• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Why Louis C.K. doesn’t let his kids have phones

September 24, 2013 By Anne 1 Comment

The video has gone pretty viral over the past few days. On Conan O’Brien’s show last week, Emmy-award-winning comedian Louis C.K. explained why he didn’t want to give his daughters (aged 7 and 10) smartphones. [You can watch it at Slate.com.] What he says was – as my friend and fellow parent Anastasia Goodstein commented in Facebook – profound. But to get the depth of it, listen all the way through.

He gives two reasons, an important one about how kids make and learn from mistakes in their social development and one about all of us human beings. Here’s the first one:

“They don’t look at people when they talk on [their phones], and they don’t build empathy.” I’ll let you watch how he illustrates that, but what I think he’s saying is that when children are mean to peers, “they’re trying it out.” By “it,” he means interaction, socialization. He seems to be saying that it’s hard to learn empathy when you can’t see someone’s reaction to your meanness. Meanness isn’t just meanness, I’m hearing him say; for kids it’s also a test, an experiment. They put it out there to see what the reaction is and learn from that. He’s not talking about the intentional, repeated kind usually associated with bullying; he seems to be talking about kids learning by working through things together, and how hard it is to do that digitally. Researchers are working on the disinhibition (lack of visual cues) part in and with social media (e.g., see “Related links” below this post). But I’ll put my takeaways at the end.

Not always filling in-between times

Then there’s Louis C.K.’s reflection on giving ourselves time just to be and to feel – which I think – whether or not we give our kids smartphones – is right at the heart of what we need to help them with as they grow up. They can learn this with or without technology, but in this tech-riddled world, sometime they’ll probably have to learn it with the technology too, so why not with their parents there? But here’s how this dad’s seeing it right now:

“The thing is, you need to build the ability to just be yourself and not be doing something,” he told Conan, who let him just talk. “That’s what the phones are taking away – the ability to just sit there [if “the phones” really were doing this, we’d really have problem!]…. That’s being a person…. Because underneath everything in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty thing … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car and you start going, ‘Oh no, here it comes, I’m alone’…. That’s why we text and drive…. People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”

Food for thought. He continued, “I was in my car one time and a Bruce Springsteen song comes on … “Jungleland” … and it made me really sad. And I go, ‘oh no, I’m getting’ sad – I gotta get the phone and write hi to, like, 50 people’…. So I started … reaching for the phone, and I said, ‘You know what? Don’t. Just be sad…. Just … let it hit you like a truck.’ And … I pulled over and I just cried…. And it was beautiful…. Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings, because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies. It has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness, so I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness….

Time just to be 

“Because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone [sounded like “therapy,” but an expletive was beeped over too] and you never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satisfied with your product and then you die. So,” he laughed and concluded, “that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

Phones are for all kinds of things, including staying connected, filling in between times and keeping sadness – or just humanness – at bay. Why do our kids want phones? That first reason, mostly, as they get to the most social phase of growing up. That’s why they say to us “all my friends have phones.” Depending on how social (or socially aspirational) our kids are, their phones can wrap their social context around them – 24×7, if they haven’t figured out how to manage the social part. Sometimes the best way to do that is through learning by doing, being part of the online/offline social milieu and figuring out as they go how to self-regulate or get some emotional distance from social drama if or when it happens (not that there’s automatically a big social scene on all kid’s phones – it depends on the kid). Whether or not we give them a phone, we can’t really make that learning happen for them. But we can figure it out for ourselves and, in the process, help them see the value of that other thing Louis C.K. talks about: time to reflect on what’s going on, or just to feel things all the way through and see where that takes us. Like he says, that’s one of the things that “builds empathy.”

Related links

  • Why another dad wanted his 12-year-old daughter to have a cellphone
  • “Louis C.K. is wrong about smartphones” in Slate
  • “So we’re all becoming cyborgs, Dr. Turkle?”
  • “Of fearless parenting in this unmapped landscape”
  • Posted back in 2010: “The new media monsters we’ve created for our kids”
Share Button

Filed Under: mobile, Parenting Tagged With: cellphones, kids, Louis C.K., mobile phones, Parenting, parents, youth

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Technology in The Family: Living in a Digital Society | FOSI GRID Blog says:
    October 3, 2013 at 9:35 am

    […] as to whether or not they think that this is a good idea, but as Louis C.K. acknowledges and as Anne Collier wrote in NetFamilyNews, the desire to have such technology is often a social one: all their friends have one.  It’s […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.