balzac, whether reading or listening, if he hadn’t received some guidance and upbringing in that direction.

– I’m a parent with whom technology has been available to my sons from day one. But we’re talking about constant accompaniment. About using the digital as a tool, not as a substitute, a pacifier.

When a child has contact with a screen, with digital reality, with a virtual world, with AI, at whatever age, it should be accompanied by a parent who is there and gives it language as it happens. When the child is left to cope alone, it inevitably sinks into its own imaginary world, and unpleasant situations follow.

– And because parenting is hard, like every important thing in life. If you take the easier path, technology shows you what happens.

– That’s where the question that surprises you comes from—that parenting is harder now. Well, yes, everyone thinks theirs is harder. Everyone’s own pain hurts them more. And since we aren’t born prepared to be parents but learn on the go, as the child grows, every parenthood goes through its own authentic difficulty.

– Which is part of the beauty and the challenge… Thank you for this conversation! Before long we’ll continue it, because it’s worth taking a look at teenagers too. Many important topics await us there as well…