When we gave our 12-year-old a smartphone, it seemed like a normal decision.

Most of his friends already had one. We wanted to be able to reach him after school, when he was at practice, or when he was spending time with friends. We told ourselves it was mostly about safety.

At first, it was.

Then, little by little, the phone became something else.

It started coming to the dinner table. It was the first thing he looked at in the morning and the last thing he checked before going to sleep. A five-minute break somehow became 45 minutes of scrolling. When we asked him to put it away, a simple request could turn into an argument.

And that’s when I started wondering whether we had made a mistake.

The strange thing is that I don’t blame my child.

These devices are incredibly difficult for adults to put down. Why did we expect a 12-year-old to have better self-control than we do?

Social media made it even harder. There is always another video, another notification, another message, another reason to look at the screen.

Sometimes I watch kids sitting together and barely talking. Four or five friends can be in the same room, each looking at a different screen.

They’re together, but somehow they’re not really together.

This year, schools across America are becoming much stricter about phones. At first, I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. As a parent, I liked knowing that my child could contact me at any moment.

Now I’m beginning to understand why schools are doing it.

Maybe a classroom should be one of the few places left where children are expected to look up, pay attention, talk to each other, get bored, laugh, argue, think and simply be present.

I don’t think smartphones are evil. I use mine every day. They are useful, entertaining and sometimes necessary.

But I do think we handed an incredibly powerful piece of technology to children without fully understanding what it might change.

If I could make the decision again, I would probably wait.

Not forever.

Just a little longer.

Because children have the rest of their lives to stare at screens.

They only get one childhood.