Phone wars: four years of hell dealing with teenager’s online use

Parents are struggling to find the right strategies in the battle to keep their online teenagers in line.

Who would have thought the old technology in the background would evolve to take over teenagers’ minds? Picture: AFP

Jalyn Van Every got her first phone when she was almost 14, setting off what would become a four-year battle with her parents over when and how she could use it.

The first fight was about social media. As soon as Jalyn got her iPhone she downloaded Snapchat and the instant-messaging app Kik against her parents’ wishes. She began hiding the apps in folders or deleting them when her parents checked her phone.

Her parents also established a curfew: at 8pm, the phone would go into their bedroom for the night. “I already had trouble waking up in the morning and they didn’t want me up all night texting my friends,” says Jalyn, now 18 and at school in Greenville, South Carolina.

But 8pm was just when her friends started coming online after finishing sport and homework. “I was embarrassed to tell my friends I had to put my phone away at night,” she says.

For many teens, and even younger kids, smartphones have become a lifeline — the source of all social connection. The loss of a phone and the fear of missing out can cause teens to resort to desperate measures to restore that connection.

Jalyn began sneaking into her parents’ room to get her phone after they had gone to sleep. She usually fell asleep with it. When her parents would find it in her bedroom the next morning, they would take it away.

Cindy and Patrick Van Every confiscated several ‘burner’ phones from their daughter Jalyn. Picture: Travis Dove for The Wall Street Journal

That’s when Jalyn turned to burner phones, a term popularised by TV shows such as Breaking Bad and The Wire, which featured drug dealers using cheap phones they would later dispose of, or “burn”, to avoid detection. In today’s teen parlance, a burner phone can be a prepaid mobile phone or any out-of-service phone they can still get to work on Wi-Fi.

“All the sudden she’d stop asking for her phone back and we’d be like, ‘That’s weird’,” says her dad, Patrick, who runs a recruitment firm.

“In almost every high school across the country there is a kid who sells burner phones from their locker,” says Rich Wistocki, a retired detective for the hi-tech crimes unit of the Naperville, Illinois, police department who now gives talks about cyber safety.

Teens don’t only use burner phones when their regular phones are taken away. They sometimes use them to post on social media profiles their parents don’t know about — the so-called Finsta, or “fake Instagram”, account, says Diana Graber, co-founder of internet safety organisation CyberWise.

“Kids can easily get their hands on a phone, through a friend, buying one online,” says Graber, who teaches a digital literacy course to students at a southern California school and on her website.

“The only thing that works is education, teaching them the up­sides and downsides of tech, and helping them establish their own boundaries.”

Sometimes the Van Everys would notice a phone that didn’t belong to Jalyn while she was sleeping and they’d take it away. Other times they’d see her walking down the street attempting to connect a phone to a neighbour’s Wi-Fi network.

“The burner phones kept showing up,” Patrick says.

They were easy to get, says Jalyn. She always had friends who could give her an old phone after someone upgraded to a new one. Some had shattered screens, but she didn’t care.

Jalyn says her parents drew up contracts spelling out the phone rules and the consequences for breaking them, but the enforcement wasn’t consistent.

“I never knew when I’d see my phone again. When I would argue with them about taking it away, they’d take it for longer than the contract said,” Jalyn says. “My mum was more lenient than my dad and eventually he’d yell at her about it.”

During sleepovers, Jalyn’s parents made her friends hand over their phones at night. Once, when Jalyn was 15, Patrick discovered that one friend had placed her phone case over the cable to make it look like the phone was charging in the kitchen. Cindy went into Jalyn’s room at 2.30am and saw a light coming from the closet: one of the girls was in there on her phone. Cindy made her hand it over. “They didn’t want to have sleepovers at my house any more,” Jalyn says.

The phone arguments got only worse as Jalyn got older. It caused tension between her parents, who say they felt overwhelmed between working, rearing three other children — twins who are now 14 and the youngest, now seven — and staying on top of an increasingly rebellious Jalyn.

“It got so exhausting,” Patrick says. “It was four years of hell.”

Cindy, who is creating a digital service for promoting Greenville restaurants and other businesses, admits they weren’t always consistent. “There was no game plan for when she’d get her phone back,” she says. “We’d get busy. We were running to soccer and gymnastics and the next thing you know, there’s no time to even communicate about what happened that day.”

Cindy and Patrick sought marriage counselling, became more active in their church and attended classes on how to handle tech issues with kids. But it took a while before things improved.

The tension increased when Jalyn had a boyfriend at 16. She had provocative photos of herself and him on her phone. When her parents asked to see her phone she refused to tell them the password, so they grounded her.

By then, Jalyn’s grades were slipping and she refused to go to counselling or to her church youth group. Her parents say they didn’t want to enable her behaviour and told her that if she wouldn’t abide by their rules, she could move out. So she did.

Last June, at age 17, she went to live with a friend and her family. She worked part time and paid for her own phone and car insurance. Her parents continued to keep in touch with her and she would have lunch with them occasionally and stop by to see her siblings.

In April, just after she turned 18, she came back home. Jalyn says she came to realise she was being immature. She says she also noticed an improvement in the way her parents communicated since they’d gone to counselling. “Now that I look back, I realise how dumb all the fights were,” she says.

Her parents have since caught their 14-year-old son with a burner phone after they had taken away his regular phone for breaking rules. They vow to do better now by presenting a unified front and maintaining consistency with the rules and enforcement.

“We’re not going to go through this with three more kids,” Patrick says.

The Wall Street Journal

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What you can do

Some parents don’t like the idea of spying on their children, saying it fosters distrust.

But many tech experts argue that parents have a responsibility to know what their children are doing online, just as they ought to know what their children are up to in the real world.

The first clue that children are using burner phones, experts say, is that they stop asking for their official phones back.

Here are some other clues — and what to do:

Watch their online behaviour

You can get a look at your children’s phone habits by checking your wireless carrier’s app, which will show data usage, or their own phone’s screen-time tally, which will give more specifics about apps. If you see a sharp decrease in phone or social media use, it may mean your child has another phone.

Monitor your network

Many newer routers, such as Eero, and parental-control devices, such as Circle, can block certain apps and websites, monitor device activity and even alert you if unknown devices are accessing your Wi-Fi. Less sophisticated routers still can show you a log of connected devices.

Have the ‘tech talk’

Rich Wistocki advises parents to speak openly with children about safe technology use and to encourage them to come clean without fear of punishment if they’ve done something online they shouldn’t have. Threatening them to comply or lose their phones will cause them to develop workarounds such as burner phones.

Establish rules — and follow them

Parenting experts say children thrive when they have rules, but there have to be fair consequences and they have to be enforced consistently.

For help, make use of the latest Apple iPhone and Google Android parental controls. And, as the Van Everys learned, parents have to be united.