Smartphones Should Have a "Baby Mode"

My daughter has barged past my phone's lockscreen and must be stopped

One of many unhinged text messages my child has sent people I know.

My daughter is fascinated by my smartphone. I get it– so am I. It’s bright, it’s interactive, it makes noise sometimes. She can’t read or understand most things, so to her it’s just a cool toy that mom plays with a lot instead of a square containing information about more misery that most human beings throughout history could even fathom. 

She likes to pretend that she’s using it, and when she pretends, she does a baby impersonation of me. She frowns at the screen, moves her fingers around quickly, turns the device sideways, sighs dramatically. She holds it up to the side of her head and says “Hello?” barks nonsensical phrases and shakes her head and says “No, no, no. No.” It’s true. I do hate talking on the phone. This impersonation absolutely drags me to filth. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics says no screen time before age 2, but there are screens literally fucking everywhere in the world and toddlers excel at being annoying and sometimes in the heat of the whiny moment you’ll do anything to placate them. We are trying to be a screen-lite family but we’re also living in reality. The truth is I don’t have the infinite time and patience and attention to devote entirely to her 100% of the time, and sometimes the quickest way to stop her from whining and reaching for my phone is to hand her the phone with the screen locked and let her pretend to be me for 5 minutes. 

But despite the fact that I hand her the phone in locked mode only, she somehow has figured out how to mess with my settings and even get in touch with people. 

If you handed me a locked phone, I could not figure out how to do the things she’s done accidentally. This morning, she somehow made it so that my photos app and only my photos app was stuck in horizontal mode and there was no way to re-orient it, and also the photos were very, very tiny. She renewed my subscription to Headspace, a very good meditation app that I forgot I even had. She changed my preferred language in a podcast app that I don’t use to “Mandarin.” She has sent my husband and other frequent contacts some truly unhinged text messages.

It’s not all bad. Several weeks ago, when I took my locked phone back from her I saw that she’d called a woman named Anna who had been an editor at a publication where I once worked. I hadn’t spoken to Anna in years– no good reason, we had just fallen out of touch. I texted her an apology and an explanation–  that my baby had somehow commandeered my phone, also I had a baby now, also hello, also I hoped that she was doing well. It turned out that she’d moved to Los Angeles right before pandemic. We scheduled a time to get coffee and reconnect. It was great! Thanks, Juniper! 

But beyond the rare friendship revival, the possible bad outcomes of her changing the settings on my phone or randomly calling, say, an old boss who I happen to loathe now or some guy from Hinge I went out with once in July 2018 before promptly forgetting everything about him including his name. I don’t want her deleting important emails or signing me out of things. I don’t want her clicking on links in scammy text messages. 

I tried buying her a toy “cell phone” of her own, but she’s not easily fooled; she knows it’s not the real thing. In a pinch, she’ll hold it to the side of her head and say “HELLO?” and play with the buttons, but it is only a half measure. She will sometimes mess with the remote for LED tape lights without batteries, as it’s vaguely smartphone shaped, but that’s not as effective as the real thing, either. 

What I want is Baby Mode. 

That’s a specific way that a phone can be locked that makes a baby think they’re interacting with the phone– just like Mommy!-- while also making it more difficult to somehow circumvent the lockscreen. I want a locked mode where no apps can be opened at all, for any reason, without the owner of the phone completing a series of steps that would be difficult to do accidentally. All the baby will see when the phone is in baby mode is a series of nonsense images and icons that look vaguely like the things that are normally on mom’s phone, but that don’t actually do anything. Baby Mode would have a time limit– maybe it would expire after five minutes or something– to mitigate any safety concerns and encourage people not to just leave a $1000+ piece of equipment in the care of a toddler. 

If I can’t have “baby mode,” then I want a toy smartphone that actually looks like the real thing but doesn’t connect to anything and can’t contact anybody. If my “baby mode” phone is a success with infants, perhaps we can roll it out to a wider consumer base, like celebrities who can’t stop posting dumb shit and politicians who spout such hateful garbage that they’re going to get somebody killed. 

Angel investors, take note.