Hang Ups
Youth smartphone addiction is bad. We can fight it without supporting censorship or belittling kids.
Hey friends! I’m back from a family road trip through some of Utah’s national parks.
I always try to log off during vacations, but it’s hard when your phone serves as your camera, your GPS, and your connection to a thousand competing digital discourses. It’s uncomfortably easy to glance at your phone for the weather forecast and find yourself scrolling through Kate Middleton conspiracy theories 15 minutes later.
While I was out, much of the online parenting community also debated the role of smartphones in children’s lives. The bipartisan consensus: there is too much phone. But the precise causes and hazards of smartphone overuse remain murky—and malleable in a political arena where bad-faith actors regularly weaponize concerns about kids’ internet access in order to advance censorious agendas.
Some of the past week’s smartphone discourse is due to a promotional push for social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
In an excerpt from his book in the Atlantic, Haidt argues persuasively that international declines in youth mental health, academic performance, and time spent with peers correlate with the widespread adoption of smartphones in the early 2010s. Kids have begun spending less time engaged in IRL play with friends, and more time ingesting short, context-free hits of digital content, undermining young attention spans and relationship formations, Haidt writes.
I haven’t engaged with the data to the extent that Haidt has, but this reads as anecdotally correct to me. My gut-level suspicions about kids and phones have led me to similar concerns as Haidt’s, manifesting in a no-screentime policy for my young kids (ask me again how that policy’s holding up when my kids are school-age).
Teachers have drawn similar correlations. In a Slate article published a few days before Haidt’s excerpt, a high school teacher describes phones as a constant intrusion in learning.
“Educators are worried too,” teacher Liz Shulman writes. “An EdWeek Research Center poll revealed that 88 percent of us see a deterioration in students’ classroom behavior—their ability to focus, their executive skills, their heightened anxiety and depression, and an escalation in violent behavior—when they have increased screen time.”
Shulman describes parents as enabling children’s in-class screentime, surveilling their kids through laptops or checking in with them via frequent midday texts. This inability for parents to disconnect strikes me as part of a broader environment of smartphone-induced anxiety, in which children’s habits are only the most visible (and the most easily policed). In a new Pew poll last week, nearly half of teenage respondents said their parents were sometimes distracted by their own phones during conversations. (Fewer parents agreed this was the case.)
Haidt, too, describes overprotective parents steering children into more digital lives, which adults view as safer and easier to surveil than the physical world. I don’t disagree. But here Haidt is also playing some of the hits from his 2018 stealth-conservative book The Coddling of the American Mind, which blamed college-age angst on effete liberal fragility, rather than the material challenges facing young people in the mid 2010s.
In his Atlantic excerpt, Haidt builds on his previous warnings about “trigger warnings,” now attributing Gen Z’s supposed sensitivity to a binary, phone-induced mental flip from “discover mode” to “defend mode.”
“This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014,” he writes of phone-based childhoods. “Students began requesting ‘safe spaces’ and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to ‘microaggressions’ and sometimes claimed that words were ‘violence.’ These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense.”
This is all a little pop-psych but let me engage with it as a critic and as someone who was, in 2014, an undergraduate at New York University, where Haidt teaches. I don’t recall having once encountered the conservative depiction of a designated campus “safe space,” but I and other classmates experienced genuine sexual violence as students, if that counts for anything. I share some of Haidt’s distaste for the term “microaggressions,” but likely for different reasons—I think it’s an over-academic term that often downplays outright aggressions grounded in structural inequality. (Which “words were ‘violence,’” by the way? Let’s hear specifics before mocking students for oversensitivity.)
In fact, I rarely hear liberals invoke “safe spaces” or “microaggressions” anymore. Like “critical race theory” to a more open strain of conservative, the terms are often more useful as right-wing bogeymen than as left-wing social justice tools, discrediting legitimate efforts to address injustice.
Haidt’s reference to safe spaces isn’t a tangent to his argument about smartphones. Regardless of Haidt’s intent, this line of thought is part of the way the right deploys evidence-based suspicion of smartphones in the service of reactionary policies.
In a mostly positive review of The Anxious Generation for the Guardian, Sophie McBain notes that some of Haidt’s previous concerns about liberal censorship in The Coddling of the American Mind proved to be political misfires. “In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans,” McBain writes.
Book-banners, no doubt, would agree with Haidt that liberal-coded safe spaces are no good. It’s an easy jump from Haidt’s speculation that phones are producing fragile, lefty college students, to the more pointed (and fairly popular) right-wing argument that apps like TikTok are making young people gay or transgender (and that being gay or transgender is bad). Indeed, a review of The Anxious Generation on the right-wing site the Federalist has already used Haidt’s book to suggest a correlation between smartphone use and gender dysphoria.
Lawmakers have also hinted at anti-LGBTQ+ ambitions when promoting bills to address children’s internet access. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, co-sponsor of the Kids Online Safety Act bill, appeared to link the bill to anti-transgender sentiment during an interview last year. When asked about her legislative priorities, Blackburn answered “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture and that influence, and I would add too, watching what’s happening on social media. I’ve got the Kids Online Safety Act that I think we’re going to end up getting through.” She went on to say that children are being “indoctrinated” online and “inundated” with an unnamed ideology.
Civil liberties groups have warned that KOSA would allow right-wing states to censor LGBTQ+ content as obscene (a charge Blackburn and other sponsors refute).
When we worry about children and smartphones, we need to be honest about what we’re trying to prevent. Is it a childhood robbed of free play, of outdoor time, of healthy boredom and healthy unsupervised activity? Or does some of the smartphone panic also conceal an anxiety about young people accessing information unsupervised, of learning about injustice and asking (yes sometimes in cringey fashion) for older people to acknowledge newfound boundaries?
In an essay reflecting on Haidt’s book, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg opines that “the internet is wasteland,” so adults have a responsibility to create better, real-world spaces in which kids can play unsupervised. “[W]e need a lot more places — parks, food courts, movie theaters, even video arcades — where kids can interact in person,” she writes.
I would add one more beat to this argument. Kids also deserve spaces of free inquiry in which they can learn and explore ideologically without fear of book bans, parental scrutiny, or bigotry. Ideally we would all log off. But let’s be honest—are any of us going to do that?