This Mom Says She’s Not Taking Her Kid’s Phone Away As Punishment Anymore
It's a quick way to get your point across, but is it actually effective?
When it comes to raising teens, a lot has changed, but I think one big thing has stayed the same for generations: the punishments. When I was a teen in the early 2000s, when my mom was a teen in the 1970s, when my grandmother was a teen in the 1940s, cutting your teen off from what they loved the most — their social life — was always a good punishment. Two weeks grounded? A literal tragedy when you’re 16. No AOL for a week? You might as well just send me off to space because I’m never going to recover from the FOMO.
And now, we just take away our kids’ phones completely. For some teens, it’s pretty much a lifeline to their hobbies, their entertainment, their friends — and taking it away gets your point across quickly when they’ve messed up.
But one Instagram user says while it might feel like the right option in the moment, it’s not really an effective strategy to actually teach your kids a lesson.
The account @mom.outofoffice shares parenting tips and strategies, and in a recent reel, her statement was clear: cutting your kids off from their phone isn’t just cutting them off from a screen or distraction. In reality, cutting your kids off from their phone can feel like cutting them off from part of their world.
Have you ever noticed how defensive your teen can be about having their phone taken away? How the conversation completely stops and they seem sullen and withdrawn? This mom did, too. “Disrespectful tone? Phone. Didn’t follow a rule? Phone. Endless fighting with siblings? Phone. And yes… it ‘worked’ fast. They’d stop right away. But it didn’t sit right with me. Because the behavior stopped but the conversation stopped, too. They shut down, got defensive, and I ended up feeling like the worst mom in the world,” she writes in the caption.
She notes that only does taking a child’s phone away often feel like you’re cutting them off from the world, but the consequence doesn’t even fit the action. Endless fighting with siblings? Make everybody take a breather and a walk and then come back to each other. Not following a rule you have set for the family? Ask them why they think they can bypass the rule and communicate why it’s important and why it must be followed. Disrespectful tone? Talk to them about why it isn’t OK and ask them why they felt like they reacted like that.
In her caption, she shares that once she made these changes, everything got better. “When I do believe phone access needs to be limited, I say it ahead of time, explain the boundaries, so next time it’s not a surprise. And the energy in our house changed. Less shutting down and resentment. More real conversations.”
It’s been proven over and over that simply shouting things like, “Because I said so!” or tossing out ultimatums and hard consequences without any discussion don’t really help your kids learn anything. If you want them to follow the rules, to be respectful, to work hard at impulse control, then you have to talk to them about it and figure out what the issue is.
Much like snatching a toy out of a toddler’s hand when they’re pushing boundaries, yanking your tween’s phone from them isn’t going to get you the reaction you want. Even just a gentle, “Hey, can we have some device-free time and talk about this for a minute?” can go a long way in making both of you feel better about the situation.
Screen breaks and no-phone time is important — but maybe not when it’s done in the heat of anger and frustration.
