As parents, we spend a lot of time on our phones. They keep us connected to work, simplify planning, and offer an easy distraction from the stress of daily life.
My daughter wants a phone. Since she is 9, it is an easy no. But as I watch older kids on their phones, I wonder what they are doing, what they are missing, and what relationship skills still need to happen off the phone.
For example:
Being brave enough to tell someone that you changed your mind or that something they said hurt your feelings.
Sitting in the discomfort of hearing that you hurt someone else's feelings without leaving them on read or putting down your phone because the conversation makes you uncomfortable.
Apologizing in person so they can see it in your eyes and know you mean it.
Asking what someone meant instead of deciding what they meant.
Disagreeing and remaining connected instead of sending a thumbs-up or a silly video.
And perhaps one of the hardest: tolerating someone else's silence when you don’t know what happened.
These aren't skills our kids suddenly acquire when they become adults. Whether we want to realize it or not, they're watching how we handle our own uncomfortable conversations.
Text Can Be Your Friend
Not all meaningful conversations will happen face-to-face and they don’t need to.
I've had friendships strengthened by years of funny, honest, sometimes deeply personal conversations over text. But I've also recently experienced the other side of it: when a relationship exists largely through text, someone can change or even end that relationship simply by no longer responding.
That made me think differently about what to teach my daughter. If text can create and sustain meaningful relationships, we also have to acknowledge how easy it makes it to step away from those same relationships.
The goal isn't to keep our kids from communicating through text. It's to help them become curious about which conversations belong there and which ones don't.
When your daughter brings you a friendship problem, you might ask:
Do you think this is something you can solve over text, or would it be easier to understand each other if you talked?
Are you trying to reconnect with her, or do you want to talk about what happened?
What would you want her to understand that might be hard to put in a text?
These are small opportunities to help our girls notice what different conversations require. I can model it myself when I write, I'm going to call you because I don't want to do this over text. Or I'll text a request to see someone in person because the conversation needs more than words on a screen.
It is hard to resist firing off the perfectly crafted response when we're angry. But our kids are watching what we do in those moments too.
Choosing a different way to communicate isn't a failure to find the right words. It's recognizing that sometimes the words deserve more than a text bubble.
Learning to Stay in the Conversation
One of the things I want my daughter to learn as she gets older is that discomfort can live within a conversation.
Healthy relationships will contain uncomfortable moments. Someone will misunderstand her. She will hurt someone's feelings. Someone will hurt hers. She'll need to say no. She'll change her mind.
It can be tempting to send a well-crafted text, an emoji, or even a silly video and think, problem solved, when the other person hearts it. But does that mean anything was actually resolved?
What I can help her learn is how to recognize when a conversation has become uncomfortable and stay present long enough to figure out what needs to happen next.
Maybe that means taking a break, setting a boundary, or saying the uncomfortable thing out loud.
Sometimes the text is the conversation. And sometimes it's simply the tool that gets us to the conversation we actually need to have.
Want more ways to start the conversation?
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