Erin Bulcao’s teenage daughters aren’t glued to their phones like most New York City middle schoolers.
Unlike the rest of the smartphone generation, the 13-year-olds are not allowed to have social media — nor have unlimited access to their devices.
“The phone is there to be able to contact us,” Bulcao, 40, told The Post.
The devices are purely for necessity, not fun — she tracks her daughters’ locations to ensure they arrive at school safely. When they get home in the afternoon, the phones, which automatically lock at 7 p.m., are docked in the kitchen.
She noticed that when her twins, Natalia and Eliana, are off their phones for a few hours, “they’re just completely different people, and in a good way.”
“They don’t realize how much the phone and the texting, even if it’s just texting, is actually affecting them in a negative way,” Bulcao said. “And as a parent, that worries me.”
According to 2021 survey data from Common Sense, 42% of US children owned a smartphone by age 10, a figure that soared to 91% by 14 years old. In fact, Lionel Richie’s daughter, Sofia Richie Grainge, recently revealed that her 5-month-old child has her own baby cellphone.
Those stats make Bulcao’s Manhattan teens seem like an exception to the rule — although that might not be the case for much longer. She’s part of a growing movement of parents raising their teens, tweens and young children offline.
“I know that the social media and, to be honest, most of the things on the phone are just not right for them, not good for them,” Bulcao said. “But there is a fine line of, this is the world we live in today and how do we how do we balance all that?”
For every household, the solution looks a bit different.
Texas mom Marguerite Locke uses her son’s iPhone 14 as a “discipline tool.”
“If he is not being respectful toward us or doing with the things that he needs to do, then he knows that he will lose his phone,” the 42-year-old author and physical education teacher told The Post.
There’s also an added “responsibility” for the 11-year-old since it’s his mom’s phone to begin with.
In order to have the privilege of using it, Locke drafted a contract for her son to sign, stating rules such as allowing his mom to access the device at all times, he must answer the phone if his mom calls and his phone will charge outside of his bedroom at night, which Locke said is “the best rule.”
“I was just concerned about the access that he would have to all the stuff with the phone,” she told The Post.
“The footprint that they leave they’re really not aware of and, as a parent who’s older and never really went through that myself because we are an older generation, that was a big concern of mine.”
But that is part of the reason Peter Anderson, a Massachusetts father of three, has removed screens almost entirely from his kids’ lives.
“Parents are overprotecting their kids in the real world, but under-protecting them in the virtual world, so they’re just bombarded with things that they’re not quite ready for,” Anderson, a 48-year-old family therapist, told The Post, adding that he’s trying to “protect them from that as much as I possibly can.”
Past reports have likened screen time to “digital heroin,” while Gov. Kathy Hochul has called social media a “silent killer.” The apps, according to one recent survey of 2,000 Gen Z Americans, negatively affected the well-being of 3 in 4 respondents and have been linked to “social media-related nightmares,” per recent research.
After seeing how kids’ social relationships suffered as a result of technology, Anderson has limited screen time for his homeschooled kids, ages 12, 10 and 7, to just three to four hours per week.
“I almost see it as the equivalent of smoking back in the ’40s and ’50s,” he said — though he admitted he may eventually get his eldest a flip phone.
Jenna Rhodes, an assistant principal at a Georgia middle school, told The Post that it’s becoming more common for teens — such as her 13-year-old son Jude — to not have cellphones.
Working in education, she’s seen firsthand the effects that personal device use has on young minds, claiming that students have shorter attention spans and less emotional maturity as a result of having phones.
Not to mention, they can’t stifle the urge to surf the web, play games or just simply put the devices away, which has inspired a growing number of schools across the nation to use magnetic pouches produced by Yondr, which are made specifically for locking away cellphones and other personal devices.
“If a kid has a phone, it’s almost like it’s a body part and they just can’t fathom the thought of not having it on them at all times,” Rhodes, 44, told The Post.
For other parents, however, the technology offers comfort.
To mitigate the perils of cellphones, some parents, like Oklahoma mom of two Jessica Barstow, are turning to tracking technology to keep tabs on their kids. Barstow, 33, installed Apple Air Tags inside the insoles of her children’s shoes for field trips.
She told The Post that it gave her “peace of mind” knowing that Addison, 9, and Austin, 5, were safe.
Meanwhile, other parents have turned to Apple Watch to get the job done. Texas moms Ashley Acree and Vanessa Villegas Reyes, both 32, said the smartwatches have helped keep track of their kids’ locations and provide a way to contact them in case of an emergency.
Acree told The Post that it made her “uneasy” not having a way to reach her elementary-aged children in the event of a crisis “especially in today’s world” where parents can “never be too safe.”
Meanwhile, in order to contact her son, 9, Reyes bought him an Apple Watch in an attempt to stave off getting him an iPhone until he’s in high school.
“I know I can’t keep him in a bubble forever, and one day he will have social media, but I try to keep him off of it as much as I can,” she told The Post, adding that kids her son’s age are “very curious.”
Rhodes, who also bought an Apple Watch for her son instead of a phone, said that kids these days are “consumed” by their cellphones and the internet — many people, she added, are “clueless” about what happens online.
“Kids are not ready to have that kind of power in their hand,” she said. “It’s like Pandora’s box, and once you open it, you can’t close it.”
