The pop star, who is a mother of six, in earlier interviews has spoken about the difficulties that she faced in raising children during an time period dominated by smartphones and social media. Looking back at how her older children responded to having their own personal phones, Madonna said she believes she introduced them too early.
‘It ended my relationship with them’
In a 2019 interview with British Vogue, Madonna explained why she chose not to give her son David a phone when he turned 13.
“I made a mistake when I gave my older children phones when they were 13,” she said.
The singer said the impact that the phone had went far beyond than them simply spending less time talking. “It ended my relationship with them, really. Not completely, but it became a very, very big part of their lives,” she said.
According to Madonna, constant exposure to images and other people’s lives also affected her children’s perception of themselves.
“They became too inundated with imagery and started to compare themselves to other people, and that’s really bad for self-growth,” she said.That is the experience that eventually influenced Madonna to take a different approach with David, whom she did not allow to have a phone at the same age.
Madonna took a different approach with David
David, whom Madonna adopted from Malawi, was a teenager when she revealed her decision and at the time, he was part of the youth academy at Benfica football club in Lisbon.
Madonna also said that David was the child she felt most connected to. “He’s the one I have the most in common with. I feel like he gets me,” she said.
Her comments showed how her approach to parenting had changed as she raised more children. A decision that initially seemed to be a normal part of growing up had, in her experience, became closely linked to changes in family communication.
Madonna had actually spoken about the effect of phones on her children years earlier too. In a 2013 interview with Good Morning America, she discussed how her daughter’s iPhone had altered their relationship.
“Ever since my daughter got an iPhone, she stopped talking to me,” Madonna said at the time.
Madonna with her children (Image Source: Instagram/@madonna)
Social media was another concern
For Madonna, the issue was not limited to the amount of time children spent looking at screens. She also worried about how social media could affect her children’s ambitions and sense of identity.
Speaking about her eldest daughter Lourdes in the Vogue interview, Madonna described her as highly talented but said she believed social media had become a problem.
“I feel social media plagues her and makes her feel like: ‘People are going to give me things because I’m [Madonna’s] daughter.’”
Madonna said she tried to show Lourdes examples of other celebrity children who had to work to establish themselves independently of their famous parents.
The comments came as Madonna was also discussing the pressures of raising six children while continuing her career. She said that being a single mother while remaining creatively and politically active left her without many obvious role models.
Phone use remains a wider parenting issue
Madonna’s experience shows a bigger challenge for parents trying to decide when children should get their own phones and how much access they should have to them.
A study that was published in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care examined mobile phone usage among children aged between the range of six months to four years in an Indian paediatric outpatient setting.
It found that 73.34% of the children who were studied, were using mobile phones, even though 93.3% of parents said that they believed children should not be given phones. The researchers evently concluded that parents often struggled to translate their intentions about limiting phone usage in the children into actual practice.
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