We can’t agree about rules for daughter’s phone usage

Dear Coleen

My daughter is 10 and during lockdown all her classmates got a mobile phone, so we gave in and got her one too.

She was struggling with not seeing her friends and they had a few class Whatsapp groups, so I liked the idea of her being able to stay in touch with her mates and I didn’t want her to feel left out.

They all have Tiktok accounts and spend hours every day taking videos of themselves and posting them. The messages on Whatsapp are pinging all the time, and she often leaves the dinner table early to reply to them all.

My husband – who never wanted her to have a phone in the first place – is furious about the whole thing and we keep arguing about it. He wants to take it off her for good, but I know it would really upset her. We’ve tried imposing screen time limits, but she never listens to us.

What should I do? I’m at the end of my tether.

Coleen says

You need to take back control. For a start, she’s only 10 and she’s on Tiktok, so you need to put all the parental controls on her phone and your home internet. There are some good guides online that will show you how to do this. When my daughter was younger, most of her friends had phones by the time they left primary school, but we made her wait until she started high school.

Even then, we only got her one because she was going to be getting a bus to school on her own and we wanted to be able to contact her.

My ex was really strict about phones and she only had to play up once for him to say, “Right that’s it, I’m taking your phone away for a day”. Whereas I’d say it 20 times but never actually take it from her.

It was like the Third World War in our house at times when it came to phones, but Ray was good at saying, “Here are the phone rules, everybody stick to them, or you lose them”.

Sit down with your husband and come up with some rules and stick to them. Don’t keep arguing about this. If your daughter breaks them or is rude, take the phone off her.

So many parents want to be their kids’ friends – I’m guilty of that too – but what they need is good parents who restrict things that aren’t good for them.

Don’t ever forget that you’re the parent here and you’re in charge – not your daughter and her phone !

“She is only 10 and she’s on Tiktok all of the time