One Classic Film Made Julia Roberts' Daughter Ditch Her Smartphone

File this under: an 80s classic just did what a million parental lectures couldn’t. Julia Roberts says a living-room screening of Rob Reiner’s 1986 coming-of-age drama Stand by Me led her daughter, Hazel Moder, to hand over her smartphone and walk away.

Roberts shared the story while promoting her new project, After the Hunt, and told The New York Times that when the movie ended, Hazel turned to her and basically said: take the phone. Her reasoning was simple and kind of devastating: if those boys had phones, they wouldn’t be talking to each other like that, they wouldn’t have gone off to find that body, and they wouldn’t be sitting around a fire actually telling stories. As far as anti-screen epiphanies go, that one’s hard to argue with.

How the Roberts-Moder house handles screens

Roberts also said she’s seen how screens can warp the rhythm at home, so she and her husband, Danny Moder, keep things structured.

• No phones at the dinner table. Conversation wins.
• Everyone parks their devices at a shared charging station instead of carrying them around the house.
• The goal, especially for kids, is more hands-on, outdoor time and fewer dopamine hits from an endless digital feed.

Her bigger point about kids and the internet firehose

Roberts is pretty blunt about what nonstop online input does to developing brains. She thinks the volume is simply too much for kids who are still wiring up their attention and curiosity, and that real-world messiness is the better fuel.

"Our brains are incapable of that influx. Our eyeballs, brains, all that is too much, especially for little, sweet, soft mushy brains, that need to be filled instead with mud and fields."

So yes, a 1986 movie about four kids on a grim little quest just convinced a modern kid to ditch her phone. Sometimes the low-tech solution hits hardest.