BPDFamily.com

You all are the only people I can think of to help me think through this. It’s been a long time since I’ve written on the boards, I don’t even remember my old username. Update: Current status, divorced, ex-husband uBPD/NPD, our only child, a son recently turned 13. Son and I lived with protection orders against husband from 2018, long custody battle, legal to include criminal case he didn’t go to prison for, and I had sole custody, until the judge decided to “make up for lost parenting time”, and sent son to live with his father, at age 10. Father has done A LOT to retaliate, along the lines of limiting son’s conversations with me, via coercive control. It’s been rough, but I’m ok, son seems ok enough.

Here’s where I am: son comes to me for summer vacations and every other Christmas /Thanksgiving, and we share custody a long distance, it requires unaccompanied minor plane tickets.

My son is here for the summer! He turned 13 this past spring. I have always provided him with a Verizon Gizmo watch, and a TracFone, so that he can call for help if he’s in trouble. Dad can’t turn off the Gizmo and has no access to parental controls to turn it off. He can take it from him, and son would have to choose to tell if bad things are happening. So far, he has not disclosed anything, he’s probably protecting his father, but, I want to hope for the best and not assume the worst.

I promised my son an iPhone for his birthday, and with that comes, Apple Family Sharing. I’m the account manager. But son is 13 and *could* remove himself from the family in Apple, Apple allows that at age 13.

Here’s where I need wisdom for anyone who has lived this controlling, manipulative coparenting meanness.
While I have my son and the new iPhone I just bought him here for the summer,  what settings, apps, etc. does anyone know of to front load me with discernment and wisdom? I sense there could be trouble on the horizon, and I can feel that I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t want to find out the hard way.

Can anyone give me a heads up, from experience? What could go wrong, and how could I possibly prevent whatever that is?

Thanks!!

Hi there,

I have triplet nieces and a nephew who just turned 13, and their divorced dad is a highly dysfunctional, long-term unemployed, undiagnosed NPD.  He is highly combative, toxic, narcissistic and totally unreliable.

I don't have experience with parental controls on devices, so I'm sorry I can't really help you there.  However, I caution against giving any child unfettered access to phones.  I've seen what it has done to my stepchildren, especially in the teen years.  Basically they were addicted to their phones, and they were up most nights attached to their screens.  They were anxious and lost sleep, and they didn't function as well as they might have in the daytime.  I think that two of the kids lost some IQ points, because the consumption of pointless TikTok videos and video games crowded out other activities, such as reading, spending time with friends in person, getting summer jobs, etc.  Basically, they were busy watching other people do stuff on screens instead of doing stuff themselves.  I think the phones robbed them of all sorts of growing-up experiences.  So by college age, they were NOT ready for college.  They all struggled.  I think two of the stepkids fell maybe 2-3 years behind, emotionally, intellectually and socially, and yet they caught up by age 25 or so.  My BPD stepkid fell around 8-10 years behind in my opinion.  Part of the reason was, because the phones are so entertaining, that she spent around five years in her bedroom consuming social media, while not going to school, working a job, volunteering, spending time with peers, let alone helping around the house or even engaging in daily conversation.  Having said that, her BPD behavior and substance use disorder also set her back significantly.  I think if she hadn't had access to a phone, she wouldn't have languished for so long in her bedroom, and she would have gotten help earlier.  And at the end of the period of self-imposed prison, she wouldn't have had such a nasty hit to her self-esteem when she finally came out of her bedroom.  Alas, by the time she did that, all her peers had long moved on . . . graduating, getting jobs, some even getting married.  Since I'm not her mom (just a stepmom), I wasn't allowed to intervene per her dad.  But if she were my kid, I would have insisted that she pay for her own phone--because she'd learn she would have to work to earn privileges, and she'd get out of the house sometimes and have a more normal routine.  When her addictions were so bad that she dropped out or got kicked out of school, then I would have turned off wifi at nighttime, and/or confiscated the phone until her grades came up.

Anyway, onto the 13-year-old triplets in my family.  Their NPD dad wants them to have Iphones so he can reach them.  But in practice, all he wants is to play phone video games with his son.  He doesn't really care about his daughters and barely talks to them anyway.  A huge problem is that NPD dad stays up all night playing video games and sleeps most of the day.  That means he wants to be texting his son and playing online games with him at night, when he should be sleeping, especially during the school year.  NPD dad does NOT abide by any rules, and he does NOT consider his son's welfare at all, nor the impact of not paying attention to his daughters.  So my sister has not allowed her kids to have their own phones, and she also hasn't allowed them to open their own email accounts, either, save for the school email system.  The triplets have access to the internet through their school computers, which had been problematic as well, until the schools "locked down" websites that were distracting the students.  You see, some lessons were done via YouTube, which is highly addictive for the kids.  Anyway, whenever the triplets have screen time, they'll disappear in their rooms to consume YouTube and ignore everything else.  To deal with that, my sister uses parental controls and allows narrow windows of screen time for her kids, after homework has been done.  She feels she has to do this to protect their childhood.  There is a lot of emotional energy expended (begging, debating, arguing, tantrums) around screen time in their home, but I think the kids have gotten used to the routine for the most part, basically a half hour per day.  (When they were 11 and 12, to deal with constant nagging and tantrums about screens in their prior home, my sister decided to discontinue internet and TV service.  Any online homework was completed at school or on the public library's internet.)  Her house rule for personal phones is this:  If dad buys them a phone, that's his perogative as a parent, but the phones stay at his house.  Mom is not buying her kids phones.  If the kids want phones at Mom's house when they are older, then they have to work to earn them, and they have to pay for their own plan.  She says they have talked about this, and the kids agree, because even they know that the phones are too addictive!  Anyway, when they go to dad's house (which is rare, as he's so dysfunctional), they basically spend their time binging with screens.  Dad likes it that way, because the kids are quiet, and he can sleep during the day.  Even the kids admit that though they liked having the phone time, they end up feeling a bit sick and out of sorts afterwards, and they notice that Dad didn't really interact with them at all.  Unfortunately, Dad is not very protective of the kids, and they have seen things like porn on screens at his home.  I'm not sure what can be done about that, short of restricting parenting time.

Anyway, when screen time is limited, then life for kids really opens up.  They have time for hobbies, boy scouts, tinkering, riding bikes, play dates, sports, etc.  They are tired at bedtime and sleep all night, without a screen to disrupt their rest.  They actually speak to adults and are present during mealtimes.

You might wonder, well what if my kid needs to make a call?  What about emergencies?  At home, they have a landline.  Mom has an Iphone to consult onine scheduling and other information related to activities on the go.  If the kids are outside the home, there's always a parent, teacher or bus driver nearby to make a call if necessary.  Just the other day, my 13-year-old niece needed to take an Uber from home to her ballet class, because mom was at work.  Mom used the woman-only driver Uber app on her phone to schedule a pick-up for her daughter at the specified time outside her house.  In other words, the teen didn't need a Iphone to get her ride.  (In the old days, when I was her age, I would have called a taxi service from the home phone, but the Uber app is cooler because Mom can moniter the trip from work).  Now I'm sure Mom and her teen were nervous about this, but my niece really, really wanted to participate in the summer ballet program, and it just wasn't possible for her mom to drive her there while she was at work.  The Uber solution has worked well, and it has been the same lady driver every day.  My niece is responsible and motivated, and she's waiting by the door to catch her ride on time every day.  No phone is even necessary for that.

I don't know if my sister will be able to enforce her rules with the triplets regarding screens as they get older.  My guess is that she will, because she has their best interests at heart.  I wonder if parents are coming around to this view, as phone time is increasingly restricted at schools.  I just can't even imagine making a kid responsible for carrying around a multi-hundred dollar miniature computer everywhere.  It's bound to be lost, broken or stolen in my opinion.  I'd advise, wait as long as you can before giving your kid his own phone.  I'd say make them work for it, too.  And if grades suffer or he quits his activities, take that phone away.  Take the phone away at nighttime too; if your teen needs an alarm, use an old-fashioned one.  Your kid is still a kid, and I'd say, don't let a personal phone rob him of childhood, through constant distraction, or worse, online bullying and/or predators.

I know that's probably a drastic view, but I really think that the convenience and pseudo-"safety" of a phone don't outweigh the very real drawbacks.