When you hand your child their first phone, are you trusting them or protecting them?

For many busy parents, giving kids a smartphone feels like a parenting milestone you’re never fully ready for. You want to build trust. You want to respect privacy. You don’t want to be “that parent.”

But today’s phones aren’t just phones. They’re constant access to social media, messaging apps, strangers, addictive algorithms, and content our kids’ developing brains aren’t prepared to handle alone. And if you’re trying to practice intentional parenting while juggling work, family life, and everything else on your plate, it’s easy to fall into a hands-off approach and hope for the best.

We did too. Until one night, everything changed.

In this episode of Parents Making Time, we share our personal parenting story about kids and cell phones, the mistake we made by leaning too heavily on trust, and why we now strongly believe that parental monitoring is a necessary part of modern parenting and digital safety. Not to spy. Not to control. But to protect, teach, and guide.

Because intentional parenting means being proactive, especially when it comes to technology.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL LEARN:

• Why trusting your kids isn’t enough when it comes to smartphones and online safety
• How phone monitoring and screen time boundaries can actually strengthen parent-child communication
• Practical, realistic ways busy parents can protect their kids’ digital lives without constant conflict
  
  
  

If you’ve ever wondered, “Should I be checking my child’s phone?,” we’re giving you our honest answer. And yes, we believe it’s a clear one.

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.

Easily improve your intentional parenting efforts at mealtime with our FREE resource, Dinner Conversation Starters.

Download our FREE resource, 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids, created for busy parents like you who need easy, actionable ways to have daily meaningful connections with their kids in less than a minute!

Parenting Questions? Email us at [email protected] (Please note, your question may be featured on the show).

For parenting inspiration, time management ideas, and encouragement for families, follow the hosts' individual accounts:

Anthony Craiker: Instagram | LinkedIn

Jennifer Craiker: Instagram

Interested in joining our free online parenting community? Send us a DM to receive an invite!

Enjoy the show? Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify

Transcript

Parents Making Time Ep. 20

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Before we get started today, we wanted to remind you of a free resource we have for you on our website. We have created a list of dinner conversation starters that we wanna share with you to help you have better conversations with your kids over dinner. You can get that by going to parents making time.com/dinner conversations.

Go there now so that you can start having those great conversations. 

Anthony: Today we're talking about kids and cell phones, but this isn't an episode about whether kids should have cell phones. That's a question for a different episode. This episode is about what comes after they have one. How much access should you have as a parent? How much monitoring is helpful and when can it start to hurt normally on parents making time, we like to explore the information and give you space to decide what works best for your family.

But in today's episode. We feel so strongly about this topic that we're doing something a little different. We believe there is a right [00:01:00] answer and we're going to share it. We'll share our experience navigating digital safety with our kids and explain why we've landed where we have so that you can understand the why behind it.

This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Jennifer: When our oldest daughter got her phone for the first time, it was around 2015, and we decided to lean into trust. It's not that we didn't put any restrictions on it at all. We had to know her passwords. She was told that she was required to ask permission before downloading anything. Social media definitely needed to be apparent, approved thing, and we told her that because we were her parents and that we paid for the phone, we could look at her phone at any time we wanted, which we did sometimes regularly, but more often occasionally.

We also tried to educate her about the dangers of [00:02:00] having a phone, but we trusted her and we didn't have any reason not to. So this continued for years and by now our second and our third child had a phone as well. With the same family protocol until one night, about four to five years later, I had a feeling that said I needed to check one of the kids' phones.

So I went to the kitchen where it was plugged in for the night and I got it and discovered that despite all our efforts to educate, but give trust, our trust had been broken by our very. Trustworthy child that night, everything changed and we decided that we needed to be more proactive and step up and protect our children because from what we saw, this wasn't about having a trustworthy child or not, it was about not trusting the outside world that we had invited in when we allowed them to have phones.

Anthony: So the mistake that we made wasn't trusting our kids. We did trust them and we continued to trust them, but the mistake was not admitting that their brains weren't actually developed enough to have [00:03:00] all of these opportunities right at their fingertips. 

Jennifer: And we believe that for so many reasons, like. My kid would never, they're smarter than that.

But when you watch a documentary like Screenagers, you learn about why phones and apps are addicting. And it isn't just because our kids aren't smart or they lack self-control. It's because things are designed to be addicting. Sometimes we even think, well, privacy's really important, and we put that privacy above protection.

Protection's also really important. And when I am thinking about minors, I think protection is more important than privacy. And when we fall into those traps and that way of thinking, we welcome unknown dangers and exposures with our children and into our homes. It often leads to our children distancing themselves from us, from the family.

They disengage, they're so in to their phones that they just won't engage with the family. We saw that with our kids and as we've talked and had more discussions, we've actually seen changes. For the opposite for the good. 

Anthony: [00:04:00] So what we did that night when we realized that our approach to cell phones or digital devices just wasn't cutting it is we invested in a monitoring system, but we also didn't do this behind their backs.

We set our kids down. And explain to them that as their parents, it was our responsibility to keep them safe, and that we realized we weren't living up to that responsibility. In order to do that, we told our kids that we had determined that we needed to better monitor their phone usage and that we would be adding a monitoring system onto each of their phones.

We emphasized to them that this wasn't about spying on them or reading all their text messages, or not giving them any privacy. It was about protecting them from possible situations that could be harmful to both their minds and their futures. Now. They didn't love it, but I think they understood to a certain degree as best they could, that we were doing it [00:05:00] out of love and care for them.

And as they've gotten older, I think they've realized the wisdom in the decision that we made. Now, we also moved the location of their cell phones at night from the kitchen to our bedroom. We had previously had a rule that you plugged your phone downstairs in the kitchen. We adamantly. Felt that they shouldn't have their phones in their bedrooms at night.

But we also had suspicions that there had been at least some instances where maybe they had come downstairs in the middle of the night to use their phones after they were supposed to have gone to bed. And so we wanted to remove that ability and temptation to give them that time without their devices, without access to their devices.

Jennifer: So as you're hearing our story and hearing our opinions on this, you might be thinking, okay, but if you're always looking over their shoulder, how are they gonna learn? I've actually even been asked that by other parents. If you're always monitoring of them, if you're always restricting them, how do they learn?

[00:06:00] Don't you wanna kind of throw 'em in and let them learn? Well, we took the approach of active parent involvement in that learning. We wanted to prepare them for the time that they would have the use of their phones without us overseeing it. We talked openly about what we saw in the monitoring app, so it wasn't just, oh, you're getting in trouble.

We tried to make it more of a conversation than a punishment. With that app, we would say, you know, I noticed you were liking that post. What did you like about it? Or, I got a notification about foul language and a text between you and. Whatever friend it was. And I'd say, I noticed that you didn't use the language and I'm proud of you for being a good example.

So sometimes we were able to then praise them and kind of have that conversation. Well, what do you do when your friends start having foul language around you? How does that make you feel? And frankly, there were some things that we just ignored because we gave them the space to be teenagers and learn from it.

Anthony: That's so important to give them some space to learn, but with something as dangerous as digital devices and the internet. You've [00:07:00] got to be proactive. You've got to protect your children. As they got older, we gave them more and more space and access based on what we thought each particular child could handle.

And, but this was gradual. It wasn't all at once and we intentionally did it with the goal of having them be responsible users of digital devices once they got into adulthood. So. All of this is to say that we feel very strongly that the answer to the question of should you monitor your kids' phones is an absolute yes.

Like we said before, their brains just aren't developed enough. They're not mature enough emotionally. They are not prepared to handle the dangers that are out there at their fingertips with their phones or other digital devices. So. Yes, you should be proactive as a parent. You should monitor their devices and be pretty [00:08:00] strict about it, and then gradually give them more and more freedom with them over time if you choose to give them a device at all.

Okay. 

Jennifer: I think we need to point out that there are multiple ways to monitor your child's phones. There are multiple companies that provide services. There are different ways to lock down certain apps or screen time or whatever. So that's a conversation between you and your spouse of how you're going to go about doing that.

It can be time consuming and exhausting, but these are our kids. We want to protect them. We love them. We want the best for them. Again, to reiterate what Anthony just said, the answer is absolutely, we should be monitoring their phones. Now, if you liked what you heard today, if you got something out of it, maybe you think someone else you know needs to hear it, please leave a rating, leave a review and share it with that person that you thought, you know, so-and-so needs to hear this because I know they're dealing with this with their kids too.

So we really appreciate when you do that. 

Anthony: And coming [00:09:00] up on our next episode of Parents Making Time, we're gonna be talking about the three most important phrases that you can say to your child. Simple words said consistently can shape how your child sees themselves, how they see you, and how they interact with others long after they leave home.

So look forward to that episode. Until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be.