My daughter was a creative genius, and then we bought her an iPhone
My daughter used to be an artist. She would spend hours in the TV room, not watching TV, but on the floor surrounded by scraps of paper, beads and string, making collages and jewelry, or copying cartoon characters into notebooks.
She loved to sew. With a needle and thread, she would make dresses and hats and shoes for her dolls. Before I got around to buying her fabric, she used construction paper. My brother gave her a small wooden artist manikin one Christmas. She made clothes for that too.
She wasn’t allowed TV on school days, but we were lax on weekends. She didn’t watch much TV anyway. She was too busy doing something else. When friends came by, she would show them her art books, page after page.
At ten, she asked for an iPod Touch. She was desperate to have one. All of her friends had either iPod Touches or iPhones. For months, she had been carrying around a phone she made by stitching yellow and black fabric around cardboard. She made a bee for a logo. She called it her Queen Bee phone.
My husband and I said she could have a phone when she turned 14. That’s when Bill Gates said he gave his kids phones, and he knew better than we did about tech. But my daughter was starting to use my iPhone, and I wasn’t controlling her time or restricting content.
