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Put the Phone Down, Dad: What a Month Without Apps Taught Me

PMBy Preston Miller
Notes from real life

The Deletion

About a month ago I deleted everything off my phone. I got rid of social media, games, news, and even the weather app. If it was built to make me open it "just one more time," it went.

I kept X. I told myself it was for keeping up with the world. Honestly, I don't love that I still have it, and I'll probably cut it soon. Amazon is next on the list after that.

I'm not writing this from some mountaintop. I'm writing it from the middle of the fight. But a month in, I've learned enough that I want to put it down somewhere that isn't a feed. So this site is home base now. If you want to know what's going on with us, it'll be here, or you can text me or email me like it's 2005.

The Dad Problem

Here's what pushed me to do it. I'd be sitting on the floor with my kids, and my thumb would be scrolling. I was there, but I wasn't there.

Researchers have a word for this: "technoference." It means technology getting in the way of the moments between a parent and a kid. In one study of 170 families with toddlers, fathers who reported problematic phone use also reported more interruptions with their kids. Mothers did too. In a follow-up that tracked about 180 families over six months, more phone interference predicted more acting out from kids later. It ran the other way too: stressed parents reach for the phone, the kid acts out more, and the parent gets more stressed. That's a loop. I've lived in that loop.

Being fair, the research on dads specifically is thinner and messier than the research on moms. Some studies found stronger effects for mothers' phone use than fathers'. Another study found dads were more likely than moms to be playing phone games, and that more gaming went along with more parenting stress. Small experiments show babies and toddlers notice and react when a parent "goes blank" into a screen, though a newspaper can do some of the same thing.

So I won't tell you science proves your phone is ruining your kids. What I will tell you is that Pew found most parents admit their phone distracts them when they're with their kids, and I didn't need a study to know I was one of them. My kids don't need a perfect dad. They need one who looks up.

What the Feed Does to Your Head

The second thing I noticed after deleting everything: I got quieter inside. Less angry at strangers. Less sure that the country was on fire every afternoon.

That's not an accident. These platforms are designed to keep you engaged, and outrage keeps people engaged. A study out of Yale looked at millions of tweets and found that when people got likes and shares for posting outraged content, they posted more of it later. The platform was literally training people to be angrier. The U.S. Surgeon General put out an advisory in 2023 warning about social media's effect on young people's mental health, and even said there wasn't enough evidence to call it safe for kids.

I'm a grown man and I could feel it working on me. I can only imagine what it does to a 13-year-old.

True Crime on a Loop

This one's heavier. Over the last few months it felt like you couldn't open TikTok or YouTube without seeing the Lindsay Clancy trial, the Massachusetts mom accused of killing her three kids in 2023. The trial ended in a mistrial on September 4, after the jury deadlocked, and she hasn't been convicted or acquitted. Experts told The Guardian that the algorithms pushed that coverage to a "fever pitch," with amateur sleuths and armchair psychologists pumping out theories and misinformation.

Then other cases started showing up in the news. One was an Illinois mother, now charged with murder, who prosecutors say had been texting friends about the Clancy trial hours before her 2-year-old son was found dead. Another was a mom in Northlake, Texas, near Dallas, charged in October with attempted capital murder after police say she stabbed her husband and two little kids, who all survived. Her husband told police she was struggling with postpartum depression.

It's tempting to draw a straight line and say TikTok made these women do it. I'm not going to say that. Nobody has proven it, and none of these cases has been decided in court. When reporters asked experts whether Clancy's case was inspiring copycats, the answer was "no proof yet." Sadly, one data set cited by those experts counts around 450 children a year in this country dying from maltreatment by their mothers. To know whether anything changed, you'd have to compare against that baseline, and nobody has done that yet. Part of what we're seeing may just be that we're paying closer attention now.

But contagion is real. Researchers have documented it for decades. It's called the Werther effect: after heavily publicized suicides, suicide rates go up. At least one study of mass shootings has found evidence of similar clustering, and researchers think media coverage may play a part. That's why there are guidelines for how journalists should cover these things. TikTok doesn't follow those guidelines. It just feeds you more of whatever you stopped scrolling on.

So my concern isn't "TikTok causes murders." It's this: we're pouring the worst moments of the worst days of hurting people into millions of phones, all day long, with no brakes. Some of the people watching are already in a dark place. That should worry all of us. And if you're a new mom, or you're married to one, and something feels off, talk to someone. Postpartum depression and psychosis are real and treatable. Call or text 988, or the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-852-6262.

What I'm Doing About It

Scripture says to guard your heart, because everything flows from it. For a long time I let a few companies in California decide what went into mine every day. I'm taking that job back.

If you've thought about doing the same, try one week. Delete it all and see what you notice. Then text me and tell me how it went.

— Preston

Sources

  1. McDaniel & Radesky (2018), "Technoference: Parent Distraction With Technology and Associations With Child Behavior Problems," Child Development. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5681450/
  2. McDaniel & Radesky (2018), "Technoference: Longitudinal Associations between Parent Technology Use, Parenting Stress, and Child Behavior Problems," Pediatric Research. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6185759/
  3. McDaniel (2024), "Parent social media use and gaming on mobile phones, technoference in family time, and parenting stress," Psychology of Popular Media. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12199167/
  4. Pew Research Center (2020), "Parenting Children in the Age of Screens." https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/07/28/parenting-children-in-the-age-of-screens/
  5. Brady et al. (2021), "How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks," Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641
  6. U.S. Surgeon General (2023), "Social Media and Youth Mental Health" advisory. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html
  7. The Guardian (Aug 24, 2026), "Social media goes into overdrive with Lindsay Clancy conspiracy theories." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/24/lindsay-clancy-trial-social-media-conspiracy-theories
  8. CT Post, "Is Lindsay Clancy's case inspiring copycat killings? Experts say there's no proof yet." https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/lindsay-clancy-copycat-killings-experts-22494912.php
  9. Reuters (Sept 4, 2026), "Lindsay Clancy trial over killing her children ends in mistrial." https://www.reuters.com/world/us/deadlocked-jury-lindsay-clancys-murder-trial-deliberate-seventh-day-2026-09-04/
  10. AP News (Sept 2026), "Mother charged with killing toddler in Chicago suburb was following Lindsay Clancy trial." https://apnews.com/article/lindsay-clancy-mother-chicago-crime-toddler-postpartum-9225ac546831157348ddcfd4706e5008
  11. WFAA (Oct 2026), "Northlake woman arrested after husband, 2 young children stabbed." https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/crime/northlake-woman-arrested-after-husband-2-young-children-stabbed-police-say/287-7abea843-c593-4678-adc0-d2cc46757110
  12. Phillips (1974), "The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect," American Sociological Review. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2094294
  13. Towers et al. (2015), "Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings," PLOS ONE. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259