Photo:erinapier/Instagram
erinapier/Instagram
Erin Napieris opening up about her reasoning behind keeping her kids away from social media and why she’s encouraging other families to do the same.
“When my daughter Helen, who’s now 5, was very young, I posted a picture of her, and someone criticized the way she looked,” she recalled. “It made me see red. It made my blood boil.”
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“And it seems likethe criticism always comes from other women. It feels like betrayal when a fellow mother has the gall to criticize your child or your parenting,” she noted.
Erin then explained that she and husbandBen Napierdiscussed the idea of keeping kids off of social media and away from smartphones, deciding to make an “informal agreement” to go at it together.
“We don’t want our kids to be disconnected. We always have said, ‘We’ll get landlines so they can call each other, and then when they’re old enough to drive, we’ll get them flip phones, and they can call and text each other,'” she wrote.
“When they can drive, I hope to give them a phone with capabilities to play whatever music they like. That seminal teenage moment of independence — driving a car while playing that perfect song for the first time — is an experience I can’t wait for our girls to have.”
Until then, save for FaceTiming with their grandparents, Mae, 2, and Helen aren’t getting the “device kid” experience.
erin napier/instagram
Erin did note that her older daughter notices “kids who are glued to their parents’ phones.”
“One time she asked, ‘What are they doing on there?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know.’ She said, ‘But you said you use your phone for work,’ and I said, “Yeah, that is what I use it for. But phones also have a bad place, a scary place that I want to protect you from. You don’t need to see the scary things,'” the mom explained.
“Helen asks why some families do things that we don’t do, like let their kids use phones, and I say, ‘Every family is different. That family does it that way, and our family does it this way.'”
Erin and Ben are now taking this idea wide withOsprey, a nonprofit that helps provides families community that helps kids meet other kids who are growing up without a cell phone and/or social media, to normalize the choice.
Instagram/erinnapier
“A lot of people are like, ‘You’re so naive,’ for thinking we can keep our kids off of social media and away from cell phones. But it’s not a forbidden fruit thing,” Erin leveled.
“We don’t intend to ever treat it that way for our girls. What we intend to teach them is that you can live the most incredible life, and you can do and see and be anything in the world, if you are not tethered to something fake.”
She concluded, “This is us teaching our children: You deserve more. And you are capable of a whole lot more if you can skip social media and cell phones until you’re older. Until you’re ready, you’ll have your growing group of Osprey friends who are having the same low-tech adolescence.”
source: people.com
