Yelling at other people's kids

Part 1 of some periodic thoughts about kids and smartphones

A few weekends ago, my husband and son and I went on a “family bike ride” in the neighborhood with a bunch of other parents and kids.

It was a ton of fun. It was both a social and a “bike activist” event, drawing attention to cyclists — and cyclists with kids — in the wake of some devastating, high-profile car-on-bike deaths in Philadelphia in recent months.

For the bike nerds, I’d be happy to tell you about all the gear I got to scope out (So many cargo bikes! Kiddos with adorable watermelon-patterned helmets!), but this is not a post about bikes.

It’s a post about how adults interact with other people’s kids, and why I’m coming to believe it’s deeply intertwined with the fraught relationship so many parents and children have with smartphones.

Photo by Jordan Sanchez on Unsplash

On the family bike ride, I found myself riding behind a nine-year-old who was leading the group home. His dad was bringing up the rear, making sure nobody got left behind.

This kid — whom I had never met before the ride — was a great cyclist. He wore his helmet, he understood how to control the bike, he was steady. And fast. And of course, he had the under-developed temporal lobe of a kid just starting puberty.

That meant he liked to zoom right up to a red light, and stop abruptly. He’d also get distracted, which would have been adorable if it weren’t so dangerous: he’d wobble into the oncoming lane of bike and pedestrian traffic on the trail, or slow down without warning to check out some construction vehicles.

So somewhere along the ride, I started yelling at him.

I exaggerate, I exaggerate. But I did start using a firmer tone to help make sure he stayed safe.

“Red light,” I’d shout out, well in advance of each crosswalk.

“I’m not blind,” he’d shout back at me.

“Stay in the right lane!” I’d yell, my tone, I hope, emulating a loving-but-means-business aunt.

“I know! I’m nine years old!” he’d reply.

And honestly, I felt weird about it. It feels taboo to tell another parent’s kid what to do like that, especially a kid I had just met.

But increasingly, I think it’s a missing piece in the puzzle of how I’m thinking about kids and smartphones.

Like many of the millennial and Gen X parents I know, I eagerly read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, when it came out earlier this year. While I don’t agree with the author about many political issues, I have found his writing (and the writing of his guest bloggers on

After Babel

, particularly the teens and young adults he has come share their thoughts) very, very useful. It’s helped me clarify my thinking about my own relationship with my smartphone and how I want to think about smartphones in the life of my toddler son.

Haidt’s argument, in case you haven’t heard him on one of the gazillion podcasts he’s been doing the rounds on, is this: contemporary kids are under-supervised online, and over-supervised in the real world, and it’s causing some major mental health problems.

This argument crystallized the connection between these two issues — both of which have independently preoccupied me as a mom — in a way that makes total intuitive sense. Screens and free play are inversely related to one another. As our culture has gotten more and more paranoid about kids exploring the world without direct adult supervision, we’ve started parking them in front of screens to give them something to do.

And while screens are a necessary and useful part of modern life — a well-timed episode of Sesame Street is a lifesaver — I also sense, like so many other parents I know, that something doesn’t feel great in the way so many of us use our smartphones.

Ever since my husband and I started talking about having a kid, we’ve been imagining ways to give him independence and freedom throughout his childhood. Way before The Anxious Generation got me thinking about how childhood independence might be related to smartphones, we’d had a running joke about having a “free-range kid.”

When we’re both running late at work and scrambling to figure out who will pick him up from daycare, my husband will text me: He’s 3, he can get himself home. He’s a free-range kid.

Whenever he does something bad? Free-range kid, I’ll shout to my husband, as I run over to stop our kid from hitting the dog with a stuffed animal.

But it’s actually something we’re both quite serious about. And no, prioritizing kids’ independence does not mean our 3-year-old is expected to walk himself home from preschool. Although maybe that would happen in Japan!

We want our son to have unstructured time to play, to interact with other kids, to have fun. We want him to cope with challenges on his own, to learn to trust himself, to figure out how to deal with it when there’s only one basketball and two kids want to hold it. (Here’s a great Hidden Brain episode about kids and free play.)

And I don’t want to spend the next fifteen years ferrying him around to a highly-orchestrated schedule of resume-building activities — I’ve got other stuff to do, including just hanging out with my amazing kid.

So what does this have to do with the family bike ride and the 9-year-old who wasn’t quite as attuned to red lights as I would have liked?

Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

Part of allowing kids a childhood filled with independence and free play — and off screens — is having a community of adults who can help keep them safe.

In all the reading I find myself doing about smartphones and our addiction to them (and trust me — I am a sucker for clicking on a New York Times article about how a reporter once went a few days without a smartphone and omg it was so hard!), this seems like a really, really under-acknowledged issue.

If we want both kids and their parents feeling comfortable with play that’s not supervised directly by parents, we have to feel comfortable with other adults keeping a collective eye on our kids.

So that’s why, even though I felt a little awkward directing that kid on the bike, I ultimately felt like it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t exactly that he was exploring the city completely on his own, but we were a part of a community activity where it was the group’s responsibility to keep everyone safe.

Here’s another example.

Earlier this summer, I remember standing around in the alley behind our garage with some other toddler parents, chatting about the splash pad down the street.

Everyone agreed the splash pad was a blast, but several of the other parents were concerned about the big kids there, who had water guns and blew past all the wobbly little ones.

“Unsupervised big kids,” one dad said, knowingly.

I knew what he was talking about. The splash pad can get a little bonkers, the water just bringing out the crazy in kids of all ages. Just earlier that day, when we were there, my son had burst into tears when a school-age kid had gotten him directly with a water squirter she was pretending to pee with from the top of a play structure. (Unsupervised big kids, amiright?)

I wasn’t thrilled about the way the older kid had, ya know, pretended to urinate on my little guy, but rather than pack up and leave, I did something apparently radical: I asked her to stop.

“Hey sweetie,” I called up. I often default to calling kids I don’t know sweetie, and I hope it helps set the tone that I’m a friend, not a disciplinarian. “My son is little, and he doesn’t like it when he gets splashed by a water squirter. Could you do it in another direction?” The kid seemed happy to comply, and frankly barely even noticed me in all the mayhem.

And then my kid could return to his favorite activity: filling up a cup and dumping it out.

I wasn’t pretending to be her mom and telling her how to live her life; I wasn’t filming her and posting it surreptitiously on social media (God no!). I was acting as a firm, brief, and kind adult intervention when she was doing something mildly unsafe.

I hope that this kind of low-key, low-stakes adult intervention can make public spaces feel safer for kids of all ages, so that we can start to give them the kind of independence and freedom that makes childhood so magical.

And when my kid inevitably becomes the unsupervised big kid using a water gun to pretend to pee off of a play structure, I certainly hope that some other nice mom tells him to stop.

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Check it out: I’ll be on NPR’s Studio 2 live (ahh!) on Thursday, September 19 at 12pm EST talking about size-inclusive medicine, fatphobia in health care, and weight-loss medications.

If you can, I’d be thrilled if you’d tune in and call to ask some questions! In the Philly area, you can listen on the radio at 90.9 FM, or elsewhere on the NPR app. Otherwise, you can listen to the podcast version after the show airs.

I also recently got to talk about size-inclusive medicine on two different podcasts, both hosted by amazing mental health providers.

Here are the links, if you’d like to take a listen:

Beyond BMI: Embracing Size-Inclusive Medicine, on the Taking Up Space Podcast (Hosted by Cassie Krajewski)

The Size-Inclusive Healthcare Revolution, on A Mind of Her Own Podcast (Hosted by

Jennifer Reid, MD

)