Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
My asshat of an ex-husband gave our 6-year-old a ridiculous birthday present last month. I want to destroy it.
A smart phone! It has parental controls, but he allows unlimited use of it while our son is with him. I have always been adamant that our son not be allowed a phone until he was in high school. When I confronted my ex, he said it wasn’t for me to decide what our son can do when he’s at his place and told me I could “eat shit and die” if I didn’t like it! Do I have permission to take a sledgehammer to it the next time my son brings it home?
—Phone Furor
Dear Phone Furor,
This is a really bad situation. Not only are phones basically poison for our kids’ little unformed frontal lobes, but your ex-husband is, as you say, a total asshat! Unfortunately, I can’t give you permission to destroy the phone. I wish I could because handing a 6-year-old a phone with unlimited screen time is tantamount to child abuse. If harm befalls this device, the asshat will immediately suspect foul play and it will only make your situation worse. You can probably get away with it falling in the toilet once. Accidents happen. But this guy sounds like such a big enough asshat that he will probably just go buy him another one and try to get you to pay for it.
I can think of two reasons why asshat would give your son a phone. First, he knows your opinion on phones and wants to make you furious (Done!). Second, he has no interest in parenting and just wants to let the phone do the work.
Your house is allowed to have its own rules about screen time and there should be as little as possible and certainly not on a personal device. When your son is over, the phone goes in a box and you should hand it to your ex-husband when he leaves, not your son. You also need to model appropriate screen time behaviors in front of your son. Stay off your phone and enjoy touching grass with him when you are with him. Make sure to send asshat lots of pictures of the two of you doing non-phone things. You might be a model for him, too! Let him see how happy your son can be off screens and spending time with a parental figure.
You said your ex has parental controls on the phone. Get access to those so you can monitor your son’s screen time. Hard data will help you understand how much time your son is spending on the phone and what he’s up to. The thing I’d worry about the most is YouTube or other short-form video apps followed shortly by Roblox. He’s a little young for you to talk to him about why you might block apps, but you should feel free to block them to protect him. Try talking to asshat about specific apps that he can’t disagree are harmful. Get him to admit that there are some boundaries. Would he let your son install Draft Kings? Pornhub? No. This could be an inroad to a more rational discussion about what should and shouldn’t be on the phone.
I was hoping to find an app in the app store that would slow down your son’s phone and consume all of its battery life, rendering it unusable after short periods. Ideally you would install this app and then he would lose interest in the device. But alas, in my meager searching, it seems that such an app doesn’t exist. Perhaps this is a business opportunity (though it likely wouldn’t be approved by either of our monopolized app store overlords). Good luck with explaining the toilet dunk. Remember you can only do it once, so make it count. Make sure it’s turned on and really let it sit in there a while.
—Greg
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