G. K. Chesterton on Enjoying Daily Life

Someone writing around 1930 that civilization might be in ruins in about fifteen years, is worth paying attention to even nearly a century later.  One such person was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), whose biography by Maisie Ward I have been reading lately. 

 

Chesterton was unquestionably a genius, but of a type that we are unfamiliar with today.  In our science-besotted age, we cannot conceive of geniuses other than the Albert Einstein type:  the scientific or technological wizard whose superiority is manifested by the fact that nobody except perhaps a few other geniuses can understand what he or she is doing. 

 

Chesterton wasn't that kind of genius.  He was a genius for the masses.  His gift was to take everyday things that everyone knew about—sunrises, beer, family affection, work—and look at them in a paradoxical way that made people sit up and see them in a new light.  He called himself a journalist, and if writing enough published material to fill a bookshelf several feet long with one's collected works qualifies you to be a journalist, he was not wrong to do so.

 

But he was so much more than that:  philosopher, theologian, controversialist, debater, radio personality, and apologist for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.  Believe it or not, he wrote many things that reflect on current issues in engineering ethics, and I'd like to focus on one quote in particular.

 

Toward the end of his life, he looked around the England that he loved, and saw how people were being drawn toward what we would now call electronic media (back then, mainly radio and especially sound movies) as a distraction from everyday life.  The very word "boredom" dates only from the early 1800s, and seems to be a peculiarly modern malady.  By the 1930s, Chesterton saw a danger in the fact that ordinary life, without spicing it up with a distraction that called for the observer to do nothing more than sit back and watch, was seen as increasingly boring.  This insight led him to pen the following words, which are quoted from the extensive biography of Chesterton by his friend Maisie Ward:

 

"Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilization will be in ruins in about fifteen years.  Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull.  That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life.  They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life . . . . Unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisations a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover.  So died the great Pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods."

 

The "economic evil" of which he spoke meant the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was arguably harsher in England than in the United States.  What he called for in this passage was not any innovations in technology.  While he was in favor of the good which advances in science and technology can produce, he saw that when people are provided with distractions that let them forget about the daily task at hand, they all too often choose the distraction over the task.

 

This is an ethical issue, and cannot be evaded with the old saw that "technology is neutral—the good and bad lies in how you use it."  Moving to today, vast fortunes and huge industries rely on the power of smartphone-enabled technology to divert the attention of billions into channels that profit corporations while delivering distractions that waste time at best.  And one of the harms it causes is the tidal wave of depression sweeping over the children and youth of the world—a tidal wave that Australia is attempting to sweep back with their recently-enacted ban on social media for anyone under 16, which took effect on Dec. 10.

 

I'm pretty sure that Chesterton, once he understood what social media is about, would be in favor of that ban.  He might even go so far as to recommend that every smartphone on earth be subjected to the treatment that a Houston private school gives every phone that is confiscated from students who violate their school-day ban on them:  slicing in two with a diamond saw. 

 

But the problem isn't just the phones:  it's what we have allowed the phones to do to our psyches.  When was the last time you sat outside for more than five minutes and did not look at your phone, but instead looked at the world around you?  Perhaps it's a busy cityscape.  Perhaps it's a field of wheat in the countryside.  Perhaps it's a forest.  But unless you live in Antarctica or on a desert island, there is life and there are other people around to observe and wonder at. 

 

That was the kind of thing that Chesterton himself could do regardless of where he was, whether in the dullest, dingiest part of London or in the beauty of his countryside home in Beaconsfield.  And appreciation for the ordinary aspects of real life is what he saw lacking in the lives of his fellow citizens of England in the 1930s, just fifteen short years before the devastation at the end of World War II.

 

I'm no prophet, and recycling old prophecies usually doesn't work.  But if mass distraction is a sign of civilizational breakdown, and Chesterton called it right in the 1930s, we should at least pause to consider whether radical-seeming steps such as the one Australia is taking may save us from a breakup that will not be World War III, exactly, but might be just as devastating.  Already, the political systems of many countries have suffered tremendous damage from the pernicious influence of social media.  And worse effects may come. 

 

If the tide is to be turned, it will happen as one person at a time learns how to use technology as a tool, and not allow it to be a master.  Put down the phone and spend time with the real world this Christmas—and with people you love.

 

Sources:  The quote above is from Chapter 21 of Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton, originally published in 1942.  The Kindle edition I'm reading lacks page numbers or references to the source in Chesterton's voluminous writings. 

Supreme Court Validates Texas Anti-Porn Law

 

On Friday, June 27, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton.  The Free Speech Coalition is an organization representing the interests of the online pornography industry, and Kenneth Paxton is the controversial attorney general of Texas,whose duty it is to enforce a 2023 law which "requires pornography websites to verify the age of users before they can access explicit material," according to a report by National Review.  The Court upheld the Texas law, finding that the law was a constitutional exercise of a state's responsibility to prevent children from "accessing sexually explicit content." 

 

This ruling has implications beyond Texas, as 22 other states have adopted similar laws, and the decision of the court means that those states are probably safe from federal lawsuits as well.

 

This is a matter of interest to engineering ethicists because, whether we like it or not, pornography has played a large role in electronic media at least since the development of consumer video-cassette recorders in the 1970s.  As each new medium has appeared, the pornographers have been among its earliest adopters.  Around 1980, as I was considering a career change in the electronic communications industry, one of the jobs I was offered was as engineer for a satellite cable-TV company.  One of the factors that made me turn it down was that a good bit of their programming back then was of the Playboy Channel ilk.  I ended up working for a supplier of cable TV equipment, which wasn't much better, perhaps, but that job lasted only a couple of years before I went back to school and remained in academia thereafter.

 

The idea behind the Texas law is that children exposed to pornography suffer objective harm.  The American College of Pediatricians has a statement on their website attesting to the problems caused by pornography to children:  depression, anxiety, violent behavior, and "a distorted view of relationships between men and women."  And it's not a rare problem.  The ubiquity of mobile phones means that even children who do not have their own phone are exposed to porn by their peers, and so even parents who do not allow their children to have a mobile phone are currently pretty defenseless against the onslaught of online pornography. 

 

Requiring porn websites to verify a user's age is a small but necessary step in reducing the exposure of young people to the social pathology of pornography.  In an article in the online journal The Dispatch, Charles Fain Lehman proposes that we dust off obscenity laws to prosecute pornographers regardless of the age of their clientele.  The prevalence of porn in the emotional lives of young people has ironically led to a dearth of sexual activity in Gen Z, who have lived with its presence all their lives.  In a review of several books that ask why people in their late teens and 20s today are having less sex than previous generations, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino cites the statistic that nearly half of adults in this age category regard porn as harmful, but only 37% of older millennials do.  And fifteen percent of young Americans have encountered porn by the age of 10.

 

There are plenty of science-based reasons to keep children and young teenagers from viewing pornography.  For those who believe in God, I would like to add a few more.  In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that they must "become like children" to enter the kingdom of Heaven.  Then he warns that "whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin [the Greek word means "to stumble"], it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."  (Matt. 18:6).  People who propagate pornography that ten-year-olds can watch on their phones seem to fill the bill for those who cause children to stumble. 

 

The innocence of children can be overrated, as anyone who has dealt with a furious two-year-old can attest.  But it is really a kind of mental virginity that children have:  the absence of cruel and exploitative sexual images in their minds helps keep them away from certain kinds of sin, even before they could understand what was involved.  Until a few decades ago, most well-regulated societies protected children from the viewing, reading, or hearing of pornography, and those who wished to access it had to go to considerable efforts to seek out a bookstore or porn theater.

 

But that is no longer the case, and as Carter Sherman, the author of a book quoted in the New Yorker says, the internet is a "mass social experiment with no antecedent and whose results we are just now beginning to see."  Among those results are a debauching of the ways men and women interact sexually, to the extent that one recent college-campus survey showed that nearly two-thirds of women said they'd been choked during sex. 

 

This is not the appropriate location to explore the ideals of how human sexuality should be expressed.  But suffice it to say that the competitive and addictive nature of online pornography invariably degrades its users toward a model of sexual attitudes that are selfish, exploitative, and unlikely to lead to positive outcomes. 

 

The victory of Texas's age-verification law at the Supreme Court is a step in the right direction toward the regulation of the porn industry, and gives hope to those who would like to see further legal challenges to its very existence.  Perhaps we are at the early stages of a trend comparable to what happened with the tobacco industry, which denied the objective health hazards of smoking until the evidence became overwhelming.  It's not too early for pornographers to start looking for millstones as a better alternative to their current occupation. 

 

Sources:  The article "Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law" appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-upholds-texas-age-verification-porn-law/, and the article "It's Time to Prosecute Pornhub" appeared at https://thedispatch.com/article/pornhub-supreme-court-violence-obscenity-rape/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton" and the New Yorker article "Sex Bomb" by Jia Tolentino on pp. 58-61 of the June 30, 2025 issue. 

A Psychologist Advises Parents About Smartphones

 

Jacqueline Nesi is a professor of psychology at Brown University whose specialty is how technology use affects children, and how parents can deal with this issue.  She has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers and writes a Substack blog on technology, and appears to be one of the best-qualified social scientists to advise a parent when children should be allowed to use smartphones.  In this month's Scientific American, she had the opportunity to summarize the best of her findings in a page or so, and I'm here to tell you that according to her . . . it all depends.

 

As one would expect, her command of the literature is superb.  She starts out by describing the present situation:  at what ages do kids these days get smartphones?  You might be surprised by the results of one study she quotes from an outfit called Common Sense Media.  Over four out of ten ten-year-olds have their own smartphone.  Or at least they say they do.  (Nothing is said about how reliable a ten-year-old's survey response might be.)  71 percent of 12-year-olds have one, and by age 14, 91 percent do. 

 

She then makes the entirely reasonable statement that while these stats show what parents are allowing their kids to do, it doesn't say anything about whether it's good or bad.  Dr. Nesi's goal is to muster research responses to let parents make the right decision "for your child and to help you feel more confident in your decision-making."

 

There's lots more statistics about phones and teens, and she describes some of the flaws in realistic surveys, and then winds up saying a gradual approach might be the best:  first a family-shared iPad, then a dumb flip phone, and then if the teen has proved to be responsible, maybe a smartphone at last. 

 

Leaving aside the expense of this graduated approach, this might not be a bad idea, although I've never personally heard of anybody using it.  But beyond all the statistics and data, there is an underlying philosophical flaw in Dr. Nesi's approach which she never addresses.

 

The word "best" implies a scale of values.  If there is a best, there are good and bad solutions, and presumably even a worst one.  But what Dr. Nesi leaves almost completely alone is the question that motivates this whole issue:  Good and bad according to what scale of values?  Producing 21-year-old fodder for the economic machine?  Leading your teen to Christ?  Or just keeping him or her out of jail until they're on their own? 

 

The closest Dr. Nesi comes to addressing any issues of moral values is when she says ". . . smartphones offer an in-your-pocket portal to everything on the Internet—some of which we'd rather they not see." 

 

Now in a one-page essay, it's unreasonable to expect a social scientist to delve into the depths of moral philosophy and come up with gems of wisdom, or indeed anything at all.  The elephant in the room here is that "science" (which is to say, scientists speaking as scientists) cannot tell us what is right or wrong.  That's not what science is for, at least not as presently practiced.  The science of psychology tries to describe what goes on in peoples' minds, but strictly speaking, it has nothing to say about the morality of thoughts, words, or actions—including giving your ten-year-old a smartphone, which four out of ten parents apparently do. 

 

To be fair, Dr. Nesi respected the boundaries of science in writing this mostly helpful and insightful piece.  She refrains from laying down absolute prescriptions, and says that each case is different.  A very mature and self-controlled ten-year-old (a thing I cannot recall having encountered) might be able to handle a fully-functional smartphone without anything bad happening, but it would be unusual.  And there are fully-grown adults walking around with smartphones that I wish someone would take away from them. 

 

But fundamentally, Dr. Nesi cannot go very far with the parents who are agonizing about what is right to do with regard to smartphones and children.  She can only say, "Well, here's the data.  Best of luck in figuring out what is right for your kids."  And while she's wearing her scientist hat, that's all she has a right to do.

 

There's a reason that as of this writing, 13 states have laws or policies enacted that limit K-12 classroom or school cellphone use.  While relatively few experts have called for a universal ban on underage cellphone use, as it would intrude into the privacy of the parent-child relationship, there are some who argue even in favor of that.  Why do you suppose these movements are happening?

 

One can think of the problem as an iceberg with the tip showing and a whole lot more we don't know much about underneath.  The tip of the iceberg are the cases of smartphone-enabled bullying that lead to suicides, and other smartphone-enabled deaths of teens and children.  Just underneath those cases are the vastly greater number of depressed, anxious, and sleepless children and teenagers whose lives revolve around how they look to others on social media.  And farther out of sight, but perhaps most important of all, lies the issue of how smartphone-mediated pornography, social media, and even news and educational material coming through smartphones molds the character and abilities of an entire generation.  Science can maybe help us a little here, but we need a moral compass to navigate these iceberg-fraught waters, to overload a metaphor.  And you can't find moral compasses in the social-science stockroom.

 

I will close with an anecdote, which has no scientific value as a single data point but spoke volumes to me about the state of smartphone-saturated society at the time.  When we were test-driving what became our new car in 2020, my wife and I exchanged random conversation with the twenty-something salesman who was hoping we would buy the car.  Somehow we got onto the topic of how life was when we were his age, and he spontaneously offered the following, which is the most accurately I can remember what he said from five years ago:  "Sometimes I wish I'd been born back then, and you know why?"  He pulled out his smartphone and said, "These weren't around." 

 

Sources:  Dr. Jacqueline Nesi's article "Kids and Smartphones" appeared on pp. 83-84 of the March 2025 Scientific American.  The statistic about states with smartphone bans in schools is from https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools. 

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.

It's Time to Ban Social Media on Smartphones for Children and Adolescents

 

In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social-media use on them.  She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary. 

 

First, the harms.  Twenge has collected data on a wide number of measures of wellbeing including sleep patterns, socializing, indicators of loneliness and depression, and participation in adult activities.  Significant shifts in all these data have occurred over the last five decades. 

 

In-person socializing, measured as the percentage of U. S. teens going out with friends twice a week or more, was reasonably steady until about 2008, when it began to decline, and fell off a cliff around 2012, falling from 80% in 1976 to around 55% in 2021 for 12th-graders.

 

The percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders sleeping less than seven hours a night was about 35% from 2003 to 2013, when it abruptly took off and rose steadily to 50% by 2022. 

 

The percentage of U. S. 12- to 17-year-old girls suffering major depression in the past 12 months was steady at 12% until 2011, and then went through a similar rise to almost 30% by 2021.

 

And the percentage of 15-year-olds measuring "high" in loneliness in regions as disparate as Asia, Latin America, Europe, and English-speaking countries all show a sharp uptick when?  Three guesses and the first two don't count:  2012.

 

What happened in 2012?  It was the year that the number of smartphone users in the U. S. crossed 130 million on its eventual way to the current number of 316 million, out of a population of about 330 million.  Also, the number of active Facebook users crossed the 1 billion mark worldwide that same year. 

 

Twenge, wearing her good-scientist hat, proposes other possible causes for these dismal statistics about teen wellbeing:  anxiety over college debt, the opioid crisis, even global warming.  None of them pass muster.  Her close study of the detailed behavior patterns of teens regarding smartphones reveals that the average U. S. adolescent spends nearly five hours a day on social media.  That's more than a half-time job, seven days a week. 

 

Anyone observing teens in the wild can confirm that their faces are stuck to their phones at every possible moment—in an elevator, walking down the street, at mealtimes with or without other family members, and evidently late at night too.  As for the other possible causes Twenge diligently considers and rejects, there is no such thing as mathematical proof in psychology, but she has come as close as anybody can to proving that social media use on smartphones has had a huge, and largely negative, influence on the daily lives of teenagers. 

 

Granting the validity of her case, what is to be done about it? 

 

Leaving teenagers in the gentle hands of the social-media companies is like leaving the hens in the gentle paws of the fox.  Some of the world's most sophisticated and effective AI software drives teens to keep clicking and scrolling on infinite websites, because the firms' profits depend on their doing so. 

 

Asking parents to control their teens' use of smartphones is nice in theory, but one would have to be a literal helicopter parent to do that effectively, hovering over each child's shoulder every waking minute of the day.  Yes, there is software to block certain sites, but teens know ways to evade such restrictions, and it's simply impossible for even highly conscientious parents to monitor and censor every last thing a child does with his or her phone. 

 

Twenge proposes a straightforward ban on social media use for everyone under 16.  While the brain of a sixteen-year-old has still got a lot of maturing to do, this age represents a compromise between exposing highly vulnerable young people to the harmful effects of social-media use and keeping them from using it when they are mature enough not to be significantly harmed by it.  While an outright ban is still in the future, a number of states (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, an Utah) have passed laws requiring that firms obtain parental permission before allowing people under 16 to get social media accounts. 

 

In many ways, this issue has parallels with the way attitudes and laws concerning smoking changed during the last part of the twentieth century.  Once a near-universal social habit, smoking was first revealed to be a leading cause of lung cancer.  Then when we found that cigarette companies had engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, their reputation suffered further.  The banning of cigarette ads from TV and radio in 1971 began a general social trend that gradually changed smoking from a normal activity to one engaged in by a decided minority of people, but only after years of adverse publicity, revelations of corporate wrongdoing, and contested legislation.

 

Largely because of the profits involved, we can expect a similar battle over an all-out ban on social media for teens.  In this case, however, the people most affected can't directly influence legislators, not being old enough to vote.  It is up to parents and others concerned about the wellbeing of the next generation to organize opposition to powerful entrenched interests backed by billions of dollars.  And even if our small-r republican system of government was in proper working order, this would be a hard fight. 

 

Fortunately, protecting children and adolescents from psychological harm has not become a partisan issue—yet.  Both Democrats and Republicans can understand the need to keep social-media firms from exploiting populations who suffer harm all out of proportion to their numbers.  Twenge and her fellow social-science colleagues have given us all the proof we need to take action.  Now all that is needed is the courage and diligence to see it through.

 

Sources:  Jean M. Twenge's article "Ending the Tyranny of Smartphones" appeared on pp. 34-38 of the May 2024 issue of National Review, and relies on data presented more fully in her latest book Generations (Atria Books, 2023).  I also referred to data from the following websites:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/201182/forecast-of-smartphone-users-in-the-us/,

https://www.statista.com/chart/10047/facebooks-monthly-active-users/, and https://apnews.com/article/georgia-social-media-children-age-porn-pornography-007fae0a3b3f80393b4a7d7a7a8b430a. 

 

Kids and Smartphones: Does the Good Outweigh the Bad?

If you have children, do you regulate their use of smartphones?  In particular, what do you do about smartphones when you sit down for a meal together?  These questions came to mind when my wife told me about a little episode she'd witnessed in a restaurant one evening last week. 

The mother and father sat on either side of the daughter, who was perhaps 11.  Shortly after they got there, all three got out their smartphones, and each person escaped into a different electronic world.  The parents actually put down their phones and started a conversation after a while over the girl's head, but she held onto her phone till the food came, and after she was finished eating she picked it up again. 

In the lobby of the restaurant we'd passed a lady who was singing pop tunes and accompanying herself on the accordion.  (This is Canyon Lake, Texas, you understand, not New York City.)  Later in the evening, the singer picked up a hand puppet and went around entertaining guests who had brought along their children.  According to my wife, the puppet struck out with the smartphone girl, who looked up uncomprehendingly and then went back to her phone.  Evidently, live entertainment can't compete with electronic media, at least in that particular girl's world. 

When a new technology gets adopted as widely and rapidly as smartphones have, there is always at least a theoretical concern that some long-term effect that hasn't shown up in pilot marketing tests will pop up later to surprise and harm us.  The worst case like this from history I can think of was the thalidomide crisis of the 1960s. 

Thalidomide was a drug introduced in West Germany in 1957 and marketed as, among other things, a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.  While it appeared to help, it took several years for doctors to figure out that if a woman took it early enough in her pregnancy, thalidomide caused severe birth defects:  deformed or missing arms and legs, facial defects, and other disabling problems.  Although thalidomide is still available and prescribed for certain conditions such as cancer, the medical community knows to avoid any possibility of its use by women who could be pregnant. 

If something as bad as the thalidomide episode was going to happen with kids using smartphones, I think we'd probably know by now.  Nearly two billion such devices are out there, and a survey in Britain showed that more than half of eleven-year-olds use their own smartphone.  But not every technological problem can be studied with surveys and statistics.

What my wife witnessed in that restaurant was the clash of tradition and something else—"modernity" isn't the right word, nor is "technology."  One way to put it was expressed by a friend of mine, Bruce Hunt, who is a historian of technology.  We talk a lot about "cyberspace" without always knowing quite what we mean by it.  His definition of cyberspace is this:  "Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the phone."  At the time, he meant a traditional POTS phone (Plain Old Telephone Service), but saying that all three members of the family were in cyberspace before the food arrived is a pretty accurate statement.  So it was a clash between traditional space and activities, and whatever each individual happened to be doing in cyberspace.

By traditional, I mean nothing more than activities that have gone on more or less the same for a long time.  There have been restaurants and inns and families eating in them as long as there have been civilizations, I suppose.  And the same goes for live entertainers, going all the way back to cave men who put on masks and danced around the campfire.  Just because a thing has been done a long time doesn't mean it's necessarily good—it's just durable. 

When it comes to a family eating meals together, though, you can find studies that correlate all sorts of good things with families who eat together at least five nights a week.  Their kids are less likely to get involved in drug and alcohol use, they make better grades, and they feel closer to their parents.  I don't know whether the studies were fine-grained enough to notice how often smartphones were brought to the table, but it doesn't take a Ph. D. to tell that a family meal without smartphones is going to allow more opportunities for interpersonal interaction than one with them. 

The age at which a child should gain access to a smartphone is a question each parent has to decide.  Not having children myself, I have never had to make that decision, but I hear that it's a hard one to make.  Like driving, watching R-rated movies, and drinking alcohol, using smartphones is something that adults are free to do, and it's a judgment call on the part of parents as to when a child is mature enough to use one responsibly. 

But the little drama in the restaurant made me think that the family that brings their smartphones to the dinner table is missing something valuable that has no corporate-sponsored PR in its favor, no guaranteed payoff, and no particular immediate harm that results when it goes missing.  It's the chance to be with other people, in the time-honored sense of devoting one's embodied attention to the experience of the real, actual bodily presence of other human beings.  The very name "media" means "that which goes between," and anything between us can separate us as well as bring us together. 

So I'm not going to issue any blanket condemnations of smartphones at the dinner table. 

But I would ask parents to consider first how you use your smartphone and what kind of example you are setting for your children to follow.  Do you let it interrupt quality time with your spouse or children?  Or do you put it away at specific regular times, and devote your full attention to other members of your family?  Children have a powerful built-in instinct that says, "Whatever mommy or daddy does is okay," and if you tell your son to put away his smartphone at the dinner table and then whip yours out when it goes off, you've just wasted your breath.  The kids won't always be young, and you won't always be around to talk with them.  Do it while you have the chance.

Sources:  I referred to an article on the website PsychCentral by Amy Williams entitled, "How Do Smartphones Affect Childhood Psychology?" at http://psychcentral.com/lib/how-do-smartphones-affect-childhood-psychology/, and a rather touching essay on the benefits of family meals by Cody C. Delistraty in The Atlantic online edition for July 18, 2014 at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-importance-of-eating-together/374256/, as well as the Wikipedia article on thalidomide.