Unplugging Your Kids
Scrap the screens, save their souls - and their lives
The below is adapted from a talk I used to give, in the before-times. It was about the unprecedented mental health crisis facing teens in our country — before Covid. Gut-wrenching as the mental health realities discussed below are, now everything is so much worse. We were faced with a generation of children falling apart under the ravages of a new, overpowering, soul-crushing form of loneliness, and then we… shut down their schools and sports and social gatherings for over a year. We’ll never fully be able to undo the harm done, but the recommendations below are now more urgent than ever. No more excuses. No more justifications. This is a life or death issue. You must take action against your child’s social media usage and take all steps humanly possible to increase their real life social interaction.
The below takes its sweet time getting to the point. For a handout with tips/takeaways, scroll to the bottom, it’s there.
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? A few years ago, unlikely. These days, though, if that tree is an influencer with a respectable tiktok following, well, pretty soon your kid’s whole school will look something like this:
This has all happened before. 500 years ago, the Reformation changed the world, and it could never have happened without the help of new media. On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s church. But how much noise can one hammer make? As John Man has written, the Reformation did not sound like the bang of Luther’s hammer, it sounded like the clang of a printing press. Those 95 theses were printed far and wide, so that, within a year, Luther’s message had spread from one church door to the whole known world. The rest, as they say, is history.
When Johannes Gutenberg was born, every single book in Europe – all meticulously hand-copied, and belonging exclusively to the wealthiest of the wealthy – could handily fit in your living room. Ten years after Gutenberg’s death, there were millions and millions of printed books, in millions and millions of homes.
Some inventions we control; others control us. Gutenberg had no intention of ushering in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, hundreds of years of bloody religious wars, and all the other dramatic highs and lows of the modern era. He just wanted to create a printing press. But once he did, the whole world changed.
If you ever wanted to know what it felt like to live through such a historical cataclysm, well, you’re in luck. Social media is out there, it may be in our palms but it is out of our hands, and we can no more tame it, or control it, than Gutenberg could have prevented the Reformation or the Scientific Revolution. Once the pages start getting printed, there’s no turning them back.
In this piece, I will address the rise of social media, look at its effects on the minds of our children, and give some tips about ways to best approach social media use.
I will try my best to arm you with practical advice about social media and kids. But, to be honest, I can’t promise you that this won’t all end in more bloody religious wars.
When discussing social media, or any media, remember that it is not just the content of our communication that matters, but the context. Very often, the content is determined by the context. For example, picture a world that communicates via smoke signals. You can use smoke signals to tell the neighboring village that the enemy is approaching, maybe that’s two big puffs of smoke. But you cannot use smoke signals to outline the major pros and cons of existentialist philosophy, or to tell a fairy tale. There isn’t enough smoke in the world to do that, and there isn’t enough information in the smoke; there isn’t the right kind of information in the context of smoke to generate that kind of content. What you communicate, what you teach, what you think, depend upon and are limited by the media you use. As the great Canadian Marshal McLuhan put it, the medium is the message. Being a decidedly ungreat Canadian, McLuhan is way over my head, so let me reference instead the fantastic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.
Postman highlights the Abraham Lincoln – Stephen A. Douglas debates from the 1850s. At one such debate, Douglas took the stage to give his side of the argument – for 3 hours. Once he finished, it was Lincoln’s turn to address the audience – for another 3 hours. Finally, Douglas retook the stage to give an hour long rebuttal. The audience, by the way, was packed, and by all accounts listened raptly to all 7 or so hours of speechifying.
Today, well, we’ve come a long way from Lincoln. Even if one of the candidates wants to explain something in detail, the moderators cut her off after 1 minute. That’s it. You’ve got 60 seconds. We have gone from 3 hours to 1 minute.
What happened? Simply put, television happened. For people in Lincoln’s day, there were no screens. Most books didn’t even have pictures. The written word was everything, and there was a ton of it; they read and wrote books and pamphlets and federalist papers and constitutions all day long. Lincoln and Douglas can talk in paragraphs – sophisticated paragraphs, with complex grammar and ideas – because the audience thought in paragraphs, because they all read in paragraphs. That was all there was to do. Fast forward to the age of a TV in every home, and people aren’t thinking in print form anymore. That hefty Dickens tome gets put aside – Ed Sullivan is on. If people read at all, it’s slimmer books, or glossy color photo magazines. The discourse shifts – it has to shift – from the complexity and long attention span of print, to the superficiality of televised entertainment. Try launching into a Lincoln Douglas style answer in a debate in the TV age and the channel gets changed; we quite simply no longer possess the habits of mind to participate in that print world any more.
That’s just one example of what people mean when they say the medium is the message. Guttenberg’s printing press made more sustained, reasoned, deeper discussions possible. And people, who a few generations before could not read, soon became so attached to words that they would kill each other over disputes in the close textual analysis of a few Biblical sentences.
The rise of television destroyed a highly literate era. And now, the age of TV is dying, and we are entering a new age, one that will be dominated by a form of media that in many ways makes your typical episode of Friends look like a doctoral dissertation. I don’t know what will happen, but I do know we are in for some major changes.
Which brings me to iGen. What is iGen? Well, that’s the name of the up and coming generation, those born in the mid-90s and after, as renowned psychologist Jean Twenge dubs them in her invaluable book iGen. What sets them apart from prior generations? This is the first generation to grow up with cell phones, the first generation that cannot remember a time before the internet. Did you have a cell phone in high school? Middle school? I didn’t have one ‘til college, and it certainly wasn’t a smartphone. For iGen, it’s all smartphones, and they’ve always been around.
We’ve all heard the stereotypes about the different generations. The boomers dropped acid at Woodstock and then sold out and became yuppies and presidents. Generation X, so detached and ironic. Millennials like me, eating avocado toast and living in our parents’ basements.
Dr. Twenge has been researching generational differences her whole career. She uses surveys that have been given to teenagers going back decades, to the 60s and before, some to the 1930s. These yearly surveys have collected info on the daily lives, ideas, and outlooks of over 11 million young Americans over the years. They’re a great way to get a sense of generational differences, because you’re not asking older people to reminisce about what things were like back in the day, you’re asking direct questions to high schoolers in 1982, comparing them to the answers given by high schoolers 20 years before and 25 years after, and so on.
The answers can be plotted on graphs, and you can see change over time. When you look at those trend lines over the decades for a variety of answers, they might go up or down just a little bit. That little bit is typically enough to demarcate generations. Like avocado toast eating – maybe it fluctuates very slightly for a few decades, then there’s a tiny little blip upwards, and there you have it, there are the millennials. All these generational stereotypes that we know about, in data form, they’re just tiny little hills and valleys on the curve. Tiny statistical changes, but with big enough consequences in real life that we all notice them.
What’s so special about iGen? Well, looking at the data, Twenge saw something she had never seen before – there were no gentle slopes, no little statistical hills and valleys. There were Mt. Everests and Grand Canyons. For just about every trendline, starting in 2012, there were startlingly sharp changes. And this wasn’t a weird one year blip – the changes kept growing and growing in the ensuing years. In other words, the behaviors and emotions of teenagers were undergoing unprecedented changes, reaching all time lows and all time highs. Simply put, statistically speaking, iGen isn’t just a new generation, they’re a new species.
A few examples:
- Going out with friends, without parents around. You know, like hanging out at the mall, a staple of every 80s movie. The graph held steady for decades and decades – then, in 2012, ravine. By 2014, high school seniors were far less likely to go out than 8th graders were in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s.
- What was the marker of independence, of freedom, of adulthood, when you were growing up? For just about all American teens, until a few years ago, it was driving. Getting your license. Life is a highway, right? Who didn’t want to get their driver’s license? Well, iGen doesn’t. Again, decades of a fairly straight line – and then another ravine. For decades, nearly every single high school senior in America had their driver’s license – then in this decade the rate suddenly plummeted, almost 1 in 3 seniors does not.
- If you don’t have a car, and you don’t go out without your parents, can you guess what else you’re not doing? 10th graders today go out on fewer dates than 8th graders did in the 90s. Half as many seniors have ever gone out on a date compared to boomers and Gen X-ers. Half.
- Similar unprecedented drop-offs are found in the percent of teens who spend time at home without adults present, and in the percent of teens who have jobs.
- Some of the drop offs might seem like a very good thing indeed. There have been similarly dramatic declines in the number of teens having sex, drinking, and running away from home.
Now, 20-30 years ago, if you told parents you could come up with a way to get their kids to drink less, have less sex, spend less time hanging at the mall, and run away less, the parents would have been ecstatic. But be careful what you wish for…
You see, not every trend has gone down. Others have gone dramatically straight up. And these are all the markers and symptoms of mental illness. Anxiety and depression rates – sudden straight up peaks, again taking off right around 2012. The percentage of teens who feel lonely – straight up. As you may expect from those numbers, and most tragically of all, the teen suicide rate – straight up – to the highest it’s ever been. Going up by 10 percent a year the past 4-5 years, never gone up anywhere near that quickly before, ever.
So what on earth is going on with this iGen generation?
As Twenge explains it, they are growing up more slowly than any generation ever. You know that saying, kids grow up fast? These ones grow up slow. Some parents, looking at the drop in drinking and sex, might be tempted to think, wow, these young kids are more responsible, more wise. That’s not it, though, because it’s not just the sex and the drinking that have gone down, it’s the driving, the working, the staying home alone, the going outside without parents. These kids aren’t better behaved, they’re just… younger. 18 year olds today have the outlooks and life experiences that 14 year olds used to have in the 90s and before. Today’s 14 year olds are like yesterday’s 10 year olds. If Hollywood remade Home Alone today, instead of cute little young Macaulay Culkin, the hero would be played by, well, Macaulay Culkin.
So, if teens these days aren’t working jobs, and aren’t drinking, what on earth are they spending all their time doing? Some might think the answer is homework, or extracurriculars, but it’s not. The time spent on extracurriculars has stayed steady across the generations, while homework time has slightly decreased. They’re not spending more time reading books – that has plummeted. Nobody reads newspapers and magazines anymore. Oh, and they’re not sleeping more – they’re actually sleeping a lot less – sleep deprivation is another steep cliff on the graph. No, they are spending all their time on their phones.
iGen spends an average of 2.25 hours a day just texting, another 2 hours a day on the internet, 1.5 hours a day on electronic gaming, and about half an hour a day on video chatting. That’s 6 hours a day with new media, and that doesn’t include time spent on screens for schoolwork and homework. Nearly all – nearly all – of iGen’s leisure time is spent with new media. The small gap that isn’t, about an hour or two a day, is spent on TV.
Teens are getting more depressed and more anxious than ever before, and teens are spending all their time on social media, so obviously social media is what is driving iGen crazy, right? In a word, yes. For one thing, those sudden dramatic peaks and valleys on the iGen curves do not clearly correlate with any other reasonable explanation. For another, the survey data seems unmistakable. As Twenge puts it, “teens who spend more time on screens are more likely to be depressed, and those who spend more time on non-screen activities are less likely to be depressed.”
That factor – the time on non-screen activities – is key. That’s where the heart of the debate lies – does social media directly cause mental illness, or is it the absence of non-screen activities that does? Remember, we are made to be social – not online social, but in-person social. That’s why we have faces and voices instead of emoticons and antennae. And iGen kids are dramatically less likely to spend time with other human beings, face to face, voice to voice. It’s not just dating. They spend much less time with any friends in person than any previous generation did. Social media friendship has effectively replaced real life friendship.
Think of your own life, and your own youth. Think back to the most vivid memories you have – whether at a big dance, or a party, or a first kiss, or a fist fight. Were you alone? iGen is alone all the time.
Crucially, on Twenge’s surveys, all screen activities are linked to less happiness, while all non-screen activities are linked to more happiness. All non-screen activities are also linked to less loneliness, and all screen activities to more loneliness. Social media simply is not social: teens who spend a lot of time with their friends in person are half as likely to feel lonely as teens who spend that time ‘connecting’ with friends online.
Academic studies aside, it’s important to remember that social media also has significant downsides, unrelated to the question of mental health. Of these, I would argue the most significant is the spread of pornography. With the rise of social media, there has been an explosion of incredibly violent, graphic pornography online, including child pornography, and our authorities are all but powerless to stop it. The average age of first exposure to pornography is 11 years old. Eleven! So, when weighing all the other pros and cons of a smartphone, and when to get one for your kid, ask yourself: do I think my child is old enough to emerge unscathed from watching hardcore pornography? Because giving them that phone means they will – not probably, but certainly – see it.
Another oft-overlooked downside is the end of quiet contemplation. There’s value in being alone with your thoughts. If Moses’ nose had been buried in his smartphone, he wouldn’t have noticed a forest fire, let alone a single burning bush. There’s priceless value in being quiet and prayerful and listening to the voice of God. With smartphones, you never have to be contemplative, ever – there is always another text or post to read, another video to watch. It’s no surprise that iGen is not just the least traditionally religious, but also the least overall spiritual generation ever, by far. You can’t look heavenwards when you’re always looking down at your phone.
So, with all that said, what are some tips and strategies to get your kids off social media, and to limit their risk of mental health problems? Here are a few ideas – I’ve got 8 tips for you, so bear with me:
1. Limit screen time. The best research we have right now suggests that the risk of unhappiness starts to increase for every hour after the first hour of screen time daily, and the risk of suicide starts to increase after the second hour of screen time. For every hour beyond that, the risks get worse and worse. And remember, the average is 6 hours a day of new media screen time daily, including over 2 hours of just texting alone. Limit all that time to an hour, or two at the absolute most, and the risks seem to dissipate.
2. Related to limiting screen time: create phone free zones. For example, have rules that there are no screens in the bedroom or the backseat, and they are allowed in the living room only as long as the daily time limit permits (as discussed in tip 1).
One absolutely necessary phone free zone you have to enforce: the bedroom at night. The use of smartphones is proven to worsen sleep deprivation, because it’s just harder to fall asleep after you’ve been on your phone. Sleep deprivation is a leading risk factor for mental health struggles. There is absolutely zero reason to allow your kid to have their phone in the bedroom overnight, it can only go bad and harm their sleep, it can’t go good. That should be a firm rule. Buy them an alarm clock, take that phone away. Sleep is as essential as it gets.
3. Be aware of what your kids are looking at and talk with them about it. Pretend it’s 20 years ago, before the iPhone. Your teen daughter comes home from the library with a few books she’s just checked out: The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Maybe everything is all right, maybe it’s for a school project on mental illness, but it’s still worth a conversation to make sure things are going ok for her. Same thing with the internet – is she spending her time on some pro-anorexia forum, or looking up cool pinterest haircut ideas? Talk to her and find out.
Along those lines, convince yourself that, in the social media realm, the risks of privacy far, far outweigh the benefits. There are so many other ways to show your kids that you trust them and can rely on their maturity and judgment. Letting them spend time online unmonitored is not one of them. Imagine a long hallway with a bunch of doors. Behind one door is some harmless fun, behind another is some useful information. But the next door houses Jeffrey Epstein, the next one Harvey Weinstein, the next one Larry Flynt, the next one Jeffrey Dahmer. No parent on earth, no matter how hip, no matter how laissez-faire, would let their child, or anyone they loved, walk down that hallway alone. The risk is just too great, the possible benefit far too small. In practical terms, this means have one computer your child is allowed to get on at home, and have it in a highly visible location, in the living room or the kitchen or something, so that they don’t have to walk down that hallway alone.
4. Increase real life human interaction. If you’re a doctor dealing with a severely depressed person, it’s not enough just to take away their shoelaces and sharp knives, though that might delay the actual suicide. You have to get them the treatment that will actually help them feel better and recover. Remember, it’s not just that teens who spend more time on social media are less happy, it’s that teens who spend more time with their friends in person are happier. All non-screen activities decrease your risk of loneliness and unhappiness. The strongest of these effects comes from hanging out with friends in person, but there are also significant effects from playing sports, going to religious services, reading books, and working a job. Do you have a kid who’s really into video games? Here’s a tip: only let them play video games if at least one friend comes over to play the game with them in person. You can frame it not as a restriction or limit, but as a reward – if you behave well this week, then on the weekend, you and your friends can come over and have a gaming party! As long as they’re together, in person. Even better: make them take breaks to go run errands for you outside. Get these kids talking to and looking at each other, instead of just at their screens. Remember why so many kids are drawn to social media in the first place: because, thanks in large part to overprotective parents, the chances for real life human interaction have vanished. I know it’s hard and scary to let your 17 year old go drive with friends to a party or something like that. But keep reminding yourself that while teens may be physically safer in their bedrooms on their phones, their mental health is at far greater risk. Things you can try as parents: make them get their driver’s license, make them get a job, relax curfew, let them go out and stay out with friends (without smartphones!). Whatever it is, even if it’s wasting time hanging out with friends, it’s better than being online – don’t think of it as wasting time, think of it as a valuable investment in their social skills and mental health. Are you worried about reaching them, or keeping in touch with them, in case there’s an emergency? Buy them a dumb phone. With an old fashioned flip phone, they can still call anytime, they just can’t get online.
Shelter them from screens, but don’t shelter them from too much else. Remember, they’re growing up much more slowly than ever. No wonder so many of them leave home, arrive at college, find they’re expected to live independently like adults, and have nervous breakdowns. Imagine if you were sent into the adult world when you were 13, you’d have a breakdown, too. They used to make movies about it, remember?
So stop coddling your children offline, stop hovering and overprotecting them, and let them grow – it’s for their own good. There’s a fantastic book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that goes into detail about this. Here are a few of the tips from the authors on how to prepare the child for the road, instead of paving the road for the child:
a. Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting bumps and bruises.
b. Encourage your kids to walk or bike to and from school.
c. Send your kids to overnight summer camps in the woods, without screens.
d. Help your kids find other kids in the neighborhood they can play with, without adult supervision. Kids desperately need and benefit from free play – not organized, uniformed soccer leagues – and all the research shows that they develop more resilience and maturity in unsupervised kid-only groups than in playdates or other adult-organized activities.
e. Assume your kids are more capable this month than they were last month, and each month, ask them what new task they think they’re up for – walking to the store, making their own breakfast, starting up a business – and let them try and do it, without jumping in to help. Let them learn from their mistakes. That’s how they’ll grow.
5. Use social media to subvert social media. That is, join the growing populist anti-screen movement! Search out and use resources in concert with other concerned parents. Two fantastic resources are the Let Grow website, at LetGrow.org, and the Challenge Success site, at Challengesuccess.org. Both are chock full of tips, resources, action plans, and local community building tools to help foster resilience in kids and reduce screen dependence.
6. Get engaged politically. While unfortunately the social media companies have huge lobbying money and influence, there are signs that some politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are starting to fight back. Get your representatives on board with the fight.
7. Educate yourselves and your children about media. Understand its techniques, how it works, how it influences you. That is incredibly important. Imagine you’re a German or a Russian in the 1930s, surrounded by propaganda posters. If you know nothing about propaganda and how it works, how it manipulates, you’ll end up believing all its lies about the Jews or the kulaks. But had you been educated about the nature of propaganda, chances are better you’d recognize the manipulation for what it is. As Postman puts it, “only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.” When the novel first arrived on the scene, lots of parents were just as worried about it as parents today are about social media. It would fill young people’s heads with ridiculous ideas, with trivialities, with dangerous emotions. But the truly great novelists were able to turn that fear into a teachable moment. Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey, showed how reading too many gothic novels could make an overactive imagination see intrigues where there were none and make you look very silly indeed; Henry James, in The Portrait of a Lady, similarly depicted how one’s sheltered novel-reading habit could lead to pain and tragedy when it encounters harsh reality. Society later had similar fears about movies, and again it was some great, self aware movies that helped educate people about the dangers of mistaking your daily life for a Hollywood production. Read books like these with your kids, watch movies like these, and talk about them, get your kids to be aware of the effects of media on their lives. Read Amusing Ourselves to Death with your kids, it’s super short and easy and full of lots of neat things to discuss. Read iGen with them, it’s got some great interviews with teenagers in there, talk to your kids about whether the profiles remind them of themselves or their friends. There’s a fantastic book out called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business school professor. It shows in great detail how these social media companies collect all our information, know so many things about us it would make your hair curl, and use that info not only to get more money out of us, but even to control our behavior and our thoughts. If you take away nothing else from this talk, take away this: if you have a kid, they should hear every day, until they know it by heart and are sick of it, the following: “if you are on social media, you are not the consumer. You are the product. You are not the consumer, you are the product.” Get them to learn it and understand it. Knowledge about the new media is the only vaccine against it.
Similarly, don’t let yourselves be coopted by the softer side of social media. Remember, in Silicon Valley, the makers of all this stuff don’t let their own kids use it, and they enroll them in non-wired schools – they know how dangerous it is, they design it that way.
Now, this will be controversial, and goodness knows many of my patients’ parents disagree with me on this, but I will stand by it: for those educators and parents looking to compromise, or get with the times, and incorporate some screen time activities: there is no such thing as educational social media games. I don’t care if the app is made by Baby Einstein, it’s not educational. Just like, you can boo if you want, Sesame Street is not educational. Yeah, I went there. We’re so used to thinking of it that way, it’s hard to unthink it, but let me make an analogy. Imagine an ‘educational’ version of Instagram. An Instagram type app where you learn the alphabet. Instead of following celebrities or influencers, you follow letters, and each letter posts some picture every few hours of something starting with that letter. And ta-da, you’re learning the alphabet – Instagram as education! Maybe this exists already, it certainly sounds plausible. And yes, you can learn the alphabet from Instagram, from a TV show, or from a book. But in each case, you’re not really learning the alphabet. With the book, you are learning how to get information from the page, how to interact with the printed word. It will prepare you for a lifetime of literary pursuits. With the TV show, you are learning how to sit and watch and consume entertainment, learning the grammar, if you will, of show business. It will prepare you for a lifetime of TV watching. With Instagram, you are learning how to navigate social media, how to follow things and like things and swipe up and so forth. It will prepare you for a lifetime hooked to your phone. In either case, at the end of the day, you do know your ABCs – but what you’ve learned, that’s something completely different, indeed. The Trojan Horse wasn’t just a big statue, people!
8. Finally, the most important, and the most difficult, advice I can give: be a role model. There is one trait that does not change among youth, no matter what generation they come from – they all have a super sensitive, hyper acute hypocrisy detector.
Parents who use screens, have children who use screens. No matter how right your opinion, no matter how logical your reasoning, if you are a chain smoker it’s so much harder to convince your kid that cigarettes are dangerous. Ditto screens. So whatever limits you’re putting on your kids, apply them to yourself as well; hold each other accountable. Put down the screens as a family, it will be good for all of you.
Ok, that’s enough of your time, I’m sure y’all are already pining for the pithy days of Honest Abe. Thank you so much for your time and attention, and good luck.
Summary of key takeaways in handout form below:
Unplugging Your Kids
1 Peter 5:8: “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
Luke 17:2: “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble”
Isaiah 44:20: “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”
Tips Discussed:
1. Limit screen time to 1 hour a day
2. Create phone free zones. Especially the bedroom.
3. Throw screen privacy out the window. Be aware of what your kids are looking at.
4. Increase real life human interaction. Shelter them from screens, but not much else.
5. Use social media to subvert social media
6. Get engaged politically.
7. Educate yourselves and your kids about media.
8. Be a role model
Resources discussed:
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
iGen, Jean Twenge
The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff
LetGrow.org
ChallengeSuccess.org
As usual, you have made great points. Read it to the littles and they were convinced to limit tv. Thanks for being such a caring doctor (and husband, father, brother, and son-in-law).
Another thoughtful, insightful post. Thank you, Dr Gaty