Ask Laura: How can I get my middle schooler to put down her phone, engage with the world?

Editor's note: In a new monthly series on Go Ask Mom that starts today, social media expert and Durham mom Laura Tierney, founder of The Social Institute, will be answering your questions about social media and kids. If you have a question for Laura, email her at contact@thesocialinst.com. Laura will be speaking at 6:30 p.m., Nov. 13, at St. Timothy's Chapel in Raleigh about how parents can help their kids win at social media by using apps positively and making thoughtful, real-time decisions with technology. It's free and open to the public. Pre-registration is requested.

Question

Our middle school daughter got her first smartphone about six months ago. Even though we talk repeatedly about cell phone etiquette and implement tech-free times of day (homework, meals, bedtime), I feel like every free second she gets, she is face down in her phone. I worry about the impact on her brain, her social skills, and even her posture! We’re trying hard to set good examples as parents ourselves, but she hardly notices what’s happening around here because she’s so distracted by what’s happening on that device. Any ideas to get her to put the phone down and engage more with the world around her?

Answer

Your daughter’s experience is not unusual. It’s the norm. Last year, Apple reported that iPhone users unlock their phones 80 times each day. Sounds like a lot, right? But how many more times do we pick up our smartphones when we hear a notification and choose not to unlock it? Some estimate 130 times a day. A research firm called Dscout found that we touch our smartphones 2,617 times a day, on average.

Why? In a recent Wall Street Journal article, journalist Nicholas Carr writes about smartphones hijacking our minds, showing how our response to their notifications and always-on-always-connectedness makes us less focused, hurts our decision-making capabilities and overall performance, and even damages some of our relationships.

The key is to teach your daughter how to control her device instead of letting it control her. Our smartphones aren’t as smart as we are. We can, dare I say, outsmart them. Here are a few things you can do together right now to help your daughter take the control back from her phone:

1. Turn off social media notifications. Each time our smartphone dings, whistles, or quacks like a duck (thanks, Apple), our brains get a tiny burst of dopamine (a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers, regulating your emotional responses). In very short order, we need to hear that sound to feel good. Weird, right? Take back your brain and your feel-good feelings by muting group text notifications and turning off notifications for platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.

2. If your family uses Apple products, install Ask to Buy. This tool is a part of Apple’s Family Sharing feature. When turned on, the “family organizer” (that’s you, mom) is notified on the Apple device when a family member (that’s your daughter) tries to buy an app. Accept the request, and the app is purchased AND downloaded onto your daughter’s phone. Deny the request, and it’s like it never happened. But, of course, it did. So, talk to your daughter about that, too: Why you don’t think a particular app is a good choice, either now or ever. Ask to Buy is turned on by default for kids under 13.

3. Sign a family tech agreement. Unlike other tech contracts, a family agreement is agreed to and signed by everyone in the family. It clarifies when and how everyone will use their devices, and it helps keep you accountable to each other. That’s right: You would also be accountable to your daughter for smart smartphone use. Need a place to start? The Social Institute’s Family Social Standards Agreement is available as a free download.

4. Charge all phones in a designated area overnight. Explain how your daughter’s smartphone can cause two kinds of disruptions overnight. If it's nearby, she’ll feel the need to check it, and, when she checks it, her eyes and mind will be stimulated by its bright blue light, something science has proven disruptive to sleep. Then emphasize that everything your daughter thinks she needs a phone for overnight can be solved with an old-fashioned gadget: an alarm clock and a land line, for example. Everyone in the family will sleep better with their phones charging together in, say, the kitchen. Someone on Etsy even makes little sleeping bags for snoozing devices.

If your daughter still has trouble outsmarting her smartphone, consider using Circle by Disney or setting up parental controls on your modem (e.g., Xfinity) to disable Wi-Fi access during certain times of day.

Laura Tierney is founder and president of The Social Institute, a Durham-based company that teaches students nationwide positive ways to handle one of the biggest drivers of their social development: social media. Laura, a digital native who got her first phone at age 13, went on to become a four-time Duke All-American, Duke’s Athlete of the Decade, and a social media strategist for leading brands. She also recently became a mom.