Susie and Kyle talk with Anna about phone usage
This afternoon Susie and I met with Anna at Starbucks to talk about her phone restrictions. The discussion between her and Susie gets heated very quickly. Susie reacts with Anna's comments of frustration, defiance, and defeat with more intenstity and it causes Anna to shut down even more. At one point Susie asked me if she was reacting in an angry way and I said her body language was pretty intense. She seemed to take it OK and tried to regulate her words more after that.
I tried to initiate conversation and it seemed like Susie was waiting for me to get the conversation going. I asked something about how her time with Morgan was but my mind was racing and it was actually pretty hard to stay focused on what she was saying because I had my own agenda of where I knew the conversation needed to be going. We got to that point eventually and were really able to talk about the phone restrictions, about how we are proud of Anna and don'te want her to see this as a lack of trust, but as how we want to limit her use to foster healthy mental development. She seemed to get the most emotional about feeling embarrased in front of her friends when she doesn't have access to a web browser on her phone but would like to use it to search the web or whatever. We tried our best to communicate to her that the issue is not lack of trust but mental development and emotional well-being.
In the end we, or maybe I, decided to give her 30 minutes of Snap Chat each day. She wasn't satisfied with that but in the end she was glad to have even that amount of time on Snap Chat, because before she had no time.
I suggested that we meet again in a month to continue to work on communication between us so hopefully at least in the next 2 to 3 months we can meet again.
I know this is a burden on Susie and it is going to demand more time for her to lock and unlock Anna's phone usage, but hopefully Anna is respectful about it and will not be rude if she gets disatisfied about the phone restrictions.
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