One admirable thing about the movement of UK mums is that they take up this matter of power with admirable stoutness and directness. Sure, they indulge in a little safetyism in their online manifesto — but less than I would have expected. Perhaps because they’re parents and want to resist what phones will do to the inner workings of their families, their articulation of “The Problem” is surprisingly political — concerned as much with unfashionable matters of will, freedom, and personhood as it is with the familiar issues of anxiety and depression.
The manifesto begins with not a predictable warning about mental health (that’s the second heading) but with the obvious (and yet still quibbled-about with brain-dead reference to “moral panic”) point that “Smartphones are Highly Addictive”. It points out that “[t]ech companies spend millions on making apps and devices intentionally addictive”. For anyone who has spent time researching the cognitive-science end of the technology business (companies such as “Dopamine Labs” and other the Stanford-trained practitioners of “behavioural design”), or for anyone who’s read Natasha Dow Schull’s Addiction By Design, it’s clear that the tech industry has a dark vein of misanthropy running through it. The fact that this force of hating people informs the design of products that children use for hours a day should justify a constant, contrary state of disgust and alarm among parents, whatever the latest studies tell us about depression. Other headings in the mum’s manifesto include “Smartphones Reduce Attention Spans” and “Smartphones Rob Children of Their Childhood”. These points express a basic parental concern about what kind of life their children should live, and what kind of person their children should be.
My wife Juliet and I had these thoughts in mind when we held off on getting our daughters phones until the end of their American middle school years. At this point they were both 14, the only kids their age they knew who didn’t have phones. During those last phone-free years, their avid reading was beginning to grow in sophistication. They had lived in their Harry Potter worlds in earlier grades, but as middle-schoolers, along with the gripping kid-with-cancer romances that make up today’s YA canon, they were diving into longer, more difficult fiction, serious, award-winning novels written for adults. Then, after we gave them the phones they’d long been clamouring for, their recreational reading of books basically ended.
“After we gave them the phones they’d long been clamouring for, their recreational reading of books basically ended.”
We are considered techno-puritans in our world. I’ve been theoretically suspicious and personally cranky about technology for many years, and Juliet, who has always been indifferent to tech gadgets and averse to the consumer worship of them, is a strong, steadfast anti-tech influence on our daughters. She has far more emotional stamina and far deeper tolerance for parent-daughter conflict than I do (but, as a school counselor, she’s an expert at making her points about technology without hectoring). When we gather our daughters’ phones at 10pm every weeknight, we assume we’re just practicing what everyone already knows about kids and phones and sleep. But when we let on to other parents that we do this, they are often astounded. Literally no one else does this.
And yet our anti-tech vigilance isn’t nearly enough. There’s always a reason for them to be tethered to phone and laptop until the very last minute. This points to tech’s power in the home, the no-win dilemmas it introduces into the job of raising kids. Household regimes of tech-rationing that keep devices turned off for designated hours are hit with constant exceptions and requests for exceptions. These make for a stream of irritating negotiations in the short run that, in the long run, undermine those regimes altogether. But a more ad hoc approach — “Okay, everyone, there’s too much dumb scrolling going on! Hand over your phones for the next two hours!” — is simply an invitation for open confict. You want a calm respite from compulsive behaviour, but you end up with two hours of argument and resentment.
In other words, when kids’ social worlds are completely mediated by smartphones, and when their phone behaviour has grown as compulsive as its designers mean it to be, imposing tech limits within individual households is a volatile, unpleasant, generally futile business. The blunt, no-defiance, “authoritarian” parenting style I was raised by would be much better suited to our domestic tech challenge than the “authoritative” parenting we’re obliged to use. We calm, reasoning parents are no match for the barrage of facile but exhausting complaints and counterarguments generated by the tech-teenager nexus.
This household dilemma has an analogue in the study of children’s tech use. On his blog, the Yale psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has a helpful discussion of the difficulties scientists face in measuring the effects of tech use on the mental health of children and teenagers. In many cases, scientists have simply surveyed kids on how much time they spend online and then sought connections between time spent online and mental health outcomes, or compared kids who are offline, for whatever reason, with the much larger number who are online. Even when such studies show some negative effects, Haidt argues, these effects are probably understated. This is because offline and low-use kids are still living in a world where everyone they know is constantly, cognitively hooked up to a smartphone. So these offline kids are experiencing the cohort effects of whatever is passing among their online friends and acquaintances, plus the isolation effects of losing this one crucial and nearly universal means of socialising, plus, if their tech use is habitual, some substantial short-term hit to their well-being from having this habitual behaviour interrupted. It’s not surprising that studying the harms of tech use in this way would show weak effects at the individual level.
This analytical problem points us back towards a practical problem, what, in a discussion of the specific risks of social media for girls, Haidt calls “a trap — a collective action problem”. “Each girl might be worse off quitting Instagram even though all girls would be better off if everyone quit.” Both studying the problem and doing something about it are thus hobbled by the powerful network effects that digital technology generates, how it turns itself into an entire ecosystem seemingly all at once, entangling us in practical and social imperatives we didn’t choose and can’t opt out of without substantial cost. (I just took my son to a professional basketball game, for which our “tickets” were active bar codes I needed my iPhone to display. As the ticket service informed me, “Your phone is your ticket.” When I fantasise about ditching my iPhone, I have to consider things like that.)
Daisy Greenwell’s understanding of her problem as a parent seems trenchant in this light. It was in her initial Instagram post that she made the bleak observation, ”[W]e all know this is a bad decision for our kids.” But we make this decision anyway. Why? Because the network effects of digital technology throw us into a collective-action problem. Do you want a no-phone son who misses all the online texting and planning and gaming his friends are doing, as my 13-year-old son is presently missing those things? Do you want a no-Instagram and -TikTok daughter who misses out on the meme-culture that all her friends consume and inhabit, as my daughters did for several years? If not, you better make the bad decision, get your kid that phone that, once it takes up residence in your home, you know you’re going to hate.
And, in this light, her practical response to her dilemma as an individual parent is also wise: start localised movements, where parents can tackle the collective-action problem together, on workable scales. As Jonathan Haidt suggests, achieving phone-freedom on these scales is likely to be both healthy and clarifying, to yield better-adjusted kids and a better understanding of the cohort-level changes in happiness and habit we owe to smartphones. These will be natural tests of something that, so far, has been both hard to escape and hard to study. My only criticism is that, so far, Greenwell and her fellow mums seem shy about extending this experiment to older kids, teenagers who might really benefit from a cohort-level break from smartphones.
As it happens, Juliet was witness to a natural experiment like this recently, when she chaperoned a 10-day high school science trip on which the students were forbidden from bringing their phones (and from which one student was sent home for sneaking his phone in his bag). These kids, aged 15 to 18, slept in small cabins without TVs and so were forced to entertain themselves and each other with conversation, board games, and book-reading. As the trip began they were clearly uneasy without their phones, but they stopped itching for them after a few days, and, by the end of the trip, they were all expressing, unbidden, how much happier and calmer they were without their phones. They saw how life without phones differed from their lives as they lived them at home, naggingly networked into the collective action problem they know as teenage living. When, during their return trip, a massive storm stranded them in Los Angeles for two days, and all 11 of them had to cram into the house of one boy’s grandparents, they experienced this stressful detour as a collective adventure, with more board games, conversation, and, now, back in civilisation, horror movies they watched together. Many of these kids began this trip as strangers and ended it as friends. It takes almost nothing — for a parent of phone-age kids, especially — to imagine how different it would have been if they were holding phones in their hands the whole time.
Before I picked Juliet up from San Francisco International, she’d told me we’d be giving a ride to one student, the 16-year-old son of one of her colleagues. On the way back to Oakland this boy mentioned several times how happy everyone seemed on the trip, how easy it was to get to know each other under those conditions. At one point Juliet asked him if he was relieved to be going home to his own bedroom – after 10 days of doing fieldwork and sleeping in a cabin and being stranded in L.A.
“I’m actually kind of dreading it,” he said.
“Why?” Juliet asked.
He said – I swear to God he actually said — “Because that’s where my phone is.”
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