Don’t Send Your Kids to Mars

As I Was Saying is a forum for a variety of perspectives to foster faith-related conversations among our readers with the goal of mutual learning, even in disagreement. Apart from articles written by editorial staff, these perspectives do not necessarily reflect the views of The Banner.

I love my daughter, but I’m a mediocre parent.

Despite having only one child, I don’t make especially healthy meals and am inconsistent about discipline. When my daughter asks me to play dragon or wolf, I prefer to hide in my den.

Being a mediocre parent, I pick my battles. Trying to model the values of faith and the covenant community is No. 1. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation helped me identify No. 2: technology. He also gave me a specific set of rules to follow as a parent around it: no smartphone till at least 14, and no social media till at least 16. This is already a challenging battle to wage with my 10-year-old, whose friends got social media at eight, but given the importance, I’m set on winning.

Haidt starts with a fun and striking analogy, describing the companies selling social media to young people as offering them tickets to Mars, comparing the distance that it places between parents and children to physical distance and the risks present on social media to physical risks:

The company behind the project is racing to stake its claim to Mars before any rival company. Its leaders don’t seem to know anything about child development and don’t seem to care about children’s safety. Worse still: The company did not require proof of parental permission. As long as a child checks a box stating she has obtained parental permission, she can blast off to Mars.

Because the numbers are probably familiar to most readers, I’ll just summarize them briefly here. People who graduated high school after 2014 (who got social media as pre-teens) are less interested in life than their peers a few years older. Their rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide—all symptoms of hopelessness—are double the rates of the previous generation. As Haidt makes clear, this shift occurred before the pandemic.

After sharing the numbers in convincing detail, he states the simple cause. The problems in mental health among young people stem from the “phone-based childhood.” Kids getting access to social media and smartphones too young causes four “fundamental harms” that prevent their normal development: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. The extensive experimental data shows these harms caused directly by the phone-based childhood are the definitive cause of (not just a contributing factor to) this mental health decline.

A social psychologist, Haidt describes how the brain rewires itself during the early teen years. Teens learn what to pay attention to, how to measure their self-worth, and how to get along with others. If you’re a parent of one, it might seem impossible that they’re learning anything. But several experienced local youth pastors have assured me that even if they’re wrestling and horsing around during the youth group message, they are always listening.

By constantly interrupting them with notifications, phones teach them that little glowing boxes are the most important thing to pay attention to. In addition, social media teaches teens that appearing perfect online and achieving fame are the ways to measure self-worth. When they spend all their time on screens, they miss out on the period when they should be learning to get along with others.

Further, there appears to be no benefit to early adoption of smartphones and social media. Those who first adopt those technologies as adults are just as able to make careers that leverage them as those who started early, and in fact late adopters carry the advantage that they never lost their ability to focus.

Finally, Haidt offers a concrete recommendation that is clearly suggested by the data. The strongest negative effects of smartphones occur before age 14, and the negative effects of social media before age 16. So while you can give your kid a dumb phone or smartwatch (visit waituntil8th.org/devices for a list), it’s best to wait till at least 14 to give them a smartphone and at least 16 to let them use social media.

If this seems like an impossible fight to win with your kids (whose friends will likely get smartphones much earlier) Haidt offers four suggestions:

1. Make the rules clear early, before their friends have started getting devices.
2. Repeat the phrase “in our family we do things differently” over and over.
3. Be a good example for your kids, and make rules that the whole family follows.
4. Give in on other things, particularly things that happened IRL (in real life) as opposed to on screens.

As a mediocre parent, I appreciated that fourth rule. Other parents sometimes make me feel like I should be more careful about how far I let my 10-year-old daughter roam in our neighborhood, how far I let her take the kayak from shore, and other physical limitations. According to Haidt, however, while kids need protection from screens, at the same time they need to try irresponsible things in the physical world (especially with other kids) to learn their own boundaries and how to resolve interpersonal conflicts in person. We should give our kids more physical freedom and more rules around screens.

My own experience trying to follow rule number three has been illuminating. It’s eerie how often my phone turns up in my hand without my knowing how it got there. Being aware of it made me guilty at first, but over time that awareness has improved my own habits.

Overall, I found the argument that the “phone-based childhood” causes youth hopelessness compelling. My daughter is well aware at this point that she won’t get a smartphone until at least age 14 and social media until at least 16, even though the kids across the street already have them.

Hebrews 12:2 says, “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Faith is attention, in a very real sense. If my daughter is to have hope of learning to focus her attention on Christ she’ll need the ability to focus her attention at all.

Together, these two issues are the battles I’ve chosen to fight.