The Hidden Digital Life Warning | Reflective Parent S2E3 — TextNow and What Parents Can't See

Transcript

Speaker 4 0:06

I'm Jason Denham, and 20 years ago, I started sitting with families in crisis, in therapeutic wilderness, in residential programs, foster homes, and eventually at my own table. What I kept seeing was the same thing over and over, good people doing their best, being pulled apart by forces they couldn't quite name. This show is called The Reflective Parent because the most powerful thing a parent can do isn't find the right consequence or the right program. As a matter of fact, I saw the tremendous strain separation put on the family dynamic. I'm here to help parents before they have to choose programming, build a solid foundation at home, first with the family table method, which was born, tried and tested in programs over 13 years before coming to families for the past seven. Let's learn to slow down long enough to actually see what's happening. Season two is called What It's Costing Us. We're going to look honestly at the things that promise to keep us safe and connected and ask a harder question, "What are they actually doing to us?" I'm glad you're here. Pull up a seat at the table

Speaker 1:20

Okay, so I wanna be clear about something, just like I said I'd be at the beginning of each episode of this season, to name what I see. That's the only way to do this work, y'all. If I sit on what I have witnessed because it might make someone c- uncomfortable, including the companies whose products I'm naming today, then I'm not worth much to you as a coach. So if I'm able to be a truth teller, here it is. I have been watching this unfold since 2007. Front lines, wilderness programs, residential programs, transitional living, family systems in crisis. I have seen what these tools do to kiddos and to the relationships between parents and their children up close for nearly 20 years. And I will... wanna be honest with you, I got a little obsessed. If you know anything about ADHD and how the brain works, you know that when I find a pattern that matters, we go all in, looking for every example, every data point, every solution we can find. That is what happened here. So what you're gonna hear today is not a theory. It, it's not a think piece. It's what I've seen and what research confirms And what I believe every parent deserves to know TextNow is a free app that gives anyone a real phone number for calling and texting without a phone plan, a SIM card, or a carrier contract. It works on any device with Wi-Fi. Over fifty million users. No age verification, no parental controls, no content moderation. It presents itself as a budget-friendly communication tool for families. Its actual function is to hand teenagers an invisible second phone like a second life, a phone life that parents cannot see, monitor, or access. So for the rest of us, that's like Google Voice and, and other apps like it. We think about using it in terms of business, in terms of, of like, I need this phone to be my, my personal phone that isn't going off at, at certain hours, and then I have a second phone But I don't have a second phone. So what if I could just use a number? Then I can set it so that I know what it's really for without even picking it up Just, then I'll know whether or not it's clients coming through. I have two businesses. So that way I can kind of spread it out and keep my personal life my personal life. There's always a positive intention, isn't there? Now, when we're young, we have nothing but time to explore. We've already seen this happen with social media. The kids are amazing at it because there were no high stakes with it. There, there was only play, and play is a wonderful teacher. Similarly, with this, they figured out how to, with their developing brains use it in ways that serves some of their insecurities. Teenagers are constantly thinking, "Where is everybody? What are they doing? Why am I not a part of it? Heck, why am I even a part of it?" Most of it is the comparison game. So is it any wonder that they're using it for different methods other than what these apps may have been originally intended for? So let me open with this scenario. Let's say you, the parent, you come to me. You've done everything right. You've checked your kiddo's phone. You've monitored the text messages, reviewed the phone bill. You feel like you have the visibility. And then one day, the-- you're discovering your fourteen-year-old has been having entire relationships, receiving explicit messages, and being contacted by strangers for months, all through an app that you've never s-heard of and that was running quietly on the tablet in the kiddo's bedroom. So that app is TextNow. Millions of people are using it Its surface promise is that TextNow markets itself as an affordable alternative to expensive phone plans. For parents on a budget, it sounds like a gift. Your kiddo gets a phone number, they can stay in touch with friends and family, no contract, no monthly bill, free. For teens, the promise is independence. Their own number, their own conversation, a sense of autonomy We all know that that's what they love. Most of the time, they don't know how to go about getting those things the right way. So for parents who set their kiddos up with it intentionally, the promise is practical. Stay connected without breaking the bank, okay? But the actual mechanics What TextNow actually does and what it does not do. It gives every user a random phone number. Anyone can contact that number, including strangers, including adults with bad intentions. If the number gets shared or exposed, more strangers can reach your kiddo directly. It has no age verification. The app says thirteen is the minimum, but there's nothing stopping a younger kiddo from signing up with a fake birthday. Kind of that way that these companies sort of are trying to help, but I don't know if there's-- if they're really being honest. So it has no parental controls whatsoever. Parents cannot see who their kiddo is talking to. They cannot see what messages are being sent or received. None of it shows up on a carrier bill because it runs over Wi-Fi, not through a phone carrier It has no content moderation, so explicit images, sexual messages, threats, and harassment can flow freely with no filtering Users can create new accounts and new numbers in minutes. If someone gets blocked, they can be back with a fresh number almost immediately. Blocking is not a real solution. Think about that in terms of, bullying.

Speaker 9 8:49

And here is the cruelest version of it. A kiddo gets harassed by someone using one of these numbers. They block. Three minutes later, same person, new number, harassment continues. Block, new number. Block, new number. the block button, which is the only tool a kid has ever been told to use, stops working. Now imagine being thirteen, fourteen years old and learning that the safety mechanism you have been promised is a fiction. Imagine the helplessness of that. Imagine trying to bring it to your parents and finding out the problem does not have a name in their world. Most kiddos do not even try. They go quiet. They start hiding the phone, and they start hiding themselves.

Speaker 12 9:37

I want you to picture this for a second. Your kiddo, eleven o'clock at night, in their room, lights off. The only light in the room is the screen on their face. Somebody is harassing them, somebody they don't know Somebody who comes back is a new number every time they get blocked. There is no door to close on this. There is no parent down the hall to call out to because they've already learned that telling you means losing the phone. And in their world, losing the phone means losing every friend they have. So they sit there with it by themselves, with somebody hurting them in real time. That is what the package of free communication is delivering when the wrong adult or the wrong peer gets a hold of it. That is what we are buying when we hand a teenager an app with no guardrails. That is the bedroom that some of your kiddos are sitting in right now.

Speaker 10:37

The messages live only inside TextNow app. A parent checking their kiddo's regular text messages or call log would see nothing. It's not even there. For teens, the draw is anonymity. They believe they can hide their activity from parents, and they are right. They can. They will. Teenagers are opportunists Here is what I am watching happen with these numbers. Kiddos who just went through a breakup are spinning up burner numbers on apps like TextNow to text their ex from. Sometimes they are spying. Sometimes they are pretending to be someone new. Sometimes they are catfishing their own ex to see what gets said about them when they are not in the room. This is not a small thing. This is a teenager living inside their own surveillance loop. Refreshing for evidence. Manufacturing tests. Sleeping with the phone face up in case something changes overnight. The anxiety this drives is constant. And the muscle memory it builds, the practice of monitoring instead of communicating, the habit of treating the people you love as suspects, that does not get unlearned. Your kiddo will walk into every future relationship carrying it. Teens should not have social media capable devices until 16 I'm gonna let that settle in Are you already feeling unnerved by this? Are you already upset? See, therapists that I've been working alongside of are now also sounding the same alarm that I did at the end of season one. Flat out telling families, "Keep smartphones away from teens until they are at minimum learning to drive." See, when we have the kiddos learning to drive, there's a system that's happening of talking, to them about how this screaming piece of metal hurling down the street is a responsibility because of the damage it can do, right? The rules for the road and how we do things safely when we move through traffic. I think social media should be the same. I think we should have a whole system that we're talking about, which is why I'm developing one, in the hopes that what we can do is, is put these side by side and create kind of an equal seriousness around it. I wanna say this too. I have been in the family dynamic, right in the milieu before with a client who finagled the password from his mother in front of me. That was actually the password his father set up. This was a family of divorce, two households. He w-- masterfully triangulated that He could have done it if it was a singular household as well. But you see, they're able to find the cracks, the crevices, and work this magic. And I had to, to say, "We gotta group up real quick because I'm, I'm witnessing something extremely dishonest happening right now." They have nothing but time, our kiddos, to figure out ways to get beyond what we're trying to build as safeguards So families where the parent believed they had visibility and had none. The discovery moment is devastating because it's not just about what the kiddo was doing, it's about the realization that the trust architecture was all an illusion. See, teenagers who learn that hidden communication is normal, that having a secret digital life is just what you do. The transparency with your family is something to be managed and avoided, not practiced. So kiddos who were contacted by predators through anonymous numbers, a documented case in Illinois where a 12-year-old received hundreds of sexually harassing and graphic messages. A case in North Carolina where a 16-year-old used TextNow to send anonymous threats to classmates. These are not edge cases. These are, are the predictable outcomes of a system with no guardrails It's, it's so I've worked with folks who've had their kiddos lured in by a predator, and they were just so devastatingly traumatized by that This is important that we lift the veil on a false sense of security, but we don't panic at the same time because the six seats have within them the first seat showing up imperfect and the second seat safety lives in the body. Knowing that we can slow down and we can make some choices that change the trajectory, that reduce the amount of risk The false sense of security parents carry. They think they're doing the monitoring work. They think th- they would know, and the gap between what they believe and what the actual happening is, is where the damage grows. So the erosion of the relationship itself. When a kiddo has a hidden communication channel and the parent does not know, the kiddo is practicing deception as a daily habit, and it's not nefarious, right? It's just, this is what you do. This is what my friends do. That shapes who they become in relationships. It teaches them that connection requires concealment. We know that's not true Honesty will out Some-- I'm working with parents who do everything they know how to do. Checking the phone, reviewing the bills, s-setting limits, and underneath all of that monitoring is a fear they can barely name. Not the fear that their kiddo is lying to them, the deeper fear that even if they found out, they wouldn't know what to do. The phone is not the problem. The problem is, the phone is a symptom of a relationship that has not built enough safety for the hard conversations. We have to have hard conversations, y'all A teen who trusts their parent does not need a hidden channel. A teen who is afraid of their parent's reaction does So it is incumbent upon us to make a safer space for those hard conversations I've sat with a family with a teenager who's already been involved in sextortion and had an inappropriate contact with a stranger before the parents had any idea anything was happening And the teen did not have TextNow, just a phone the parents thought was being monitored. The gap between what parents believe they can see and what is actually happening is where kiddos get hurt. By the time those families arrive in my work, the damage is done and the work is repair, not prevention. And hey, sometimes it's still prevention This episode is about prevention A parent I work with discovered her teenage daughter had been using TextNow specifically to stay in contact with someone she knew was not good for her Parents had no idea the channel existed. The kiddo knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it So TextNow follows the exact same pattern as every other episode in this series. Something presents itself as helpful. Free communication for families, budget-friendly connection. The actual function is the opposite. It creates an invisible wall between parents and kiddos. It gives anonymity to people who would exploit children, and the cost shows up at the dinner table, in families like yours every day. The package is a phone app. The product is disconnection. Because these businesses want as much of everyone's time as they can possibly get It doesn't make sense to just capture the family and do something that the family will do together because that's limited. When you can get every member of the family sequestered in a corner of the house away from everyone else, so they can just be there on these apps, finding ways to connect, even if those ways are harassment or breaking the rules We're tossing our moral compass right out the window So I wanna say this line to you too. The anonymity that makes the team feel safe is the same anonymity that makes a predator feel safe. It's the same feature serving opposite purposes When a kiddo learns to maintain a hidden communication life at thirteen, what do you think their relationships look like at twenty-three? So I'm not trying to paint text now as evil, but this is what happens when we build tools with no guardrails and hand them to people with developing brains. The question is not whether your kiddo can be trusted. The question is whether we have built an environment where trust can develop Even the phones designed for kids can be worked around by a motivated teenager. The device is never the answer. The relationship is the answer. What it didn't give them was connection So this week, I want you to sit with your kiddo and ask them a question. Not an interrogation, no spotlights. A real question. Ask them, "Is there anything happening in your digital life that you feel like you need to hide from me?" Before you ask it, ask yourself whether you have built a relationship where the honest answer is safe And I feel like that's the-- a conversation that could be so much bigger because if in fact your kiddo's saying, "I don't feel safe to come to you," the place is not defense about all the things that you did to create that safety. The reality is they still feel like that's not true Our place as the adults in the room is to question what led to that? Was it something I did, or was it something that they're experiencing on these platforms in echo chambers with their friends? If it's true and we treat it like it's true, then the relationship becomes, "What are we gonna do about it? How can I build a bridge to you?" What do you need from me, the parent, to create the safety That lets go of that secret digital life And if you're thinking now, not just digital, what about in our relationship in reality? Oh yeah, that too Thanks for hanging in The reflective piece of reflective parenting sometimes is really challenging. So thanks for being here I'll see you soon