PARENTS ARE DISCOVERING THE SECRET TO KEEPING KIDS OFF SMARTPHONES 

It’s hardly a shocking idea among parents that smartphones and social media have been highly detrimental to kids. Many families fear they are driving a crisis of loneliness, anxiety and depression among teens, along with more severe outcomes including suicides from sextortion, eating disorders from dangerous dieting advice, and deepfake pornography and other child sexual exploitation online.

Books warning about these trends have dominated bestseller lists and encouraged new policies limiting phones in school. Yet it remains extremely difficult for concerned parents to stand against the strong current of screens into childhood. Giving a smartphone to a teen feels like an inevitability. 

All their friends have them. Schools and extracurricular activities require certain apps. No parent wants their child to be ostracized or disadvantaged. They worry about reaching them in emergencies.

Individually, parents feel helpless to resist. But this is a collective action problem, and it requires a collective solution. It is possible to beat the digital tech crisis by creating counter-communities that resist screens together. And not just by keeping them out of school, but delaying or forgoing their use entirely.

For my book, “The Tech Exit,” I spoke with dozens of families that have deliberately kept their kids from using smartphones, social media, tablets and video games. Contrary to what you might think — and, if I’m being honest, what I expected — their children aren’t isolated, odd or antisocial. 

These are normal families who have strong relationships with their kids. Their kids aren’t resentful of being deprived of smartphones and social media. Their grown children are thankful for the technology restrictions they had during childhood.

What these families had in common was that they were not alone. They sought out other families who shared similar values and a desire to give their children an embodied, real-world childhood free of screens.

Sometimes this happens naturally. I visited one suburban neighborhood in the Washington area that looked like something out of the 1970s: Kids playing outside, riding bikes to one another’s houses, building forts, even arguing on the front lawn and working through conflicts themselves. No parents in sight. Best of all, no devices in sight.

No, it’s not a compound for some kind of cult. It all started from a conversation one mom had with her neighbor who shared her own family’s thinking around technology. Their kids started playing outside together, while the parents acted as friends and allies in keeping their children on a technology diet. 

Soon other parents and kids joined in, attracted by the sounds and sights of children running, throwing balls, squealing and laughing together. That’s all it took to shift the momentum on the street away from screens.

It’s not realistic to assume every family on your street will have the same views, of course. Other parents I spoke with found like-minded parents through their school. You can email other parents in your child’s class. Invite them over to your home. 

Start a conversation. Discuss approaches to technology that match your needs: Many families I met gave their children non-smartphones that allowed them to call and text without an internet browser, social media or apps to distract them.

The one common denominator in all these “Tech Exit” families is they start by rejecting the premise of the inevitability of smartphones and then build their plans from there.

Organizing even a small group of families in contact and committed to setting limits on screens accomplishes multiple goals. In addition to providing a steady source of playdates and alternative activities for the children themselves, they can offer moral support, encourage accountability and help to troubleshoot problems that come up.

Importantly, a coordinated group of families can better advocate for themselves when institutions wrongly assume participants are universally smartphone adoptees. Increasingly, apps are being imposed as a prerequisite for participating in more and more aspects of our children’s lives, from school assemblies to sports activities. 

But once the commitment to reject the inevitability of these technologies is decided, the answer to these challenges be­comes quite simple: find work-arounds. If these parents are told an app is required for a school assignment or a child’s activity, they don’t accept it. 

They talk to teachers or coaches to find another option. They push back. And every par­ent that pushes back makes it easier for the next parent.

The end result of these parents’ initiative and intentionality to create counter-communities is that their children are flourishing. They are not self-absorbed in the virtual world, but directed toward relationships, responsibilities and service to others. 

Only by building rich, meaningful real-world communities that can compete with the allure of digital ones can parents push the smartphone out of childhood.

By Clare Morell
Clare Morell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.”

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