Drew Barrymore Gets Candid About Letting Her Daughters Experience Discomfort & How It Makes Her Feel ‘Vilified'

Letting our kids get hurt goes everything against our mama bear instincts. We want to protect them from the world and give them whatever their heart desires — especially if our own parents weren’t able to do the same for us. However, sometimes protecting your kids and giving them what they want clash, and we have to make hard decisions that our kids might not like. Drew Barrymore opened up about this in a candid new post, admitting that her daughters Olive, 12, and Frankie, 10, who she shares with ex Will Kopelman, sometimes make her feel “vilified” with her decisions.

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In a lengthy post on Instagram today, The Drew Barrymore Show host got vulnerable about her own experience with “too much access and excess” as a kid, referring to her public battle with addiction . “I wonder 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,” Barrymore wrote, adding that she “never thought in my wildest dreams that kids would be in my boat of too much excess and access.”

In this case, the 50 First Dates star isn’t talking about drugs or alcohol — she’s referring to the addiction of smart phones and social media. “Kids are not supposed to be exposed to this much,” she wrote. “Kids are supposed to be protected. Kids are supposed to hear NO. But we are living in an a 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.”

Barrymore admitted that she has “felt pressure” from her daughter Olive about getting a phone. “All her friends had one, the age-old phenomenon all parents face: the comparison argument. And so, on her 11 ^th birthday, she got a phone, only to be used on weekends and for a limited time with no social media,” she said. Barrymore looked at her daughter’s texts and behavior after three months and was “shocked by the results.” “Life depended on the phone,” she said. “Happiness was embedded in it. Life source came from this mini digital box. Moods were dependent on the device.”

“And so, missing the human I knew in my daughter and wanting to put a stop to these high-stakes emotions that were flying around, I printed out every single text onto paper. I handed her a stack of pages and said this is not a black void that these travel to. They’re permanent somewhere where we don’t see it, so we don’t believe in its retraceable and damning nature if we fail digitally to act with decently.” Barrymore said that she changed her mind about letting her kids have a phone and described how she “made sure” that her daughter knew she was not punishing her and this was not a flaw on her character; rather, it just wasn’t time for her to have her own phone yet.

After doing research and talking to experts, Barrymore felt like this was the right decision for her house, even though her daughter was unhappy. “I want to let parents know that we can live with our children’s discomfort in having to wait,” she said. “We can be vilified and know we are doing what we now know to be a safer, slower, and scaffolded approach.”

She describes her approach called “sacred observation,” where she will “visualize my kids angry with me, but I do not go back on my rules.” “Rather than trying to fix it for them, I can let my kids experience that discomfort and figure out how to cope and work through it.”

The comments were full of praise. Psychologist Dr. Tracy Dalgleish wrote, “My seven year old came crying to me last weekend. Others have a phone and she doesn’t. She knows our rules: no phones or social media until 16. I wish more parents were holding firm on these boundaries. But at the end of the day, it’s my job to hold space for my kids’ disappointment and upset feelings with me. Thank you for speaking out about this. ❤️❤️”

“Social media is the cigarettes of our time,” another person wrote. “My kids are 17 and 19 and I fear I did everything wrong bc during the pandemic we thought their phones were a lifeline since they were the primary access point to their friends, but it came with a huge cost and that’s obvious now. It’s so hard to know what to do. We do our best with the information we have at the time. 🤷🏻‍♀️”

Supernanny star and global parenting expert Jo Frost commented in part, “This time is about protecting our most vulnerable,our most innocent, so that they can enjoy their rite of passage, childhood. It will take empathetic leadership to instill policies that protect our children on devices and everything else in their life, it will take every person and resource that is involved family or simply in community to understand the task at hand so that it is becomes a common collaborative movement.”

“I love you so much Drew🥹 Thank you for sharing this, it is so important🥰🫶🙏” Paris Hilton commented.

Artist and author Jenna Rainey commented, “Yes Drew!! Get kids into hobbies again, exposed to art and music and jamming in the garage with friends, learning a new skill, developing interpersonal skills through real, physical world based friendships, self awareness and how to communicate what they’re going through with conversation rather than picking up the phone and disassociating once again…make the physical world more important than the digital world once again! In our own lives as adults do we can model it for our kids. We must find the way again.❤️”

In a Feb. 2024 interview with Us Weekly, the E.T. star opened up about parenting after her own childhood trauma. “[Motherhood is] so surreal [for me],” she said. “When I see one of my kids going through something that reminds me of something I went through, I just go straight to fear, and then I have to talk myself off the ledge and get proactive and empathetic and [focus on] discipline and boundaries and guidance.”

“I have no blueprint, a crazy track record, and there’s nothing I’ve ever wanted to get more right in my life,” she added. “But it isn’t a matter of right and wrong. It’s a matter of doing your best. Also doing a lot of work and research. The answer doesn’t just land in your lap. You’ve got to go out there and mine for it. Put on that headlamp and go figure it out.”

Before you go, check out these celebrities who have shared their technology rules for their kids.