In children’s homes and residential care facilities, the question comes up at every team meeting: what do we do about phones? I suggest turning it around. Before being a screen, the phone of a teenager in care is the thread that connects them to their family, their peers and their own history. A framework remains necessary, but its nature changes depending on what we think we are framing: an object to neutralise, or a bond to support.
A question raised at every team meeting
When I work with child protection teams, the question of the phone comes up quickly, and it comes up loaded. Phones are confiscated at night, returned in the morning, negotiated over at meals, taken away as punishment, and each of these operations produces conflicts that exhaust everyone. Professionals say it honestly: the phone has become the object around which a good part of the educational relationship crystallises. This observation deserves to be taken seriously, precisely because an object that crystallises so much is not an ordinary object.
The family in your pocket
For a teenager in care, the phone contains first of all their family. Messages from a mother, calls from a brother who lives elsewhere, photos from before the placement. Maintaining family ties is a right of the protected child; the phone is today its main material support. It then contains peers, that is, the social world in which the teenager exists as something other than a “young person in care”. It finally contains pieces of the self: music, the images one has made, the conversations one has kept. Confiscating the device means suspending all of this in a single gesture, and the intensity of the reactions becomes understandable.
Serge Tisseron, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with whom I have been working for more than fifteen years, described the mobile phone, during a training course we were leading together, as a tool for taking the floor and reclaiming one’s own life. For young people whose words nobody has ever really listened to, he said, identity construction can hardly go through language, for lack of having acquired its mastery through exchange; it then goes through the making of images, which makes it possible to reintroduce one’s own point of view on the world and to build small pieces of a life that belongs to you. Many teenagers in child protection are exactly in this situation, with, in addition, events of their history that have remained outside language. Their phone is not just entertainment: it is sometimes the only place where they tell their own story.
Screen time as self-assertion
The anthropologist Jocelyn Lachance, in L’adolescence hypermoderne. Le nouveau rapport au temps des jeunes (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011), shows that contemporary teenagers, urged to become autonomous in an uncertain world, turn their relationship to time into a terrain for asserting that autonomy. Deciding for oneself when to connect and when to disconnect is part of this conquest. When an adult confiscates the phone, they are not just removing an object: they are taking back control over one of the few territories where the teenager exercised their sovereignty. For a young person whose place of residence, schedule and visits are already decided by the institution, this territory counts double. This does not invalidate the framework; it explains why the conflict is so intense, and why punitive confiscation costs the relationship so much.
A framework that allows rather than an object that gets removed
In the article The framework that allows, I developed an inversion that applies word for word to the rules of an institution: thinking of the framework as what allows rather than what forbids. A framework about phones can be built with the young people, differentiate times and places (meals, night, activities), and apply to everyone, adults included. A phone-free meal where educators keep theirs in their pocket is not a framework, it is a power struggle. A phone-free meal for everyone is a collective ritual, and teenagers know the difference very well.
Two clarifications, to avoid misunderstandings. First, a co-constructed framework is not a weak framework: it holds, it is recalled, it has consequences; simply, its reasons have been shared and it is not to be confused with the adults’ moods. Second, there are situations where protection requires limiting specific uses: ongoing harassment, contact with a dangerous adult, exposure that puts the young person at risk. These limitations are matters for team decisions, explained to the young person and articulated with the measures in place, not one-off reactions. Protecting is not punishing, and removing the family bond should never serve as a sanction.
Consistency between adults
Holding this position first requires giving up judgement about young people’s digital practices, as I argued in the article Not judging people’s digital practices: you cannot support what you despise. It then requires consistency between adults, between team members, with foster carers, with families when possible, because the teenager immediately spots the gaps between everyone’s positions. It finally requires accepting to talk about the adults’ phones, which is often the most uncomfortable and the most useful moment of the training courses I lead. The conference « L’usage des écrans au cœur de la protection de l’enfance », designed with Serge Tisseron for professionals in this field, started exactly from there: before equipping our gaze on young people’s practices, questioning our own.
