In a lengthy statement shared on Instagram, actress Drew Barrymore is getting “vulnerable” and putting herself “out there as a parent.”
As Barrymore began her statement she talked about her own childhood. How she didn’t have any “guardrails” and what that led to.
“I had too much access and excess, and eventually, ‘no’ actually became a challenge. I would not accept it because I had so much autonomy at a young age that I simply couldn’t accept authority of any kind, and I ended up in an institution for two years. It was a blessing,” Barrymore explained.
“A hard-core style of a reset. It made me appreciate everything. And since there isn’t a time machine to go back and redo anything, I will keep loving my journey,” Barrymore continued.
But with that journey comes lessons, lessons she carries with her as she parents her own young daughters who are now 12 and 10 years old.
Barrymore admits she often “wonders if my life’s experience was a butterfly net to capture the understanding of what young girls need. Is it my karma? I know now that I have never wanted to be more protective of kids in general.”
As Barrymore continued, she admitted that the access she had at such a young age was “unorthodox” and while she doesn’t regret the life she has been given, the mom admits she “never thought in my wildest dreams that kids would be in my boat of too much excess and access.”
“Although I was able to see and get anything, there were still regulated rules,” Barrymore explained. But with the internet these days, those obvious lines are blurred today.
“I was around plenty of hedonistic scenarios at parties and even in my own home where the viewing was of highly sensitive natures and caused me tremendous shame,’ Barrymore explained. “We, as kids, are not meant to see these images. And, yes, I was even a big exhibitionist when I was young due to these environments I was in.”
“I thought of it as art, and I still do not judge it. But when I did a chaste artistic moment in Playboy in my early 20s, I thought it would be a magazine that was unlikely to resurface because it was paper. I never knew there would be an internet. I didn’t know so many things.”
Now, following the life she’s lived, the TV host wants to pay it forward.
“Which leads me to my kids,” Barrymore writes. “Now that I am a mother, I cannot believe I am in a world that I know correlates to my own personal pitfalls and many of my peers who got into too much, too soon. Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much. Kids are supposed to be protected. Kids are supposed to hear NO.”
“But we are living in an à la carte system as caretakers, in a modern, fast-moving world where tiny little computers are in every adult’s hands, modeling that it is OK to be attached to a device that is a portal to literally everything. How did we get here,” Barrymore asks.
“I have wanted to create a coalition in the model of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), where they knew they could not get alcohol off the streets but could lessen fatalities,” she continued. “I have waited to speak out, because in doing research in my own home, school with my daughters’ friends and families, there is nowhere to turn that has guardrails against tech. Our smart TVs can get you to YouTube and TikTok. Our school and many others are on technological platforms that you need the internet to engage with. My kids’ friends come over with their smartphones.”
“And so, I found myself researching dumb phones. And I see an opportunity. A device you make that all us parents who want to come together on and work with schools and design something that has so many of the amazing aspects of artistic and inspiring innovations without the pitfalls of social media.”
“Remember my childhood? How are we allowing kids to just have this much access? For brains that are not fully developed? And group texts? These texts can get so toxic, and we must protect our children from being put in scenarios where they cannot always control the rhetoric of the multiple-party dynamics that get put on record on a cloud only to potentially haunt them one day,” Barrymore writes.
“I messed up in public when I was 13, and people were shocked. I was on the cover of the National Enquirer and every other magazine as a washed-up tragedy.” But as Barrymore continued, it was the grace and forgiveness she’s received that has led her to extend that same grace and forgiveness to others.
And while she understands not everyone is expected to live life the same way, Barrymore says she goes “home to the most compelling thing that occupies all of my heart and soul, which is, ‘How do I protect my kids?’ I don’t know the ages they should be to be allowed on social media. I realize I have my own baggage from my own life experiences with this. Or is it an asset? Am I more equipped to be asking these questions for my family because I know things? Can our painful and powerful life experiences lead us to strengths? I hope so. And with all my might, I put myself out there once again. This time for kids. And this won’t be perfect. But it’s a start.”
Barrymore has worked with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy “on how to move forward in different ways. And with the announcement about warning labels on social media he created, that’s a start, too. I am so proud and humbled to reach out on behalf of all moms who see their kids doing something that we know isn’t good for them.”
Through her own research, Barrymore says she’s come “to the conclusion simply that I am not ready either to allow my kids to have a ‘phone.’”
“I am going to become the parent I needed. The adult I needed. And I want to have the voices in my head saying, ‘I’m trying … I’m trying.’ Because that’s all we can do. Try to figure this all out, for ourselves and those we are designated to take care of.”
“Maybe the kids will become the model of balance and take ownership in knowing they are doing something powerful,” she continued. “If only they had that ideal device. Good Apple, anyone?”
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