He desperately wanted his father’s approval, and the acceptance he needed and the smartphone he’d bought could not coexist

By Yossie Strickman, as told to Bayla Hersher

“I didn’t want to go behind his back, but when I try to explain, it’s like he doesn’t hear me.”

The young man sitting on the other side of my desk sounded more miserable than angry.

“My rebbi agreed that getting a smartphone is the right decision for me now, but my father… let’s just say he wouldn’t approve.”

Meir had struggled to fit into the yeshivah system his whole life, and now, at 22, he’d found his place. He was in a laid-back yeshivah where the guys work hard to sit through seder, go to the gym to let off steam, and watch basketball after night seder three times a week.

Although Meir had been raised in an insular environment without exposure to technology, he felt he needed access to a smartphone during his downtime. Like most of the yeshivah, he followed sports as an outlet after a long day of learning. He wasn’t being rebellious — on the contrary, he was a good boy with a strong value system.

That’s why he was here, getting his new phone heavily filtered.

“You talked to your father about this?” I asked, trying to get Meir to open up.

He nodded. “Of course! I wanted his permission to get a smartphone, but he kept saying no without listening to what I was saying. And it always ended in a fight.”

Meir’s story is a familiar one. Parents have the best intentions when restricting their kids’ access to technology. To protect their children from something that could be detrimental to their spiritual and emotional well-being, they respond with a firm no — and the expectation is that their children will accept their parental authority in this case, just as they do with other issues. After all, no means no.

However, many parents fail to realize that the request for a smartphone stems from an underlying need, one that differs from child to child.