Drew Barrymore is drawing on lessons she learned as a child star as she raises her daughters — but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. In a lengthy and “vulnerable” Instagram post, Barrymore opened up about her own rebellious childhood and how she was reflecting on it amid making the decision to take away her daughter Olive’s first phone.
“I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me no. I wanted so badly to rebel all the time, and it was because I had no guardrails,” Barrymore wrote about her childhood of “too much access and excess.” She went on to say that she had “so much autonomy at a young age that I simply couldn’t accept authority of any kind,” and that was part of the reason she “ended up in an institution for two years.”
“I now have two daughters, aged 10 and 12. And I wonder if my life’s experience was a butterfly net to capture the understanding of what young girls need,” Barrymore added.
Barrymore shares her daughters, 12-year-old Olive and 10-year-old Frankie, with her ex-husband, Will Kopelman. She said she gave Olive a phone for her 11th birthday, “only to be used on weekends and for a limited time with no social media.”
But, she continued, “Within three months, I gathered the data of the texts and behavior. I was shocked by the results. Life depended on the phone. Happiness was embedded in it. Life source came from this mini digital box. Moods were dependent on the device.”
So she printed out all the texts from the device and handed Olive “a stack of pages.”
“They’re permanent somewhere where we don’t see it, so we don’t believe in its retracebale and damning nature if we fail digitally to act with decency,” she said she told her daughter.
Before taking Olive’s phone, Barrymore said she made sure she knew “she was a good person and that this was not a punishment on her character,” and that taking the phone was “not because she [Olive] did anything wrong but because it was not time yet.”
“I want to let parents know that we can live with our children’s discomfort in having to wait. We can be vilified and know we are doing what we now know to be a safer, slower and scaffolded approach,” she concluded. “I am going to become the parent I needed, the adult I needed.”
Barrymore touched on the elephant in the room with most parents and kids— that the current relationship most adults have to their phones only sets an example for kids. “We are living in an á la carte system as caretakers, in a modern, fast-moving world where tiny little computers are in every adult’s hands, modeling that it is OK to be attached to a device that is a portal to literally everything.”
She also acknowledges the difficulties in setting boundaries, but reflects that doing so can actually be a point of connection: “We can admit we’re learning, too, especially in tech, and things have to pivot from time to time.”
