Jonathan Haidt on how smartphones have harmed children growing up with them
Haidt makes an excellent case that smartphones have harmed a generation and are working to harm the next one:
What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.
I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.
I believe another element in the acceleration of these problems were the lockdowns, and I would wager that the leftist indoctrination in many schools has had a role as role. But I have little doubt that phones are a very significant driver of the angst.
What is the remedy? The first step would be for parents to step up and delay the introduction of smart cell phones for their children, and should only allow them to have old-fashioned stupid cell phones that are limited to making phone calls. However, how many parents will actually do that? And there is also the reality that unless most parents refuse to get smart cell phones for their kids, some children will borrow the smartphones of others. In addition, people of any age can buy cell phones if they have the money; should the sale of smart cell phones, like cigarettes or liquor, be banned for those under eighteen?
Haidt’s article is long, but I highly recommend reading it. The discussion isn’t limited to smartphones and their affects, either; Haidt goes into many other aspects of modern child-rearing. Towards the end, he suggests some possible remedies, including this one that I think would be a good thing to try to implement:
Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children’s friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.
I’m glad I raised my own child in a pre-smartphone and more traditional age, but as a grandparent, I’m especially concerned about all of this.
Maybe forcing young adults into an “over eighteen” age bracket is part of the issue – in an ever advancing technological world.
Perhaps it is long past time to start considering the lowering of that age bracket to align more closely to what Mother Nature intended—puberty.
What has been the effect (affect?) on young adults maturing when natural maturing is stymied by mankind’s rules & laws?
Or we could limit smart phone and internet access and go back to free range children.
The latter would do more than anything else anyone has suggested, is my bet.
Once I hit 12yo, I was pretty much free to go anywhere (biking) within about 2-3 miles of home, easily, and further still as long as I checked in first. I was smart enough to stay off main highways as much as possible, but that was just sense.
My wife’s family was in a terrible head on collision with a logging truck when my wife was 14. She was given a special driver’s license when she was 15 because her mother took a couple of years to recover to point of being able to drive. Doubt they would have let her chop off any body parts though.
Silicon Valley folks are restricting their children’s access to tech, starting at the very top, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Even Snopes calls it true:
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Did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Other Tech Billionaire Parents Advocate Limiting Children’s Technology Use?
The philanthropist Melinda Gates told me the same. Her children don’t have smartphones and only use a computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill, the Microsoft co-founder, spends hours in his office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans technical devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg wants his daughters to read Dr Seuss books and play outside rather than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs’s children had strict limits on how much technology they used at home.
It’s astonishing if you think about it: the more money you make out of the tech industry, the more you appear to shield your family from its effects.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tech-billionaire-parents-limit/
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There’s something disgusting about this — like drug lords doing their best to addict other people’s children, while fiercely protecting their own.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves here by over-complicating the problem to the extent that everybody throws their hands up. If the technology exists to place all of this content at the disposal of children, then it follows that the technology is already in place to find the means to block it. It simply requires the exercise of will and purpose. So-called ‘stupid’ phones are already easily available, capable of simple texting and calls only. It would be a relatively unchallenging task to program an ‘app’ that could severely curtail access and capability of smart phones, as well. The problem is, there are also too many distractions in front of the adults, who find it challenging to find spare time to advocate for their children, and there are too many temptations in front of government to use the other side of these powerful tools to influence public sentiment in their own cynical favor.
In my view, it comes down to the parents. I knew kids in my youth that were allowed to run wild, because parents were distracted with their own drama. And I knew kids that were on a tight rein. It is no different today.
Government can never be relied upon to have our best interests at heart. This was one of the many lessons I made sure my own kids learned.
My daughter, with a PhD in speech and language pathology, has read all the studies about child development and screen time. She restricts her daughter’s TV time, and will not give her a smart phone until she’s out of high school, she says. We send toys that require our granddaughter to DO things, and we send books.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I partly think of smartphones as a new “technology” like alcohol, which people found highly attractive and addictive, and it took centuries to sort out (not that alcohol is entirely sorted out).
Those most recently exposed to alcohol, e.g. Native Americans, have experienced horrific damage.
I also think of heroin in the jazz community during the 50s/60s/70s. It took a while for heroin chic among jazz players to die down, but jazz players did figure it out.
We will figure out smartphones and social media, but that won’t reduce the terrible casualties in the meantime.
Teach your children well.
We send toys that require our granddaughter to DO things, and we send books.
Kate:
I love that!
My mother was kinda out of it for most of my childhood, but when I wanted to Do Something — painting, surfing, read the Great Books, build model airplanes, do astronomy in the backyard, go birdwatching on the Tomoka River — she backed me, within reasonable budgetary limits.
The problem is that many “parents” are either complicit or themselves captives of the “spirit of the age”.
Which would be the most polite way I can conjure up in order to describe the present generation of morally labile hedonic nihilist Hell-bound drones our intellectual culture has produced.
Of course such dispositions, partly choice partly predisposition, are nothing new in the history of humankind. It is just that it is relatively recently that the intellectual culture has, under the influence of thought leaders of the mid 19th century become openly nihilist.
As far as taxonomically human specimens go then, that go-along to get along impulse has probably always predominated: As in being “well socialized” as Dewey might have put it, and as one commenter has recently reminded us.
So, I know everybody is as sick of reading it as I am of writing it, but it is a question of one’s “philosophical” anthropology.
If the parents are quasi mindless herd animals looking for the path of least resistance, to fit in, to seek realization in all the keywords so incessantly harped on in our quotidian culture – inclusion, affirmation, acceptance – all the shallow kaffeeklatsch Oprah approved gimme access too values, then what can you expect?
Its really about the content on the shells which is trash before tiktok there was myspace there is the most misogynist and racists music
Anybody else remember an excellent book, ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television’? Written by an advertising exec, if I remember correctly, with the unlikely name of Jerry Mander. Copyright 1977.
Basically the same arguments apply to television as well. Both tend to stupidify.
David Sacks has actually read the TikTok bill, and summarizes what he believes to be the most significant points:
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1768453579013312662
As a new grandfather this is also concerning to me. I thought the private school that huxley mentioned was very interesting and I think that’s a big part of the solution. I think parents are going to have to opt out of public schools and try to find like-minded parents to form new community schools that teach practical skills.
Our current culture is toxic, particularly for young girls, and new parents are swimming against the tide. But I also think there are a lot of people out there that see the damage being done to their kids and are desperately looking for answers. I think this explains the popularity of Abigail Shriers new book.
David: Yes, I remember “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”!
As I recall, an early version was published by Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth fame) in his “CoEvolution Quarterly.”
Back in my hippie days we all despised television. Not, exactly, that we didn’t watch it. My main problem with tv was that I hated the commercials.
David Foster, thanks for the link on the TikTok bill.
We’re discussing two things on this thread — whether a social media app controlled by Communist China is a threat, and whether social media in general are bad. The bill addresses the first. As such, I think the bill is okay. According to the link, it says an app, to be forced to be sold to US operators or shut down if not sold, has to be controlled by a foreign adversary “AND” declared as a national security threat by the president. If it were “OR,” we’d have a problem of the type that some conservative sources are worried about.
I have young children – oldest ten, currently pregnant with #5 – and I am the only parent I know of in real life who limits screens like I do. My oldest is the exception to this – he’s from a previous marriage and his step-mother throws screens in front of his face every chance she gets at that house, and he is sent over with an Apple Watch and iPod every week. But they just sit on a shelf at my house.
Anyway, aside from him, none of my kids has a personal device. Screen time in our house is almost entirely television-based, and even then, I limit their options and limit the amount.
But I stick to these limits and still worry. I mean, even if my kids never rebel and grow up to be polite and well-mannered and know how to socialize with others…who are they meant to socialize with? All the social media addicted girls and p0rn addicted boys? All these peers who are chronically depressed, popping SSRIs like candy, and can’t function without a device in their hands? I’m doing my part to raise functional adults, but who else is?
And to reply to ObloodyHell – while I largely agree with you that free range parenting would do kids a lot of good, it’s harder and harder to be that kind of parent as we move further and further from a high-trust society, which is a completely other topic on its own.
No it isnt good not with this apparat
Social media and smartphones are as bad in our time as Elvis and Rock ‘n Roll was in the 50s. Tools of the Devil. The solution for both is, respectively, ballroom dancing and writing long letters in cursive script.
Sorry, I just can’t take this latest “the kids are NOT all right” jeremiad seriously.
To your point Aggie, my daughter didn’t have a smart phone until she was a junior in high school (they weren’t available) while my son had one by middle school. My daughter is much less concerned with online social life than my son. Of course, some of that may be due to their personality differences. Many of his friends in high school were very glued to their phones and disengaged from the world. Whereas my daughter and her friends were/are mostly in to it for the utility and always seemed engaged, more like us.
I always tell new parents to keep smart phones away from their kids until high school.
Do we need legislation to get parents to do the right thing?
NS, you’re doing the right thing. Keep the kids involved with sports and music or other things where a phone is useless.
another observation from the class room jungles, urban youth are entirely too familiar with the metropolitan correctional facility website,
About the, “anyone with money can buy a cellphone” comment. Doesn’t buying a cellphone involve signing a contract in order to get service? It’s my understanding that you have to be at least 18 to sign a contract. I don’t know how a child under 18 could get a cellphone and use it unless an adult gave them one.
If I’m wrong on this, please correct me.
As an aside, I really learn a lot on this website!
yes they will find money for the plan, to keep the shells operating,
Parental solidarity groups. This needs to be the New Social movement
The single-most important rule? No Smart phones before age 16. Then you can learn to drive!
Flip phones and Dumb phones are OK, earlier.
The problem is, IrishOtter49, that the kids really aren’t all right this time. See the article this post is about.
they were put in a skinner box for the better part of three years, I don’t think that happened with robinson crusoe,
There’s a range between kids who are always on their phone alone playing games or checking out social media, and kids who are always using their phones to connect with their friends. I wonder if they’re both affected in the same way by technology.
The Atlantic has another article about smart phones and kids here. Some of the effects — isolation, no dating or sex, no rush to drive — were common in bookish kids in earlier generation, but then, we had books and could build something out of that.
Huxley at 12:02 a.m.
Ironically, I now find some commercials more interesting than the programs.
the movie review by Drinker Mauler and stuff along with Ryan George’s pitch meetings better than most films,
A lot of this stuff is also accessible through a web browser, so unless parents are cutting off the internet itself, kids will still be able to access it.
Ann in L.A.:
There are ways to do it without cutting off the internet. See this, for example.
JFM:
Apparently they can. See also this.
Kate:
Maybe you’re right, maybe not. Either way I can’t get worked up about it. Either the kids will sort things out or they won’t. Just like everything else.
Since nearly nearly leaving this life I’m ever more inclined to indifference to a whole lot of things.
I’m Neo-first, thank you for the links. I think I’m not framing my point clearly enough. My question wasn’t about the phone itself, but the service to the phone. That was the contract I was asking about. The links all were aimed at the phone as property and whether parents can take it away or not. If the children can’t sign, legally, a service contract then the parents can just cancel the service. Yes, the phone can still be used to access the internet-in some places, but not all.
A car is a car, but without fuel it isn’t going anywhere.
JFM:
I think it’s pretty clear that they are somehow buying the service, or there would be no issue. I believe they can get a prepaid phone card, which is apparently not a contract.
Also – and I could be wrong about this – I believe you can get an unlocked phone and connect it to the internet off of WiFi without a phone contract. You wouldn’t be able to make or receive calls or texts, but you could access the internet.