In Viral Post, Second Grader Wishes Her Mom’s Cell Phone Was Never Invented

It’s not just millennials who are buried in their cell phones all day long.

Mommies are, too.

In a school exercise, second-graders were asked to write about “an invention you don’t like.” One student wrote a kinda’ heartbreaking piece on his mom.

“‘If I had to tell you what invention I don’t like, I would say that I don’t like the phone,’ the student wrote. ‘I don’t like the phone because my panert [sic] are on their phone every day.”

“A phone is sometimes a really bad habet. I hate my mom’s phone and I wish she never had one. That is an invention I don’t like.”

At the bottom of the sheet of paper, the student drew a cell phone with a big ‘X’ over it, along with a frowny face saying in a little bubble: “I hate it.”

The student’s work was posted on social media by a teacher, Jen Adams Beason, who lives in Louisiana. She didn’t post the name of the school or the student. At the end of her Facebook post, she added the hashtags #getoffyourphones and #listentoyourkids.

The post now has nearly 300,000 shares on Facebook.

A study published last May in “Child Development” found that “heavy parent digital technology use has been associated with suboptimal parent-child interactions.”

“Parent reports from 170 U.S. families (child Mage = 3.04 years) and actor-partner interdependence modeling showed that maternal and paternal problematic digital technology use predicted greater technoference in mother-child and father-child interactions; then, maternal technoference predicted both mothers’ and fathers’ reports of child externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Results suggest that technological interruptions are associated with child problem behaviors, but directionality and transactional processes should be examined in future longitudinal studies.”

It’s jargon for “put your phones down, parents!”