Hazards of Smartphones for Kids

 

A recent Associated Press article describes how public schools are trying to counteract the maleficent influence of smartphones.  Simply banning them from the classroom isn't enough, it seems, because kids will become glued to their devices as soon as they get them back after school.  Reporter Carolyn Thompson says that in an effort to counter the smartphone plague, a school system in Maine coordinated a week of outdoor activities, including camping and cooking outdoors in May.  A Spokane, Washington school ran a program called "Engage IRL" (In Real Life) to give students an alternative to infinite scrolls and chatrooms.  And many other schools are trying to encourage extracurricular activities to displace the domination of smartphones in their students' lives.

 

The schools are right to see a problem.  But just banning smartphones in class and adding extracurricular activities here and there isn't going to solve it, according to Jonathan Haidt.

 

Haidt, a Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, has written The Anxious Generation, a book that everyone with children younger than college age should read. 

 

The advent of social media has caused a nearly universal sea change in the fundamentals of daily life for every child and teenager who has access to a smartphone.  There is no need to cite statistics on how much time a young person with a smartphone spends on it.  Just a circumspice (look around you) will show that unless some powerful outside force intervenes, kids will use literally every spare minute engaged in keeping up with social-media posts and rumors and all the other stuff that goes on in their personal cyberspace. 

 

Haidt marshals the most impressive set of statistics I've seen in any kind of social-science book in a long time to show that the advent of smartphones has not only been correlated with, but in most cases is the cause of, declines in all sorts of normal healthy stuff that kids used to do without prompting:  spending literal face time with other kids, playing outside, and learning how to be an adult by attaching oneself to an adult role model or two, getting a driver license, and finding a job.  On the active-harm side, incidences of anxiety, depression, visits to emergency rooms for psychological reasons, use of pornography, and suicide rates have all soared. 

 

I have described elsewhere in this space how the social-media companies have spent billions on perfecting algorithms to keep eyeballs glued to their apps, and because the user is the product, the user can't just passively watch things—he or she has to essentially live online and constantly keep updating the avatar that increasingly represents them to the online world.  Besides being a sucky way to live, this mode of existence has now been conclusively shown to be actively harmful to mental health.

 

Haidt has done for smartphones and kids what Rachel Carson did for DDT and eagles in her famous book Silent Spring, which was a foundational document of the environmental movement.  If we can muster even a fraction of the concern and activism that we focused on eagles, and apply it to our children and teenagers, we might be able to get somewhere.

 

The schools cited in the AP article deserve credit for perceiving a problem and trying to do something about it, but Haidt might not endorse their solution of increasing structured activities, although it might do some good.  If I had to summarize what Haidt advises in the closing section of his book, it would be "Less smartphones and more recess."

 

It turns out that play—just letting kids goof around and come up with fun things to do on their own—isn't just the cherry on top of the educational milkshake.  It's a vitally essential activity that forms kids' brains and souls to become capable, functional adults.  Especially when kids form groups or teams, they spend time working out problems together and face difficulties and learn how to overcome them, ideally without much adult intervention.

 

For various reasons I won't go into, the idea of just letting kids be unsupervised kids has fallen into disfavor in some circles.  The epitome of this attitude is exemplified in a photo Haidt shows to make his point that adults are trying to restrict free play unnecessarily.  It was taken at a playground of an elementary school in Berkeley, California.  A sign fully as tall as the chain-link fence it is hung on is titled "Tag Rules" followed by nine rules phrased in a way that would warm any bureaucrat's heart (e. g. "If a player doesn't want to play tag, then other players must respect that.").

 

Such stifling oversupervision is part of the problem, not part of the solution.  Haidt cites studies of experiments in which schools have brought back the old-fashioned unsupervised recess, where the kids are told to basically go outside and play for half an hour.  He has helped to found a movement called Let Grow Play Clubs, which helps schools design playgrounds that have fun stuff to play with, not the standard OSHA-approved boring playground equipment, but things like big blocks and old pieces of machinery and so on that you can do stuff with.  And keeping adults away from the kids is just as important as providing them with stimulating things to play with. 

 

Haidt even has the temerity to say that if a few kids get minor injuries while playing, guess what?  It's okay.  Better to scrape your elbow on a playground then grow up never knowing what getting hurt is like.  That sounds harsh, but it's just an example of the well-supported data he marshals to show that we are currently letting kids do the psychological equivalent of smoking three packs a day, and we not only need to take away their mental cigarettes, but help restore to them the natural stages of childhood and teenagerhood that lead, or used to lead, most people to become functional, reasonably happy adults. 

 

And that still happens, sometimes.  But for millions of kids it's not, and we need to do something about it yesterday.

 

Sources:  The AP article "Schools are competing with cell phones.  Here's how they think they could win" appeared on Aug. 24, 2024 at https://apnews.com/article/school-cell-phone-ban-extracurricular-afterschool-4d89f5b7fd7c8f1d5903f8c04f26da54.  Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation:  How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published by Penguin Press in 2024.

Getting Used to Liquid Modernity

 

I do not own a conventional smart phone.  Instead, I intentionally use a style of flip phone whose rugged case and physical numeric keypad buttons won't be injured by a drop of three or four feet to a concrete surface.  It can receive some texts on its small screen, and I can even send texts after a fashion with the twelve numeric keys, tapping them rapidly one to four times to select the correct letter or punctuation mark.  It won't do capitals, but you can read texts from me without capitals and still get the message.  It took me a while to get used to that method of texting, but in the five or six years I've had a phone like this, I've gotten to where I can do it as fast as I need to. 

 

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.  One day I went to send a text and the keypad didn't respond as usual.  If I wanted to start a sentence with "C," for example, I tapped the "2-ABC" key four times.  It used to be that I'd get a C that way.  But no longer.  Now, if I tap the "C" key four times, I don't get "C"—I get "BBC." 

 

Much as I admire the British Broadcasting Corporation, it was not my intention to discuss it when all I wanted was a C.  Further investigation revealed that some little menu showed up every time I touched a key longer than really short, and the thing expected me to navigate the menu to the letter I wanted, using a separate up-and-down button that I never had to fool with before when I was texting.  It's two weeks later and I still haven't figured out how this new system is supposed to work.  I've been too busy to call my phone provider and chew them out about this, because I don't send texts that much and the ones I do send are things like, "OK" and "LVG NOW" ("leaving now," not "living now," although that's not a bad interpretation either), and I've been able after much struggle to send those messages after taking out extraneous spaces and idiotic guesses of the software as to what I was really trying to say.

 

I shouldn't complain, though, because this is a tiny example of what the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called "liquid modernity."  Living in liquid modernity requires that you take an approach to life that is more like a tourist on a vacation than a conventional citizen of an organized, institutionalized society. 

 

The only constant of liquid modernity is change, chiefly of the self, but also of the self's surroundings.  Jobs, relationships, commitments, political or sexual orientation—all are subject to the whims of the sovereign self.  And firms that fail to adapt to liquid modernity will of course be left in the dustbin of history.  The onslaught of liquid modernity has accelerated in recent decades, and the contrast can be seen by another thing that happened to a piece of personal electronics of mine recently.

 

Somewhere around 1984, I bought a Hewlett-Packard HP15C pocket calculator.  It was a state-of-the-art machine when I got it, capable of all the standard scientific math operations plus programming and even numerical integration.  To use it, you had to learn something called "reverse Polish notation" involving stacking numbers in an imaginary stack, but I was younger and eager then and didn't have much problem learning it.  The beauty of it was that it avoided having to use parentheses in complicated math expressions, which was good because the small one-line display wouldn't have accommodated parentheses very well anyway. 

 

That calculator served me well for over thirty years until a couple of weeks ago, when it fell from a height of two feet underneath a book that also fell on it, and the glass display screen cracked.  I was able to find a used one on eBay, so I can still calculate with reverse Polish, but the point here is that a product that didn't change fulfilled its purpose in my life—hardly a week passed when I didn't use it for something—for over thirty years.  I kept doing the same sort of thing, and it kept right up with me.

 

You might call that "solid life"—an approximation to the eternity of bliss promised to the faithful by the religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

 

In marked contrast to that is liquid life, in which a cell phone you buy isn't really yours in the full sense.  In order for it to remain useful, the phone company continually messes with it and reserves the right to change important fundamental aspects of its operation. 

 

What happened to my phone was minor compared to some of the things that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert describes in a recent piece about the fluid nature of ownership in a high-tech world.  Her emphasis is on the way that legal concepts of ownership have lagged far behind what firms like Apple and Google actually do, shielded by incomprehensible legal boilerplate that it is practically impossible to opt out of.  Besides providing all sorts of details about our private lives that we don't even know our phones and other electronics are sending to their makers, the software we try to use is subject to change at any time, and usually does.  If you don't like it, well, your liquid self can just flow over to the next opportunity and change phones, or service companies, or even start using carrier pigeons if it strikes your fancy. (But you'll have to get everybody you know to switch to carrier pigeons too. Good luck with that.)

 

The freedom that high-tech life presents is largely illusory, because it has to remain within the bounds of what the dominant high-tech firms allow us to do.  I could pitch my flip phone and buy a smart phone, but I suspect that would just be leaving the frying pan for the fire.  So as long as I don't move by myself to a cabin in the woods, I suppose I'll just have to deal with whatever arcane system for sending texts that the phone company imposes on me.  But I wonder what this sort of thing multiplied by millions does to our collective psyches.

 

Sources:  Elizabeth Kolbert's "What's Mine is Mine" appeared in the Mar. 15, 2021 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 78-80.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Zygmunt Bauman and Late Modernity.