How This HGTV Star Models Healthy Phone Use for Her Kids
By Movieguide® Contributor
HGTV star Erin Napier explained the habit that she and her husband, Ben, have adopted to model the healthy use of technology while their children are young.
“I think it’s important that we start talking about what we’re doing on [our phones],” Napier told the Aro podcast. “If the girls ever see us on our phones, we try to say what it is that we’re doing. So we say, ‘Miss Kate just texted that there’s something wrong at the house that we’re working on right now. There’s something wrong with the light fixture, and she’s asking me what I think about this problem. What do you think about this problem? What do you think I should do?’”
“I don’t want them to wonder, ‘What is mommy looking at? What is mommy doing?’ They can’t learn how to be an adult by watching me tap on this,” Napier continued. “They don’t know that I’m writing an email about how to deal with this or that. So I say what I’m doing.”
The Napiers are strong advocates for keeping children off of technology for as long as possible, especially when it comes to social media — which they have vowed to keep their kids off of until they graduate high school. The couple believes social media introduces immense pressure onto kids which they are not capable of properly handling until they are more mature.
“It’s our job to build a hedge of protection around their heart until they’re strong enough to fight that battle,” Napier told PEOPLE. “I feel like when our kids have more opportunity to be engaged in the real world and learning skills and finding their talents, that’s where self-assurance comes from. And the opposite of finding self-assurance is in social media. Everything that tears down our self-confidence and self-assurance lives there.”
“So that’s really what we want to focus on is helping our girls find their gifts in the real world, and when they’re older, much older, I think they’ll be mentally prepared for what social media is and the tool that it can be,” she added.
While this view is currently countercultural, Napier believes the newest generation of parents, who at least partially grew up with smartphones, are more inclined to protect their kids from the tech. She even created a nonprofit — Osprey — to help parents with this mindset connect and come together to provide their children with a community of children growing up in similar tech-free spaces.
Movieguide® previously reported:
HGTV star Erin Napier confirmed that her children will not be on social media and shared why she’s made that decision.
“I think there are just masses of us who are millennials who started college or finished high school around the time social media began. So we clearly see what life is like connected in the digital age, but when we were more mature and could handle it — and we still see how difficult it is,” she told PEOPLE. “I think that’s a perspective Gen X isn’t familiar with. They didn’t know what could come with that and let their kids have phones young without knowing.”
“I think we’re going to see a huge change with parents that are millennials. I don’t have a single friend who is open to letting their child have access to a smartphone before the age of 16,” she added. “It’s not something we all discussed and decided on together. It’s something we just know. It’s not what our kids need.”
While some argue that her position deprives kids of social interaction and experiences, Napier disagrees.
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