Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. – James Baldwin (1924-1987), American writer and activist.
Growing up, the moments that marked my coming-of-age were numerous.
Back when I was a kid in Padawan—must’ve been 26 years ago—freedom came in the form of the back of a van.
Yelling “holo!” over poker bets no teacher ever found out about.
My father, a man of few words, once looked me straight in the eye and said: “If you want to damn a man, teach him how to count.”
At the time, I figured he meant our family debts.
Now, I realise he was mourning something deeper—how we forget to live once we learn to tally every risk.
There were other firsts, of course: motorbike stunts on gravel roads, sneaking out of the hostel at night, the smoky scent of chicken or duck we’d stolen and barbecued in the jungle, skipping classes to feel rebellious.
We also took on whatever after-school jobs we could find, squeezing meaning out of every little chance to feel alive, to feel free and worthy.
My classmate, now working at Taiyo Yuden in Samajaya, remembers it differently.
For him, it was about cruising in a brown Toyota wagon with friends from Teng Bukap to Simpok, the music blasting, the windows down and no clue what the future held.
Though the settings where we come of age may vary, the camaraderie we build with our peers during that time is universal.
Adolescence today resembles less a daring escape from a hostel window and more a quiet step out of a store, first smartphone gleaming in hand.
For the past year or two, my wife and I have been in a delicate dance with our 14-year-old, Bella, over when she can get her first smartphone.
Nearly all her friends in our neighbourhood already have one.
It started with one or two in fourth grade (age 5-11 in elementary school).
In some schools, the phones were everywhere.
Now, in sixth grade (age 11-14 in middle school or junior high), the ranks of the phoneless have dwindled to my daughter and two of her friends, whose fathers are colleagues of mine.
We seem to be heeding a silent pact: I won’t buy one if you don’t!
A new report from the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) Group within Goldman Sachs’s Investment Banking division found that by age 8, one in four children already has a smartphone.
A 2021 report from the same group showed a significant rise in the number of 8 to 12-year-olds with a smartphone, from 24 per cent in 2015 to 43 per cent in 2021.
Most parents justify a phone as a necessary tool for staying in touch when their kids begin venturing from home.
We did this for my 11-year-old son Hayek when most of his peers seemed to be getting smartphones.
The decision wasn’t about social conformity, but, as I mentioned in the previous column, he genuinely needed it to pilot his drone.
At the school’s drone show last year, for example, the phone served as his co-pilot.
As clueless parents of a kid with a great attention span, we set no controls—a rookie mistake we realised months later.
Now, in Forest Hills, it’s Bella who’s coming into her own.
She walks the new neighbourhood independently these days, something I’ve managed by strapping a glitchy kiddie watch on her wrist, which she despises.
So glitchy that it’s earned the nickname in our household as “the ankle monitor.”
We use it for calls, though we can’t always hear each other over the din of the school bus.
I can text her, but she can respond only by voice text or preprogrammed one-word answers, such as “yes” or “OK.”
I can’t track her every move like I did with Hayek, but I’ve come to learn that I don’t need to know every time she heads to the hospital to see her mother.
This kind of restraint, I’ll admit, was hard-earned.
I realised tracking Hayek had become a kind of screen-time addiction when Life360, a tracking app, began showing up in my most-used apps.
I know she’ll get a phone eventually, probably sooner than I’d prefer.
She’s not waiting until high school, no matter what her grandparents say.
It’s just not practical anymore—not when she’s commuting alone nearly every day.
I’ll want to be more readily available in case of emergencies, and she’ll need GPS maps and local transit apps to navigate the daily maze of subway changes.
And yet, I’m clinging to her phone-free days like a toddler wrapped around his dad’s leg, unwilling to let go.
I know that once she gets a smartphone, there’s no rewinding the clock.
Fourteen is a peak age.
Bella will still let me hold her hand when we cross the street, even though I know she does this alone all the time.
She’ll cuddle with me when we watch “Ugly Betty,” a silly and retro show that she loves as much as I do.
(“What’s that?” she asked about the corded phone in Betty’s house.)
Bella still humours me with bike rides and tennis matches during my visits, just long enough to beat me soundly.
What can I say? She’s got her inner Emma Raducanu switched on.
She will go hiking with me—a pandemic pastime—even though I know she’d rather be slurping noodles with her friends or combing through the aisles at Five Below (the US version of Mr. DIY) for cheap trinkets.
She doesn’t act embarrassed when I’m around her friends.
Sure, there is plenty of eye-rolling and side-eye and bouts of ‘tween ‘tude to contend with, but she will never say no to a game of Settlers of Catan or Monopoly with us.
Without a smartphone, Bella thinks she’s missing out.
Why wouldn’t she?
All around her, everyone is glued to their screens.
That includes her friends on the school bus, on play dates and even at parties.
When we escorted her and more than a dozen friends to a karaoke room for her 13th birthday, almost everyone was fixated on their phones on the subway ride home.
The mysteriously magnetic power of smartphones greets Bella at home, too.
God knows how many hours a day her mother spends fielding calls and managing patient appointments from her device.
Meanwhile, I spend my evenings juggling alarming Bloomberg headlines, silly memes and gossip across three different group chats.
As for Hayek, we could throw fireworks in our house, and he may not notice if he’s on Interstellar mode.
Bella consistently maintained that her lack of a smartphone resulted in social exclusion.
I disagreed.
I reminded her that her iPad was perfectly capable of handling messages and making plans.
She countered that she couldn’t text me.
I told her that wasn’t a problem.
Now that nearly all her friends had phones, I said she could use one of theirs to reach me.
Then came her trump card: she pointed out that her younger brother had gotten one earlier, so it was only fair that she got one too.
There, she had me. One point for her.
I’ve tried to explain how phones, with all their social media apps and games, are designed to be addictive.
Just look at us!
I’ve also warned her of the risks, a point underscored by the dark Netflix series “Adolescence,” which we recently watched together.
She insisted she was willing to put up with any restrictions we deemed wise.
She said she was fine with whatever limits we set—no social media, no phones after bedtime, no problem.
(This is, after all, the same girl who wrote an essay arguing that Roblox was educationally useless, complete with statistics and a self-conducted survey of her classmates.)
While we drag our feet, Bella has begun looking up deals on refurbished smartphones online.
She knows her phoneless days are numbered.
She’s started talking about how having a phone would make her weekly trips to Manhattan for the Rock the Street, Wall Street (RTSWS) programme more manageable—a ride we usually spend absorbed in Wordle on my phone.
She’s getting excited about spending more time out of the house, making plans with friends, and being more socially active, which means less time for Ugly Betty and Settlers of Catan with me.
Can you blame me for trying to postpone, for as long as possible, the day she swaps my hand for a smartphone?
She’s so ready for this next step.
Soon, one day, but not just yet, I will be, too.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com
