Two books about kids and screens

Hello!

I usually have two books going: one paper and ink, one audio. Most of the time there’s no thematic relationship between the two. But every now and then a theme announces itself. This happened when I was reading Helen Phillip’s dystopian sci-fi novel, Hum, and listening to Jonathan Haidt’s dystopian nonfiction book, The Anxious Generation.

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues a point that I’ve been quietly making in my head for years: that we’ve sold an entire generation of children to the untested, unregulated manufacturers of distraction. For most of human history, children grew up playing with real objects and real people, which Haidt refers to as a “play-based childhood.” But since the advent of smart phones and social media, a critical mass of children—especially in the U.S.—have experienced a “phone-based childhood.” I don’t think I need to explain what this means.

My children are 13 and 16. They both got smartphones at age 13. At the time it felt (especially to my children) like we had waited longer than usual. I was proud of myself for choosing to make them wait until after their bar/bat mitzvah. Now it feels too soon. I haven’t finished listening to The Anxious Generation because the library hold expired. I will probably finish it at some point, but I also feel like I didn’t need to read this book to tell me the same thing that my bones have been screaming since 2007, when I noticed for the first time that everyone was staring at their phones. Of course this is wrong. Most parents I know live with a constant, soul-draining unease. It’s like a slow leak of the soul. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to hand a child over to a screen for hours at a time, and yet, and yet.

Haidt has his critics; you can read more about that here. But his basic argument is so intuitive that it’s hard not to agree with his conclusions even if you are well-versed enough in his methodology to find reasons to quibble. Putting aside the question of whether smartphones are inherently bad, I liked the parts in The Anxious Generation about how parenting changed back when phones had coiling cords and call-waiting. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, especially in Western countries, parents became afraid of letting their children roam