Jean Twenge’s three teenage daughters aren’t exactly Luddites, but they’ve put up with stricter technology rules than most of their friends have had to follow.

Julia, Twenge’s 13-year-old, has a Pinwheel — a “kid’s phone,” Julia calls it — with no internet and limited apps. And Kate, now 18, had a flip phone until she was 16½. Her friends were boggled by how long it took her to plunk out simple texts, but Kate says she learned skills her peers have never had to master. Like, how to find her way without GPS. Or how to have an actual phone conversation.

“I love talking on the phone!” said Kate, a college student and corpsman in the Navy Reserve. “If someone’s like, ‘Do you want to text?’ ‘No! Call me. I want to hear your voice.’”

Twenge, 54, is a psychologist and best-selling author who, in the past decade or so, has emerged as one of the research world’s loudest voices on what she sees as the obvious, incontrovertible risks of smartphones and social media for kids. And she practices what she preaches at home.

“Having concrete rules that are reasonably strict is usually the way to go,” Twenge said when I asked her to describe her parenting approach during a Zoom interview from her home in San Diego over the summer. “When stuff has gone wrong, it’s often because I’m like, ‘OK, just this one time.’ And then it blows up in my face.”

Chief among Twenge’s rules: No smartphone until you get your driver’s license. And no social media until you turn 16.