Are You Aiming For a Phone-Free Childhood?

To support independent feminist journalism, become a paid subscriber, starting at $5 a month, using the link below.

If this newsletter is meaningful to you, it would mean a lot if you would share it with someone who would enjoy it. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares make a big difference in making this newsletter sustainable. Thank you for reading, and for supporting our work!’

Photo by Andrew Guan on Unsplash

My group chats and text chains were lit up this week with reaction to yet another magazine article decrying the impacts of screens on kids.

You’ve likely read your own stories about this: Increased depression and social anxiety. Lower test scores. Inability to focus. More irritability. Poor job readiness.

“End the phone-based childhood now,” writes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s Stern School of Business.

The impacts on human development are just too great to ignore, he argues.

One of his key points is that the more time spent in front of screens, the more time kids don’t have much-needed opportunities for independent play.

(Haidt is the co-founder of an advocacy group, LetGrow, that provides resources for getting kids off phones and into more independent play).

Independent play is serious business, he writes.

“Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.”

(Now, I was a child who walked home from school and immediately sat down in front of Little House on the Prairie and Santa Barbara, so I’m not speaking from direct experience when I say that I tend to think it would be better to explore the world than cocoon with my phone).

But I was particularly bought into the part of the article that describes what kids lose out on when they are on screens, that is — the other benefits of real-world interaction:

They happen in real time and at the same time (not in fragmented “hits” or at any moment, 24-hours-a-day.)

They involve one-to-one contact (or one-to-a-few) interactions — as opposed to broadcasting to unknown audiences of unknown numbers.

And they are embodied: all of the reading of body language, the holding (or avoiding) of eye contact, so integral to my experience of how I relate to people, disappears when we’re just interacting on the phone.

Now, I know that not all screen-based activities are devoid of these qualities. And I can hear a chorus of voices arguing that these impacts are overblown or reflect a neurotypical bias: many kids just don’t relate socially in the ways that Haidt (and I) think are beneficial.

The gray areas — everything from the learning benefits of screen-based activities to the potential safety risks of not having phones (one parent I know argued for giving her child a phone so they could contact her in case they were in danger) — are meaningful areas to explore.

But what I am feeling most urgently right now is the need for collective action at a community level.

Parents I know have banded together for “Wait Until 8th” pledges: a community agreement in which parents collectively decide their kids won’t have phones until the 8th grade.

The beauty of community action around this is that it can help avoid the natural fear of being left out.

If you’re not the only one without a phone, you’re in a special kind of “in-group,” the argument goes.

And kids might well be ready to be released from the tyranny of their phones.

Haidt cites one study in which a majority of kids would be willing to be paid $50 to deactivate Instagram or TikTok for a month.

But then, the researchers told kids that they were also going to pay other kids in their school to get that same platform.

“They asked, ‘Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? ‘

The answer, on average, was less than zero.”

The short take: You wouldn’t even have to pay your kids to get off the apps, if they thought other kids also wouldn’t be there.

I’ll leave you with a few of the solutions I’ve gleaned from some smart friends, as well as those Haidt lays out in his piece.

1. At home, phones should be used in communal spaces — not alone in the bedroom.

2. Wait as long as possible. Haidt recommends waiting until kids are in high school to have a smart phone, and until they are 16 to be on any kind of social media.

3. At schools, advocate for phone-free classrooms. (Mixed results at my kid’s middle-school on this one, as kids have all kinds of ways to make it seem like their phone is hidden in a Yondr pouch.) So it’s hard to enforce, for sure, but a good start at opening a conversation with other adults around this issue.

So much easier said than done, all of this. I have found asking other families about their screen time policies as sensitive a topic as any other I can think of, equivalent to asking whether there are unlocked guns in the house.

So sensitive in fact, that I have to admit to not knowing the screen time use of some of my kid’s closest friends.

The risk of insulting someone by asking about their screen time rules is real.

But these days, the risk of not asking feels even greater.

---

MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and lives in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter works at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.