Erin Napier Reveals Why Her Daughters Won’t Have Smart Phones, Social Media
By Movieguide® Contributor
HGTV star Erin Napier revealed why she keeps her kids off of technology and away from social media.
“When my daughter Helen, who’s now five, was very young, I posted a picture of her, and someone criticizes the way she looked,” Napier recalled. “It made me see red. It made my blood boil.
“And it seems like the criticism always comes from other women. It feels like betrayal when a fellow mother has the gall to criticize your child or your parenting,” she noted.
After that experience, Napier discussed social media with her husband, Ben Napier, and they decided they would keep their children off of technology in general, especially social media.
“We don’t want our kids to be disconnected. We always have said, ‘We’ll get landlines so they can call each other, and then when they’re old enough to drive, we’ll get them flip phones, and they can call and text each other,” she said.
“When they can drive, I hope to give them a phone with capabilities to play whatever music they like,” she explained. “That seminal teenage moment of independence—driving a car while playing that perfect song for the first time—is an experience I can’t wait for our girls to have.”
Until then, however, Napier wants to keep them away from technology so they learn they can live full lives without it.
Napier’s oldest daughter has noticed that her life is different from most other kids.
“One time she asked, ‘What are they doing on there?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know.’ She said, ‘But you said you use your phone for work,’ and I said ‘Yeah, that is what I use it for. But phones also have a bad place, a scary place that I want to protect you from. You don’t need to see the scary things,” she recalled.
“Helen asks why some families do things that we don’t like let their kids use phones, and I say, ‘Every family is different. That family does it that way, and our family does it this way,’” Napier added.
To make it easier for parents who want to keep their kids off of technology and social media, Erin and Ben have created Osprey, a nonprofit that helps families taking this approach find community.
Napier wants to normalize the experience for her kids and help them find a community of children who have grown up with a similar experience.
“This is us teaching our children: You deserve more,” she explained. “You are capable of a whole lot more if you can skip social media and cell phones until you’re older. Until you’re ready, you’ll have your growing group of Osprey friends who are having the same low-tech adolescence.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Napier:
“I am so thankful I grew up without the crushing pressure of social media,” she continued. “As a highly sensitive artistic kid, the criticism or silence of ‘likes’ would’ve hurt me deeply. It would have shaped me into someone, something else. I read once where we should only accept the criticism of people who know us and love us well enough to deliver it gently and in a way that helps instead of hurts.”
Napier called social media “the harshest criticism of all,” as well as “a distorted and broken and misguided kind of critic who sets these young people without their fully developed emotional minds on the wrong path.”
“Is it mean to keep [my children] from communicating with smart phones? I don’t care,” Napier concluded. “I’m also keeping them from finding a distorted picture of who they think they need to be, porn, hate, the criticism of strangers. Childhood is so short. We’re gonna savor every last second of our girls’ that we can.”
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