Drew Barrymore says she’ll be the parent she needed by limiting her kids’ access to tech. Experts say her approach is a good one.

Drew Barrymore took her daughter’s phone away after only three months. 

Drew Barrymore says that she’s going to become the “parent I needed” as a child by implementing boundaries and protecting her two daughters, ages 10 and 12, from the “access and excess” of phones and social media.

In a lengthy Instagram post, Barrymore talked about her own difficult childhood, including a stay in a psychiatric hospital when she was 13. She attributed her troubles to being exposed to the adult world far too young and having no boundaries set for her.

“I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me no,” she wrote. “I had no guardrails.”

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Now, the mom of Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, says she’s been shocked to find her girls in a world that’s similarly permissive because of technology that’s constantly at their fingertips.

“Now that I am a mother, I cannot believe I am in a world that I know correlates to my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon,” she said. “Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much. Kids are supposed to be protected.”

A psychologist says boundaries are critical, even if kids don’t like them

Robert D. Friedberg, a clinical psychologist who studies anxious youth, says that boundary setting — including around technology, social media, and phone use — helps reduce anxiety for kids by setting expectations and strengthening the family structure.

“Limit setting or saying no to children is pivotal,” he said. Although children and teens might not like boundaries, those limits serve the child well in the long run, Friedberg added. “I remind parents that the root of the word discipline means to teach or instruct.”

Barrymore says she’s willing to take the burden of her children’s disappointment if it means protecting them.

“I want to let parents know that we can live with our children’s discomfort in having to wait,” Barrymore wrote. “We can be vilified and know we are doing what we now know to be a safer, slower, and scaffolded approach.”

Barrymore even uses a technique to help her stick to her rules.

“I visualize my kids angry with me, but I do not go back on my rules,” she wrote. “Rather than trying to fix it for them, I can let my kids experience that discomfort and figure out how to cope and work through it.”

Limiting exposure and gradually increasing phone privileges is important

Pediatrician and mom Whitney Casares advises parents to “limit your child’s access to social media and phones for as long as possible.” It’s also critical to lead by example, implementing time away from your own phone, she added.

When you do decide to introduce a phone or social media, “dosing is really important,” Friedberg said. “Parents can start low with access to the media or phone with teenagers, see how it goes, and then adjust up or down depending on the effect.”

Barrymore shared that she gave Olive a phone for her 11th birthday but, within three months, became concerned about her daughter.

“I was shocked by the results,” she wrote. “Life depended on the phone. Happiness was embedded in it.”

That left Barrymore “missing the human I knew in my daughter,” and after three months she decided to take the phone away from Olive, “not because she did anything wrong, but because it was not time yet.”

When she’s ready to reintroduce the phone, Barrymore wants a limited device.

“I personally believe in the three T’s and M’s of a cellphone — talk, text, track; music, maps, memories (photos) — and that these devices were meant to be phones,” she wrote.

Fostering in-person connection in kids is important too

Barrymore isn’t the only parent concerned about the impact of group texts. When people chat via text instead of in real time, there’s potential for “miscommunication, bullying, and negativity,” Casares said.

“It’s so much easier to call someone a mean name or to speak hatefully on a text than to their face, and it’s so much easier to forget that they’re a fellow human who also has feelings,” she said.

To help contextualize texts, Barrymore printed out all of Olive’s messages to demonstrate “this is not a black void that these travel to,” she wrote.

Parents can also remind children that relationships should be “productive, mutually satisfying, and helpful as opposed to hurtful, dissatisfying, and unproductive relationships,” Friedberg said. Asking open-ended questions like “Is this relationship building you up or tearing you down?” can help kids identify harmful communication patterns, he added.

As for Barrymore, she’s using her own experience of being exposed to too much, too soon, to prevent the same from happening to her daughters.

“We must protect our children,” she wrote.