Why I can't leave my 59-year-old mom to her own devices

Had we gone back in time and switched souls? Was I in a Freaky Friday spin-off nobody told me about? No, it turns out this is just what happens when older folks with the infinite time of retirement meet the infinitely addictive algorithms of their smartphones.

Interestingly, for many people my age, this shift coincides with that surreal phase of life where adult children find their parents acting more and more childlike.

While last month’s landmark K.G.M. vs Meta et al ruling in the US showed that firms like Meta and Google develop deliberately addictive social media products, the focus was largely their impact on young people.

This makes sense. Their brains are still developing, they’re vulnerable to predators and inappropriate content, and are still learning about themselves and how to socialize. Senior citizens, on the other hand, have lived full lives, formed identities and built relationships.

However, the consequences of too much screen time go far beyond and are age-agnostic: poor sleep, negative mood, political polarization, vulnerability to scams and fake news, and excessive dependence on one’s device.

Besides, relationships, even lifelong ones, are not static. They require attention to stay alive. A friend I spoke to said her grandmother’s attention span was so ‘cooked,’ she couldn’t hold a conversation anymore, much to the frustration of her relatives.

At this point, you might be thinking, shouldn’t the elderly be the experts on this? Haven’t they been shaking their heads at young people for being chained to their phones since the first cellphone was invented?

The apparent hypocrisy can be frustrating.

One former colleague said of her mother whose sleep is impacted by phone overuse, “Basically, everything she tells us to stop doing, she is doing.” This should tell us that nobody is invulnerable to addictive design. Studies across the world have found that screen time is on the rise among the elderly, and in some places, at levels comparable to the youth.

We’re all in the same boat. The only difference is that those of us who’ve had social media for a decade or more have greater digital literacy and experienced both the positive and negative effects for long enough to know what it skews.

For our parents and grandparents, on the other hand, the combination of suddenly having too much time, losing your purpose post-retirement, having an ‘empty nest,’ limited mobility, loneliness and even liberation from lifelong responsibilities can outweigh prudence.

While guardrails for the young like age gates, age-based content restrictions and parental controls cannot be applied to the elderly, the core issue of addictive-by-design applications must be addressed.

We need groups like the Centre for Humane Technology that lobby for public awareness and incentives that make technology uphold ethical standards, plus rulings like K.G.M. vs Meta to set precedents that make it easier to argue for better regulation.

Many of us would love to have control over our parents’ phone time, not only to protect them from the evil that lurks in the dark recesses of the internet, but also to encourage them to be who they used to be.

A friend told me she felt bad about her father’s phone overuse and wishes he would do something more productive or fulfilling instead. She also felt that WhatsApp forwards provided the illusion of connection, but were not meaningful exchanges. Another lamented that her father, once a voracious reader, no longer picks up books for leisure, choosing to use his phone instead.

I, too, have tried in vain to get my mother to read again. It turns out all she needed was to get knee surgery and be stuck in the ICU with no phone and nothing else to do, but that’s a story for another time.

At the end of the day, our elderly loved ones are adults with agency. All we can do is try to create conditions that encourage them to make better choices for themselves.

Government and non-government bodies should foster digital literacy among the elderly to help them understand the effects of phone overuse, how to navigate digital spaces safely and protect themselves from bad actors.

To address the unmet needs of seniors that make them more likely to overuse their phone, governments, NGOs and startups could collaborate to create avenues for the elderly and retired to discover and rediscover hobbies, and form a community not only with peers, but also with younger generations. I can attest to the wonders of intergenerational friendships: one of the most enriching friendships in my adult life has been with a septuagenarian.

Finally, public spaces must be made more accessible and inviting to the elderly and those with limited mobility so that they have an incentive to go out and take the world in, as they have always encouraged us to. We all need to touch grass from time to time.

The author is a journalist at Mint.