Madonna says giving her children mobile phones ‘ended their relationship’

The singer says her children’s lives became dominated by the technology

Madonna said ‘I made a mistake when I gave my children phones when they were 13.’ 

Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Mdna Skin

It’s a daily bane of modern parenting that even Madonna appears to have got hung up on: how to keep a child’s attention once you give them a mobile phone.

Madonna has complained of losing a link to her children after giving them mobile phones at a relatively young age, to the extent that she has prevented her 13-year-old son from having one.

“I made a mistake when I gave my older children phones when they were 13,” said the mother of six, who has previously talked about feeling like “Billy-no-mates” while living in Lisbon in Portugal, where she said she spent most of her time doing the school run or driving her youngest son to football matches.

In an interview with Vogue magazine, she said: “It ended my relationship with [my children], really. Not completely, but it became a very, very big part of their lives. They became too inundated with imagery and started to compare themselves to other people, and that’s really bad for self-growth.”

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Her adopted son, David, has been deprived of a phone. She said he was most similar to her out of any of her children.

“He’s the one I have the most in common with. I feel like he gets me,” Madonna said of the teenager, who is part of the youth academy at Benfica football club in Lisbon.

She was somewhat more critical of her 22-year-old daughter, Lourdes; social media was an issue, she said.

“She doesn’t have the same drive [as me] – and again, I feel social media plagues her and makes her feel like: ‘People are going to give me things because I’m [Madonna’s] daughter.’ I try to give her examples of other children of celebrities who have to work through that ‘Oh yeah, you’re the daughter of … ’ and then eventually you are taken seriously for what you do.”

The singer, who turned 60 last year, also attacked ageism in the music industry, claiming people had tried to silence her in the past for reasons such as supposedly being “not pretty enough” or not talented enough.

“Now it’s that I’m not young enough,” she said.

Madonna, who was recently named the most successful solo artist in the 60-year history of the US Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, gave the interview to promote her new single, Medellín.

The song has been released as part of her latest reinvention under the alter ego of Madame X. That is also the title of her forthcoming 14th album, which follows a number of commercially underwhelming records.

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