Drew Barrymore reflects on rebellious childhood after taking away daughter's phone
Drew Barrymore is opening up about her decision to take away her daughter's phone in a "vulnerable" message she shared as a parent.
In a lengthy note on Instagram post on Friday, the "Charlie's Angels" star first reflected on her rebellious childhood and the consequences she endured after having "too much access and excess" as a child.
"I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me no," she wrote. "I wanted so badly to rebel all the time, and it was because I had no guardrails."
She went on to share that she had "so much autonomy at a young age that I simply couldn't accept authority of any kind" and as a result she said she "ended up in an institution for two years."
"I now have two daughters, aged 10 and 12. And I wonder if my life's experience was a butterfly net to capture the understanding of what young girls need," she continued.
The daughter of late actor John Drew Barrymore, who shares two children Olive, 12 and Frankie, 10, with ex-husband Will Kopelman, began her career in film at a young age, starring in "E.T." at just 7 years old and in the sci-fi horror film "Firestarter" two years later in 1984.
She later went on to star in a number of other projects through her teens and early 20s.
Barrymore shared that she first gave a phone to Olive for her 11th birthday "only to be used on weekends and for a limited time with no social media."
"Within three months, I gathered the data of the texts and behavior. I was shocked by the results," she wrote. "Life depended on the phone. Happiness was embedded in it. Life source came from this mini digital box. Moods were dependent on the device."
She later said she printed out every single text onto paper and handed Olive "a stack of pages."
"They're permanent somewhere where we don't see it, so we don't believe in its retracebale and damning nature if we fail digitally to act with decency," she remembered telling Olive.
Before taking away the phone from Olive, Barrymore wrote she made sure Olive knew "she was a good person and that this was not punishment on her character."
Barrymore added she took the phone away "not because she [Olive] did anything wrong but because it was not time yet."
"I want to let parents know that we can live with our children's discomfort in having to wait. We can be vilified and know we are doing what we now know to be a safer, slower and scaffolded approach," she concluded the post. "I am going to become the parent I needed, the adult I needed."
