Mom-on-her-phone-all-the-time syndrome and how this should not be a guilt trip
Grace. Grace. Grace.
Good morning, amigas. Today we are going to nip off the social media bottle a bit with an Instagram post I stumbled upon the other day.
Now, I know some of you hate social media. I hate it too. Genuinely. But some of us of the more entrepreneurial persuasion find it hard to deny its business growing power. And despite how horrendous social media can be to our health and happiness, there are still conversations happening there that are valid and important. This is life in the modern age.
And speaking of the modern age, the Instagram post we will look at henceforth has to do with calling out a coping mechanism we all use to get through the doldrumery of our days, and that’s being on our phones all the time.1
Here’s the text from the post:
Just randomly thinking about how we all talk about generational trauma, and cycle breaking. And I’m just wondering if our kid’s version of that one day will be us as their parents having been on our phones a lot rather than being as present as they needed us to be. It is a modern world. One where technology is a way of life. And it has its benefits. How will this all play out for future generations? I don’t know about you, but I want to find more balance. I want to model balance for my children. And I guess it starts with accepting the truth, which at times can be a hard pill to swallow.
I think the phone usage of mothers (and everyone, really) is a really, really important subject, but I also think this post has some inherent biases in it. I want to talk about how the mom who posted this has an excellent point, and how at the same time she may be veering towards perfectionism in her motherhood without even knowing it. She calls for balance, let’s find balance in this, for the sake of all of us.
How she is right
Because we know we hang out on our phones too much. It’s that simple. Heck, you’re hanging out on your phone reading this post right now, so I’m sorry for creating so much cosmic irony here.
The question is WHY do we hang out on our phones as mothers?
Because we use our phones as a coping mechanism to get through our day, just like everyone else.
Motherhood, especially stay-at-home motherhood, requires us to be both instantly on and instantly off at the same time. Motherhood is the unique state wherein it is possible to be both insanely busy and wretchedly bored at all points during the day. To mother is to live in an unpredictable insanity where the kids don’t always need you, and sometimes they need you every 3.5 seconds. We learn to appreciate the breaks when we can get them and one of the ways we do this is by resting our weary heads on the ample bosom of our hand held entertainment boxes.
And the system works, more or less, because if a kid comes up to you and needs you all of a sudden, you can close the screen, look away, and come back to whatever you were doing on your phone later. If I, instead, chose to do something a little more vintage and wholesome with my spare time like drawing or painting or… I dunno… something pioneer-esque like embroidering, it actually would be much harder to mentally transition to caring for my interruptive child at that moment.
Couple this with the utility of it. A lot of the times when I’m on my phone, I’m not on social media or whatever. I’m paying bills. I’m researching parks we can go to later or I’m reading emails that I need to deal with or I’m texting one of my friends and thus keeping that friendship alive so my entire life doesn’t drift into total anonymity from being a mom. I think a negative part of all this is our kids don’t necessarily understand we are not just playing on these machines most of the time, but coordinating our households.
With all of that in play, and much of it undeniably real, we now need to ask whether this situation, as imperfect as it is, is the massive problem this Instagram post is making it out to be.
Weeding out the bias
In the interest of cutting to the chase, here is the main bias we are dealing with in the Insta post:
Assuming being “present” with our kids at every moment of every single day is not only possible, but prerequisite for raising well adjusted kids.
If this is the assumption, than we need to follow it to its natural implication, which is if we aren’t “present” 100% of the time with our kids, we are darn near abusing them and setting them up for failure. They will surely turn into godless, miscreant, drug infested adults if we aren’t available for them on a level that only God Himself is ever available for anyone. The Instagram post is very much implying this because notice how she uses the word “trauma” in the beginning to lead into how our phones keep us from “being as present as [our kids] needed us to be.”
This, my fellows mums, is very much a modern take on motherhood and we need to be suspicious of it because not only is it highly perfectionistic (and perfectionism will never, ever make us better people or parents), but it denies a perfectly normal reality of motherhood that women have been dealing with for all time.2
To see what I mean, all you have to do is think of your own childhood. What did your mom do to pass the time between breaking up fights betwixt you and your siblings and doing the mountain of housework on her plate? I was born in the mid 80s, so my mom (who was a SAHM) did very 80s and 90s things to get through her day. She watched soap operas. She knitted. She smoked a ton of cigarettes. In between those little coping mechanism treats, she broke up fights and did chores. She paid bills. She made long phone calls to her friends in order to keep those relationships alive. Sound familiar?
Let’s go back even further to motherhood pre-industrial revolution, or even motherhood in the 1800s on the prairie or whatever (the ideals and practices of which have oddly become the gold standard for successful child rearing). Those moms were even busier doing things like hand washing clothes for an entire family, hand washing all dirty dishes, and crafting meals without the convenience of refrigeration, microwaves and frozen pizzas. They were busy within their homes on a level that you or I cannot even comprehend. Were those moms 100% present all the time to their kids? Not at all. Their kids had to be told to wait until mom was done being elbow deep in washing clothes before she could even think about addressing whatever small, childish need was brought to her attention, just as my kids must wait until my hands are not actively doing dishes before I handle their concerns.3
And did those moms also have their chosen pleasures where they just sat and did anything else other than housework? Totally. They would knit and sew and read books and all that. Why? Because they bloody well deserved to after busting their butts all day for their families. Honestly we are not that different from moms of yore. If those prairie moms from the frontier were handed iPhones from the future to sit and zone out on, they probably would receive and use them happily.
Coming back to the example of my own mother, I want to point out two important things:
I don’t feel I have had to heal from the “trauma” of my mother’s particular coping mechanisms at all, so maybe this healing that needs to happen for the phone generation may not be as dramatic a thing as it sounds. Rather than having to heal from her coping mechanisms and now that I have my own kids, I actually better understand my mom and the tactics she used to get through the day.
I don’t do what my mom did to cope (I don’t smoke, I don’t knit), meaning the “example” she set for me was not a reliable indicator of how I would chose to live my life once I had a family. Looking at it another way, I go on runs or walks to help deal with my stress and my mom never exercised at all. Maybe my kids will chose to spend less time on their phones due to my behavior as their mother (because we know these suckers aren’t going away), or maybe they won’t. Either way it’s not set in stone.
Don’t get me wrong: spending tons of time mindlessly playing with our phones does have the potential to damage the little people who depend on us if taken to extremes. And research keeps showing that excess screen time can hurt our health and our hearts in many different ways, so we would do well to “balance” our interaction with the technology in our lives a little better. But is our screen time a trauma our children will have to heal from? Only if my mom taking a smoke break every half hour was traumatic for me and I can tell you right now that it wasn’t. My mom did plenty of other more insidious things that I have had to heal from, but thankfully her mild coping strategies don’t factor into the things I talk to my therapist about.
What about moms that work outside the home?
Are the children of parents/mothers who work traumatized by not seeing their parents for 40 hours a week? After all, these parents or mothers are not technically present with their kids most of the day either. I would say no. Which means I do not believe the children of smart phone users are traumatized when their SAHM chooses to not be 100% emotionally present and so uses that smart phone to check out for a bit here and there.
The Instagram post seems to have overlooked not only the plight of the working mom, but how if a mother chooses to stay home with her kids, she has already made herself present and available to them 100% of the time, even if she allows her mind to drift off to Instagramland every once in a while. The longer a mom spends in the home, the more she will tend to zone out on her phone, but she’s still there with her kids and for her kids.
Do you see the bias now? Here’s this mom posting this very valid point on Instagram, and yet at the same time, she likely is a SAHM because she’s worrying about her phone use (actually I just went back on Instagram and stalked her profile and I was right: she’s a “SAHM of 3 under 4, former lawyer”).4 Side note: most working moms I know actually are more emotionally present with their kids because of their lack of interaction with them all day. They use their phones less in front of their kids because the time with them is more precious.
I’m like, look lady Instagram poster— you are already sacrificing a ton to stay home with your kids. You are already with them the max amount of time you can be. And yet you are worried that your phone usage is creating a “cycle” of “generational trauma.” As Christians, we can make it easy on ourselves by remembering we are already creating a cycle of generational trauma simply by having kids in the first place, because we pass down the OG generational trauma to our kids—our sin nature. We can’t avoid passing that trauma down by using our phones less or being a perfect parent, because the only answer to the trauma of original sin is Jesus.
Once again, we cannot fall prey to perfectionism when we look at our motherhood or else we will go insane. Perfectionism, in motherhood or anywhere else, takes every tiny morsel of humanity and looks down on it with scornful, guilt-trippy eyes. Human beings cannot live without grace and if we are Christ-followers, we never need to live without grace because it is shed abundantly on us every single moment of every day thanks to the sacrifice of Christ.
I am guilty of spending some leisure time on my phone every day and I do it because my phone is a world my kids have not touched and where they cannot go. It feels to me like an ordered, interesting universe I can pop into every now and then to remind myself that I am still an adult and still a person separate from my kids. And no, I don’t feel guilty about it. And if I feel like I’m doing it too much, I take a break from it. This is common sense, ya’ll and mom culture in this day and age definitely struggles with common sense when it comes to how we are supposed to exist as adult women around our children.
But it doesn’t have to.
We can choose to see the bigger picture. We can see ourselves as a regular, ordinary moms in a long line of regular, ordinary moms. We can see our struggles as not only common, but survivable. And most of all, as Christ followers, we can boldly live into any sort of grace we need to get through our intense, marathony days, even if that means you check out on your phone every once in a while.
And anyway, checking out on your phone is better than doing street drugs to manage the stress of having kids, so at that point we should be grateful we are all doing so well.
Yay! You’re not on drugs! Look at you go!! 👏
In the spirit of anonymity, I’m not going to put a link to the original post because I’m not here to attack the person who originally put this up on their feed. I’m just here to talk about the concept she presents.
One thing I’ve seen modern motherhood do well is heap unnecessary pressure onto us moms. Hence, always be suspicious of any motherhood thing reeking of “pull your bootstraps up and don’t ever make any mistakes” pressure.
It must be mentioned here that these moms also had bigger “villages” at their disposal to handle their kids while they were busy— grandmas, friends, other moms, a dad who worked in the field or shop just outside their door. We don’t live like this today, but it doesn’t mean the kids that grew up for thousands of years with busy parents are somehow better than the ones who grow up in the era of helpful appliances, computers and iPhones.
And she posts videos of her breastfeeding like 5 times in the middle of the night. Can we please stop posting the feeding videos??? I don’t need to see you breastfeeding. I did it for one year per kid and that was more than enough for me. We don’t need to glorify how you feed your kid using videos that should never be publicly posted anywhere.
I have a love-hate relationship with my phone, social media, and technology in general! It’s a distraction...it’s a tool of the enemy. Things will only get worse, we will become more and more distracted. Trust me, I have teenagers and it is a constant battle! It makes me think about the movie Wall-E. Watch it if you haven’t already. I try to imagine Jesus walking the earth today and using a smart phone. Parent or not, do we give Jesus a fraction of the time we give to our tech?