Like hot-wiring cars, walking away from giant explosions and having The Sex without awkward elbow incidents, buying burner phones looks way easier in the movies.

When I ask the nice dude in Phone Shop One if he can please sell me a burner phone, he looks at me like I'm Walter White.

"Don't worry," I reassure him. "It's my daughter who's breaking bad. The burner phone's for her, not for me."

Can't imagine why he asks me to please move along.

My daughter's devices are her mainline to all her friends. Confiscating them is sentencing her to a tech version of solitary confinement.

But I need to impound her iPhone for a week as a punishment for Serious Tween Violations.

My modern parenting dilemma is how to do this in such a way that I'm still able to contact her and she's still able to contact me in case of emergencies.

This is the reason I'm attempting to buy her a "punishment phone".

'She's going to hate you'

Several phone shops later, I try a different tack.

After the mandatory queuing (the standard staff-to-customer ratio in bricks-and-mortar phone shops breaches all the Geneva Conventions), I smile widely and try to act normal.

"Good day, fine sir!" I say in what accidentally turns out to be a British accent. "I'll take the cheapest, crappiest phone you have, thanks!"

Acting normal really isn't my forte.

Talking very slowly and loudly, he shows me phones with text sizes you could see from space.

"THIS PARTICULAR MODEL IS VERY POPULAR WITH OUR SENIORS," he shouts. "THE PANIC BUTTON WILL STILL WORK EVEN IF YOU DROP IT LOTS."

I check out the phone. It's $100 and it has a touch screen.

"This has way too much functionality," I say. "What I need is a dysfunctional phone. Something along the lines of a brick with an alphabet. You got anything like that?"

Nice dude does not.

By the time I reach Phone Shop Six, I decide to come clean.

"Look," I say to the latest nice dude. "I need a punishment phone for my 12-year-old daughter. She's been really slack on the whole room-tidying and homework-ing front and I want to replace her smartphone with a dumb phone. Not for long. Just a week or so. Just long enough for it to hurt a bit."

Nice dude thinks hard.

"So, you want something that can make calls but not much else?"

"Yes."

"Something without Instagram."

"Exactly."

"And she's been using a smartphone for how long?"

"Since she started using her fingers to try to enlarge photos in doctor's surgery magazines. But to keep things simple, let's just say since the moment of conception."

Nice dude shakes his head.

"She's going to hate you."

"Unfortunately that boat's already sailed. She's 12. Hating me is already her full-time job and her side hustle."

Nice dude straightens his nice tie.

"I think I have what you need," he says in a low voice — like we really are engaged in drug trade. "Excuse me while I go down to the basement."

Deprivation from social media is the tween version of solitary confinement. ( ABC News: Elise Pianegonda )

A mortifying find

He returns with the ugliest phone I've ever seen.

Its display is anaemic. Its buttons are so stiff they need finger biceps. It's $19. It's perfect.

When I get home and give it to my daughter in exchange for her iEverythings, she looks like she's going to burst into tears.

Especially mortifying are the great big stickers with the phone numbers of important relatives plastered all over it (because #nocontactslist and #whoevenknowsanyonesnumberanymore?).

I suddenly feel awful.

"I'm really sorry, lil dude," I tell her. "I hate this. I really do. But also I'm really sick of having to wear a hazard suit when entering your room and let's not even start on the whole eating-uncooked-instant-noodles-straight-from-the-packet-in bed business."

The small human pulls herself together and nods.

"You're right, Mum," she says, sounding like a much larger and wiser human. "While this does feel like the absolute worst, I do need to stop letting social media rule my life. And ultimately I'm sure we can both agree that this is still very much a hashtag firstworldpunishment."

It did not go to plan

After her first day at high school with the punishment phone, my daughter returns home outrageously chipper.

In less than 24 hours, she's managed to extract every square inch of functionality from the thing. Photos and videos with pixels so huge they look like Lego. A ring tone with an actual song. An analog-ish music playlist.

She's even managed to tune its FM radio to five different stations despite not really knowing what a radio even is/was.

"The burner phone's a huge hit with my friends," she says. "Everyone wants to see it. It's so bad it's, you know, good."

She holds the phone to her ear and pretends to dial.

"Good day, fine sir!" she says in a thick British accent. "I'd like to purchase some of your finest drugs using the cool new burner phone my mother bought to teach me about responsible behaviour."

I try not to laugh and fail. A lot.

Resilience and irony

The TL;DR version? It's really hard to find a dumb phone these days but, once you do, your child will really suffer — at least for an hour or so until the kitsch value kicks in.

Also: kids today are a weird kind of magnificent.

Resilient. Tech-savvy. And OMG their irony game.

Later, looking for something in the cupboard, I find an empty muesli bar box full of chocolate wrappers, tissues, and something that may or may not have once been a cheese sandwich.

I should be cross but right now I don't care.

Right now I love my small human so much it hurts.

Emma Jane is a freelance writer and a senior lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW.