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Copyright © 2025 by Clare Morell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morell, Clare, author.

Title: The tech exit / [Clare Morell].

Description: First edition. | New York: Forum Books, 2025 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024056155 (print) | LCCN 2024056156 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593736296 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593736302 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology and children. | Internet and children.

Classification: LCC HQ784.T37 M67 2025 (print) | LCC HQ784.T37 (ebook) |

DDC 004.67/8083—dc23/eng/20250127

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024056155

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024056156

Ebook ISBN 9780593736302

Book Team: Production editor: Jocelyn Kiker • Managing editor: Julia Wallace • Production manager: Kevin Garcia • Copy editor: Kayla Fenstermaker • Proofreaders: Debbie Anderson, Alissa Fitzgerald, Julia Henderson • Ebook Production Manager: Kyle Madigan

Cover design: Jamie Keenan

Cover photograph: gjee/shutterstock

The authorized representative in the EU for product safety and compliance is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68, Ireland, https://eu-contact.penguin.ie.

ep_prh_7.1_151468120_c0_r0

For my children:

Theodore, Flavius, and Josephine

Introduction

The school bus ride each morning had grown eerily silent, just like the hallways between classes. For Emma, this meant feeling totally isolated.[1] It hadn’t always been this way. Back in third and fourth grade, she used to laugh and talk with her friends on the bus and between classes. But now everyone she knew, it seemed, was staring down at a phone. Her parents, Molly and Tim, wanted to wait until she was thirteen to get her a smartphone, as they had with her older siblings.

But once Emma started sixth grade, so did her daily begging for a smartphone. She felt like she was missing out. Missing out on the group texts, the GIFs, memes, photos, and inside jokes. She told her parents every day that no one was making jokes out loud, that all the interactions among her friends were happening on the phones. And Emma wasn’t exactly wrong. It was painful for Molly and Tim to see their daughter feel hurt and left out during such a pivotal time in her life.

The other pressure Molly and Tim felt came from other parents. How, others wondered, did they feel safe not knowing where Emma was? It seemed like every other parent was always tracking their kids’ whereabouts. And now Molly wondered if she and Tim were acting irresponsibly as parents.

After a conversation with Emma’s pediatrician, Molly and Tim made their decision. They would set ground rules for tech in their home, put daily time limits on the phone, and enable parental controls on all their devices in order to keep Emma safe. So, one month into sixth grade, eleven-year-old Emma got her first smartphone.

Can’t Screens’ Negative Effects Be Mitigated?

As a policy professional focused on tech and child protection, I often speak with parents about their experiences with screens and kids. All of them have felt immense pressure to give their children screen technologies. And despite their reluctance, parents end up relenting for good and understandable reasons:

“I want my kid to be happy. I got tired of saying no every single day.”

“I want my child to have friends. This is how all the kids socialize today.”

“I want to keep my child safe and know where they are.”

“I want my child to succeed. I don’t want them to be left behind in this technological world.”

Parents make the best choices they can in order to ensure their children are safe, happy, and successful.

But parents know in their gut that screens aren’t ideal for children. Parents read the news, hear tech CEOs testifying before Congress, or read Jonathan Haidt’s or Jean Twenge’s work, and they see for themselves the evidence that social media and smartphones are harmful to children.

Maybe you’re in the same boat. You know something is wrong, but you’re not sure what’s a realistic alternative or solution.

As I’ve worked in the public policy space for the last five years, it has been my goal to protect children from online dangers through advising lawmakers on needed changes in the law. But in this role, I’ve increasingly found myself speaking with parents who are looking for concrete, everyday advice: How do I protect my child from seeing online pornography? What should I do about social media? All my child’s friends are already on Instagram. At what age should I give my child a smartphone?

I’ve had to stay informed of the latest research on kids and digital technology, digging into empirical studies on mental health outcomes and the effects of social media and smartphones on developing brains, and my work has also entailed combing through horrific stories and reports about online predators and child sexual abuse material.

But I’m not just a researcher; I’m a parent. My research convinced me never to give social media or smartphones to my own children. But they were young. All under the age of four when I took on this role. The parents of teens I speak with know it isn’t that simple. There are undeniable social costs to any child who isn’t given access to a smartphone or social media. These parents want advice that is going to work for them.

In my work with these parents, I started looking for the answers they needed. They couldn’t wait for Section 230 reform to be passed. Or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 to be updated. They needed help now. So I read and surveyed lots of parenting books on technology.

I was sorely disappointed.

The advice they offered wasn’t commensurate with the dangers I knew existed for children online. I’d move from horrifying accounts of kids falling into sextortion schemes to advice like “set time limits,” “turn on privacy settings on their accounts,” “talk to them about online dangers,” and “have them hand in their phones at night.” I saw a major disconnect. While these were good steps, I couldn’t help noticing that they fell far short of the problem. They all accepted the premise that screen-based technologies are an inevitable part of childhood, so the best they could offer parents was harm reduction.

But harm reduction is always and fundamentally the acceptance of some harm. And even if we accept the idea that we have no choice but to accept some harm, we should still examine how these harm reduction measures are working out for children and parents in reality.

—

Let’s return to Molly and Tim. They set ground rules for tech in their home, like no phones in bedrooms or at the dinner table. Molly put daily screen-time limits on Emma’s phone, enabled all the parental control settings, and even purchased additional parental monitoring software. Molly felt pleased with these solutions and reassured that Emma would be shielded from ill effects. She could experience the benefits of tech and avoid the costs.

But after three months, Molly was utterly exhausted. All the rules she’d tried to establish just didn’t stick. Emma was always asking for more time. Or finding work-arounds. Or downloading apps Molly hadn’t heard of without her knowing. The software had glitches. The settings on the phone sometimes were reset, and she didn’t know how. And the number of notifications she got from the software was overwhelming. It was like trying to battle a Hydra. Once she and Tim figured out one issue, cutting off one head, two new heads popped up, requiring different solutions.

There are also other costs they didn’t anticipate.

Molly and Tim feel like they have totally lost Emma to the screens. It wasn’t just a matter of some time diverted from other activities, as they had anticipated; it’s all Emma wants to do. She’s compulsively drawn to the screens. It’s never enough. And even when she isn’t online, the screen activities still dominate her thoughts and behavior. Molly and Tim feel the effect on their family relationships. They are frustrated, disappointed, and exhausted.

Molly and Tim are not alone. Theirs is the common plight of screen-time parents.

The vast majority of parents I speak with end up in this screen-time trap. These parents weigh the costs and benefits of giving their child a smartphone or social media access. They are led to believe they can sufficiently mitigate any costs to their child while reaping all the benefits.

At first glance, this moderate approach sounds the most appealing. It seems like these families can have it all. They can both allow their children to have screens and also ensure their kids are protected from any detriments. But in reality, the parents trying to do everything are the most frustrated. The controls and limits—and the experience of trying to manage these harm mitigation tools—aren’t what they hoped for. The tools are exhausting and don’t work. It’s a lose-lose scenario. The kids aren’t being effectively shielded from screens’ negative impacts, and the parents are miserable. They’re getting the worst of both worlds.

Breaking Free from the Screen-Time Trap

But what if there is a better way?

I’ve written this book to show you that another way is possible. Despite real challenges, your family can break out of the screen-time trap. I hope to convince you that digital technologies need not be an inevitable part of childhood. A different future is possible. It’s even possible to reverse course if you’ve already given your child a smartphone or social media and now regret it. I call this different path the Tech Exit, and this book is my invitation to you to embrace the kind of life you already want for your kids.

After I realized that harm reduction strategies weren’t the solution, I was wondering how to help parents do differently, and I had the good fortune of getting to know a few Tech Exit families. My family got to know one family in particular and spend time at their home. We saw their family life up close. The parents and children had strong, close relationships, which was clear in the way they talked to and looked at one another. Their children could carry on excellent conversations with adults; they made eye contact and asked engaging questions. They would all sit still and listen attentively through a meal as we adults talked. Their children also played well together as siblings. Whenever we went over, they were self-entertained; they would go off, come up with a game to play, and include my children.

As young parents, my husband and I were eager to know what these parents had done. We wanted our children to grow up to be like this. It turns out one of the most important things they did was to offer their children lives free of screens. They filled their children’s lives with books, sports, music, and lots of independent play outside in the woods behind their house or at the arts and crafts table in their basement. And when it came to screens? They used alternatives to smartphones like a Gizmo watch to stay in touch with their oldest daughter when she got to middle school, then purchased her a Gabb phone (a non-smartphone alternative) when she started high school. They didn’t allow any social media or video games. Their kids were happy and healthy, free and lighthearted.

Seeing a Tech Exit family in real life, flourishing like this, was beautiful and compelling. It convinced me this way of life was possible. And I wanted it for my own kids.

I’ve now had the opportunity to interview dozens of other Tech Exit families (and I’ve heard of hundreds more). They each differ in some ways, but they also share a few core practices: They haven’t allowed their children to have smartphones, social media, or video games during childhood and adolescence and have largely limited all other screens for entertainment. They have given their children a low-tech or screen-free childhood.

Contrary to what you might think—and, if I’m being honest, what I expected—their children aren’t isolated weirdos. These are normal families. They have good relationships with their kids. Their kids aren’t resentful. Their grown children who are now out of the home are thankful for the technology restrictions they had during childhood. Their families are thriving, and their lives are not boring or dull but filled with vibrancy and joy.

I want to invite you to journey with me to learn how these families have exited screen technologies for their kids. I’m convinced that if you continue to follow along with me, you’ll find freedom from tech-saturated childhood and family life and have within reach the life you want for your kids. I’ve found this freedom. Many other parents have as well. This book offers an escape plan so you can do the same for your own family.

—

The first step on this journey is to understand why harm reduction doesn’t work when it comes to screens. That will be the work of part 1.

Then, in part 2, we’ll walk through how to reverse course and fast from screens if you’ve already given your children screen technologies. I’ll explain what a digital detox is and how you and your family can do it.

Part 3 will explore how you can adopt and maintain a Tech Exit lifestyle—of resisting smartphones, social media, video games, and other screens for your children—for the long term. Drawing on my interviews with Tech Exit families, I’ll walk through the five commitments that make up the Tech Exit. We’ll remember these commitments with the acronym FEAST. Not only will FEAST explain how to exit screens during childhood; it will also guide you in the real-life responsibilities and pursuits your family can choose instead. Not only is the Tech Exit possible; it’s also positive.

I’m aware, however, that no parent can make this exit alone. From tablets in kindergarten classrooms to smartphone apps required of college and even high school students, we are all expected to participate in a society-wide social experiment, and that means parenting has become uncertain in fundamental new ways. Parents are feeling the pressure—from their own children begging for these technologies, from the perception that all the kids have them, and even from other parents. Parents must join together. The Tech Exit, therefore, starts with F: Find Other Families. By working with other families in your communities and schools, you can create counterpressures to push screens back out of childhood.

Finding community to exit tech with you is an important first step. To make the Tech Exit sustainable over the long term and to preserve a good relationship with your children, it’s also important to work to get your kids’ buy-in—or at least their understanding and acceptance of the lifestyle you are calling them to. To do this, parents E: Explain, Educate, and Exemplify. They explain their rationale, educate children about the dangers of digital technology, and exemplify healthy tech use.

Tech Exit families also A: Adopt Alternatives. In order to resist smartphones for their kids, they adopt alternative communication methods and find work-arounds to app requirements. They also S: Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules. They disallow private technology and establish rules for screens in the home, like using screens only publicly and purposefully. And finally, they T: Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits. They replace screens with positive responsibilities and activities in the real world.

What we’ll observe from Tech Exit families as they live out these five commitments is that there are short-term costs involved in saying no to screens but greater and longer-lasting gains. You might say that exiting digital technology is like potty training: No parent wants to be changing a thirteen-year-old’s diaper, and Tech Exit parents have found that after they made it over the hump, the benefits of a tech-free childhood have been more than worth it.

I know that none of this can happen overnight. Throughout parts 2 and 3, I’ll offer you stepping stones toward a screen-free childhood for your kids. You can test a detox out at any level, and you can take steps toward a total exit at your own pace.

Even when individual parents opt out, smartphone and social media use by other peers can still have undesirable impacts on a child or teen. Part 4 will address needed collective solutions, what schools and policymakers can do to protect children from detrimental group effects of screen technologies. Schools play a crucial role—and when they’re intentional about technology, they can support Tech Exit families. Chapter 9 will explain policies and practices that schools can adopt to help students thrive academically and relationally and to help parents protect their kids by creating a phone-free school culture.

Parents also need better laws to back them up. Chapter 10 will explain changes in the law that policymakers can enact to support parents in resisting screens for their kids. And screens are a justice issue. All children deserve to be protected from online dangers, not just those with involved parents. Public policy solutions are necessary, the same way we have adopted restrictions to tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and other dangers to children.

At stake in all this discussion of exiting digital technology is human flourishing. That’s what this book is ultimately about: how we can give children a beautiful and rich childhood that will lay the foundation for them to be happy and successful adults. And that’s what we’ll consider in the book’s conclusion: what we receive when we leave these technologies behind. On the other side of exiting tech is the life you want for your family.

Part I

Escaping the Trap of Harm Reduction

Chapter 1

Screen-Time Limits Aren’t Working Out

The screen-time limit is the digital version of a seatbelt. It’s the industry-standard harm reduction measure and the most prominent form of parental control. Tech companies have held out a promise to parents that any negative side effects from their products can be avoided with time limits—a suggestion predicated on the idea that any undesirable outcomes seen in children are the result of how much time they are spending on screens and that if you limit the time, you eliminate the negative impact.

The idea that limiting screen time limits the amount of harm sounds reasonable enough. I decided to ask an expert about it. Conveniently, I was invited to the American Academy of Sciences and Letters award ceremony, and so was the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

I spotted him across the great atrium inside the Library of Congress during the cocktail hour. As he sipped his cocktail and I my Sanpellegrino (I was eight months pregnant at the time), we discussed his not-yet-released book The Anxious Generation. I shared about my work on protecting kids from the dangers of digital technologies and raised the issue of screen-time limits.

Dr. Haidt’s now-released book compellingly lays out the evidence of how social media is causing the mental health crisis. He does so by showing studies where teens’ depressive symptoms improved when they reduced their use of social media platforms[1] and other studies indicating that the more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed.[2] Social media is clearly a cause, not just a correlate, of the increase in depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among teens. Dr. Haidt’s research would seem to suggest that time limits, then, can save us from the crisis. But this isn’t the whole story.

Dr. Haidt also found that social media and smartphones have pernicious network effects that time limits do nothing to mitigate. What I’ve learned in my own work confirms this, and I’ve found that the risks of digital technology extend far beyond teen mental health.

Negative Network Effects

The teen mental health crisis today is due not only to negative effects of digital technologies for individuals but also to the group social dynamics that smartphones and social media have created. Dr. Haidt explains that smartphones with their social media apps harm all teens’ social lives. This is what happened to Emma as her peers started getting smartphones. The unfortunate reality is that social media creates negative network effects where, even if a few teens use it in a school or organization, it affects the entire cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media at all.[3]

Time limits have no bearing on a child’s social environment and the nature of children’s friendships. Teen relationships are now largely mediated through what’s happening in the online world of social media. Friendships are built around likes, reshares, and memes, not shared experiences, adventures, or baring their hearts to one another. The result is teens aren’t spending as much time in person anymore.[4]

Individual families imposing screen-time limits fail to address this dynamic. One might imagine that limiting screen time would force kids to socialize in person, but that assumes (1) that all parents are enforcing limits and (2) that the kids are limited at the same times of day. The reality is that time limits only create a temporary hurdle to a child’s social life that is otherwise still mediated through digital technology. And even when they aren’t interacting on the apps, they are thinking about them and what they may be missing out on.

Teens crave social acceptance and peer approval. This is a normal part of adolescent development that helps children bond with their peers. Social media takes this natural process and hijacks it with an environment built on teens holding themselves out to the world for review and judgment, for instant feedback and gratification, with metrics for constant comparison with others—the perfect recipe for teens to become anxiously addicted to checking their phones.[5]

The result: Kids are constantly connected yet lonelier and more anxious than ever. Limits can even exacerbate loneliness as teens constantly fear what they are missing out on. FOMO is very real, and the feeling of missing experiences can cause anxiety and depression.[6]

But abandoning the screen-time limit altogether only ushers in other undesirable effects the limit was meant to keep at bay. And giving a child more time to connect with peers online is clearly not the answer. As Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains, we need the hormone oxytocin to bond with one another. It’s a happiness hormone that we can get only from eye contact and physical touch during in-person interaction with other human beings. We can’t get oxytocin through a screen.[7] Friendships built on dopamine instead of oxytocin are shallow. So kids feel lonely. That loneliness is compounded by feelings of isolation and being left out.

When children conduct their relationships through social media, screen-time limits can do nothing to affect the nature of teens’ social environment. In other words, while studies show that reducing the time spent on social media does reduce mental health symptoms, limits on time can’t eliminate the negative social dynamics from screens, which undermine real friendship, induce loneliness and anxiety, and can lead to depression.[8]

Beyond the social dynamics, time limits also do nothing to address the inherent addictive nature of these technologies.

Mentally Consuming and Compulsion Inducing

We have a metaphor problem when it comes to digital technology. This problem is apparent in the way we talk about adolescent social media consumption, that it’s a question of whether teens are on their phones too much and whether time limits can help. When someone admits that digital technologies can be detrimental to kids and then suggests that time limits can mitigate the negative side effects, they are implying that smartphones and social media apps are harmful in the same way that other good things can be harmful if consumed immoderately. In a word, they suggest that screens are like sugar—basically unavoidable, a treat to be enjoyed with abandon sometimes and consumed in moderation in an otherwise-balanced diet.

But the metaphor doesn’t work.

When we examine smartphones and social media apps, it’s clear they are designed to undermine any impulse control or effort to use them in moderation. In fact, the effect they produce in the brain resembles the most addictive drugs, like cocaine.[9]

Let’s get the metaphor right: Digital technologies are not like sugar. For the developing brains of children and teens, they are more like fentanyl.

Even a small amount of time on screens creates a strong craving for more. Digital tech generates this craving by stimulating the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in the brain’s reward system. But dopamine doesn’t create satisfaction or lasting pleasure; it only produces “wanting” so that we will repeat that action.[10] When we get a new like on social media, we get a hit of dopamine—a little burst of pleasure that makes us crave the experience again.[11] Scientists use dopamine “to measure the addictive potential of any behavior or drug,” writes Dr. Anna Lembke, the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, in her book Dopamine Nation. Dr. Lembke explains, “The more dopamine released in the brain’s reward pathway and the faster it releases dopamine, the more addictive” that thing is.[12]

Dopamine, therefore, works to reinforce in us the behaviors that it rewards. But when getting the dopamine becomes a powerful need by itself (rather than rewarding us for genuinely healthy choices), it can make us addicts.[13] Digital technology was designed to keep us trapped on this hamster wheel of craving dopamine without ever reaching satisfaction.

Former Big Tech employees like Tristan Harris have spoken out about the addictive design of tech products. According to Mr. Harris, the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”[14] Social media engineers are tasked with designing features that hijack our human vulnerabilities so that we can’t resist: things like constant notifications, daily streaks, immersive environments, and sensationalized feeds customized by algorithms that learn what you like and continue to give you more of the same content to keep you hooked.

Developing brains are especially vulnerable. The regions of the brain associated with social rewards, like visibility, attention, and approval from peers, undergo significant development during adolescence. The brain’s dopamine receptors multiply between the ages of ten and twelve. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex, which enables self-control, isn’t fully developed until age twenty-five. In other words, children’s brains are “all gas pedal with no brakes” when it comes to craving the social feedback that tech readily and constantly serves up to kids.[15]

One might think the negative effects from digital technology’s dopamine hits occur only when someone is spending too much time on it. But even regular use is detrimental to developing brains. In 2023, University of North Carolina researchers published a study that found that sixth and seventh grade students who checked social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat) multiple times throughout the day, to say nothing about the amount of time they spent on the apps, demonstrated divergent brain development over time. Students who were frequent checkers of social media became more sensitive over time to anticipation of social feedback compared with students who didn’t check social media as often.[16]

Also, even if children are allowed on social media for only thirty minutes a day, that brief exposure can affect their mental space for the rest of the day. Social media is designed to make people check their accounts compulsively. Because of the built-in social metrics, children will be constantly thinking about the next time they can get on to see what likes they may have gotten or what friends might be posting. (Not to mention that a time limit only sets the total amount of time for the day, meaning a child could still be checking an app twenty-plus times over the course of the day.) Any app with a reward component or social networking aspect like messaging features—and this includes online games—will have this compulsive effect from dopamine. Whether they spend fifteen minutes or an hour in the virtual world, kids carry it with them long after they leave the apps.

Two moms I spoke with, Tara from Vermont and Haley from Wyoming, shared how they saw their tween sons change as each boy became compulsively drawn to a gaming app. “Even fifteen minutes a day on it was too much for my son,” explained Haley. “He spent the rest of the day thinking about the game, waiting until he could get back on it.” Tara likewise noted how the game completely changed her son’s behavior and mood. Even when he wasn’t on, all he wanted to do was play it. Because these apps are designed to create a perpetual craving, no time limit will ever be enough.

Smartphones only exacerbate cravings and checking compulsions. After all, “a device that travels with you is always a better vehicle for addiction.”[17] Research shows the mere presence of a smartphone is mentally consuming and distracting.[18] That is, a smartphone affects your mental function even when it isn’t being used, even when it’s just sitting in your pocket or on a desk. “Phones are disruptive by their mere existence…. They remind us of the world beyond the immediate conversation” or task.[19] It’s no wonder that the younger someone is when they get their first smartphone, the worse their mental health outcomes will be over time. Young people who get their first smartphone at age six do worse than those who don’t get one until age thirteen or eighteen.[20]

Time limits also can’t sufficiently mitigate the negative effects that interactive screens can have on a child’s nervous system. The psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Dunckley, who wrote the book Reset Your Child’s Brain, had children struggling with conditions like autism or ADHD, or other issues like mood swings, insomnia, chronic irritability, lack of focus, and tantrums, coming to her practice. She found the majority of these struggles were caused or exacerbated by the child’s use of interactive screens (video games, tablets, smartphones). Screens were overstimulating the nervous system and resulting in a dysregulated child. She termed this new phenomenon electronic screen syndrome (ESS) to describe the state of hyperarousal (fight-or-flight mode) and dysregulation of various biological systems that screens cause in children.[21] And this syndrome isn’t just appearing in children who use screens too much.

Dr. Dunckley has found that “ESS can be triggered by even ‘regular’ use of screens.” She says that “individuals with ESS aren’t always or even usually addicted to screen-time.”[22] In her book she explains, “Electronics overuse bears a striking resemblance to stimulant abuse and addiction. Like amphetamine abuse, focus and mood may seem—and indeed may be—enhanced by the stimulation of screen-time.”[23] Many parents find handing a child a screen, especially a child with ADHD or autism, can be helpful to calm them down. But Dr. Dunckley warns that “over time and as usage increases or accumulates, the ‘user’ will begin to experience mood changes, sleep disturbances, shortened attention span, irritability, depression, defensiveness, an inability to tolerate stress, and a general worsening of functioning.”[24] She cites research showing that excessive screen use can even cause brain damage like that caused by alcohol addiction and drugs like heroin and cocaine.[25] And, she says, “as with drug abuse, electronics use or abuse ‘just on the weekends’ can still produce significant issues.”[26]

This is why Dr. Dunckley recommends a total screen detox to her patients. She has had more than five hundred children, teens, and young adults do her strict electronic fast. As a result, her patients have experienced a dramatic reduction in symptoms, behavioral issues, and other challenges. For 80 percent of those with a diagnosed psychiatric disorder, such as ADHD, an autism spectrum disorder, or a tic disorder, taking the screens away reduced symptoms by at least 50 percent. And for many patients without any underlying condition, their symptoms (including tantrums and poor focus) entirely disappeared.[27]

Undermining Self-Control

These days, my number one goal as a parent is teaching my toddler self-control. I’m working daily (and it’s tiring work!) to teach him self-control in the small things, like not throwing a tantrum when I say, “It’s time to leave the playground,” or learning to wait with patience for his dinner. I want him to cultivate self-mastery as he grows into an adult so that he has agency over his schedule, his responsibilities, his emotions, his desires, and other areas of his life.

By its addictive nature, digital media undoes parents’ hard work to teach self-control. It undermines kids’ self-mastery and their ability to develop it.[28] Every one of us has felt the temptation to hand the screaming three-year-old a smartphone, even just for a few minutes of peace. It’s an understandable choice, but it’s not without costs to the child’s development, especially their self-control. A study found that the use of mobile devices to calm young children “worsened their emotional regulation skills over time.” Calming children with devices robs them of the natural opportunities life provides for them to learn emotion-regulation strategies.[29]

Dr. Lembke explains that digital technology’s instant gratification “means we’re constantly living in our limbic brain, which processes emotions, rather than in our pre-frontal cortex, which deals with future planning and problem-solving and is important for personality development.”[30] She says, “We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.”[31]

When parents hand a child a screen, even for a limited amount of time each day, they are working against their own goals for their child’s development, eroding their progress toward self-control.

Opportunity Costs

Even after learning about the mental health and cognitive harms, I found myself wondering if time limits, properly enforced, could at least reduce the opportunity costs of these technologies. By setting a time limit, a parent can probably ensure their children won’t spend all day on the screen so they can still do non-screen activities that are good for their development, like reading or playing outside.

And then I learned I was wrong. It turns out that screens cost children more than just their time; they also cause them to lose their appetite for things of the real world. Screens exact costs on children’s tastes and creativity, habituating them to the virtual world and drawing them away from the real world.

One psychologist who specializes in technology addiction, Nicholas Kardaras, describes how screens create a need for an ever-increasing level of stimulation to achieve the same dopamine rush, rendering offline activities unbearably dull by comparison. The scientific term for this is desensitization. Dr. Kardaras explains that using social media repeatedly and for prolonged periods floods the brain with too much dopamine. This overwhelms the dopamine receptor cells, so the brain reduces or shuts down its own production of dopamine. Hyperstimulating triggers, like social media, that lead to unnaturally high levels of dopamine release, thus damage the brain’s dopamine reward system and leave it unresponsive to natural sources of pleasure. In other words, children on social media become bored by everyday activities and things. Dr. Kardaras writes, “For them, reading a book, a walk in the park…just doesn’t cut it anymore.”[32]

Screen technologies both make children overly sensitive to the digital world and its social feedback and they desensitize children to the real world’s beauty and pleasure.

Parents are seeing this for themselves. Remember the two moms we met, Tara and Haley, whose boys became compulsively drawn to online games? Their boys lost their appetites for anything else, so both moms ended up taking the games away, Tara for a season and Haley permanently. Their sons’ ability to enjoy other things gradually came back. Haley explains her son’s experience by comparing screens to cotton candy: “If you feed a baby cotton candy, it’s not going to want to eat pears, because it’s lost the taste for them. The same is true of the virtual world. There is so much sensory overwhelm in the virtual world that it can dull the senses to the beauty and pleasures that we’re supposed to experience in the natural world.”

—

Educators also observe this firsthand.

It’s an early morning in Iowa, just 8 a.m., when Spencer Jones joins my Zoom call to speak with me about her perspective on smartphones and social media as an educator. She has her light brown hair pulled up in a perky ponytail with side bangs swept across her forehead, a white mug of coffee in her hand. Spencer taught in private high schools for seven years before going to the University of Iowa as both a master of fine arts student in their renowned nonfiction writing program and a rhetoric instructor for undergraduates.

Digital technologies are making students distrustful of the feeling of being unstimulated. She explains that, growing up with phones, these kids don’t know what to do when they feel “empty headed.” As an English teacher, she paints a picture for me of how she taught high school students to write an essay. After explaining how to structure an essay around one big idea and walking through various examples of how it could be outlined, she would stop talking and let the students sit there so they could learn how to take the lesson and produce their own content.

“That particular moment,” Spencer says, “is what has become an increasingly difficult moment for students. They are so unfamiliar with the concept of ‘You’re going to sit there for sixty seconds, and nothing is going to come to mind. And you’re going to sit there for sixty more seconds, and you’re still not going to know what to say, and you’re going to sit there for sixty more seconds and still not know what to say. And then in the fourth minute, maybe you’ll have an idea for a first sentence.’ The experience of waiting until a thought strikes, which means sitting somewhat uncomfortably with what feels like nothingness, kids now interpret as something having gone wrong.”

Blaise Pascal once said that all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And that was four hundred years ago.

Haley, the mom who likens screens to cotton candy, is also a folk songwriter. She and her husband, Jasper, write and play music together. As artists they recognize that a lot of creativity comes from silence. They want their children to be creative, and “if a child’s mind is always receiving input, there is no silence or space for it to develop its own ideas and thoughts,” Haley tells me. Screens wire children toward consumption rather than creation, and over time that creative muscle atrophies.

How Much Is Too Much?

Screen-time limits raise the question: How much is too much?

The truth is we don’t really know. This became frighteningly clear to me after a conversation with Dr. Sandra Cremers.

Between surgeries where she was operating on cataracts or performing corneal transplants, Dr. Cremers, a mom of six, called me from her car.

She told me that seven years earlier kids started coming into her practice with dry-eye problems. The first case was an eight-year-old girl whose mom brought her in because she was complaining about her eyes hurting. Examining her, Dr. Cremers found that her meibomian glands—her eyes’ oil glands—had disappeared. Dry-eye conditions are most likely to appear in people older than seventy. An eight-year-old child shouldn’t have already lost these glands. Dr. Cremers asked several questions to rule out any underlying autoimmune conditions like arthritis that could cause this. The only factor she could identify was screens. Since the girl was a year old, starting with Baby Mozart, she had been watching screens for four or more hours per day. That was it. Just screens.

Not long after that, Dr. Cremers saw another patient, a ten-year-old boy who was also losing his eye glands. He liked to play video games and spend time on the computer. That was his only risk factor.

Since then, Dr. Cremers has seen numerous young patients with the same condition. She published her findings on the link between screens and dry eye in children, which you can read in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.[33]

I asked her how this is happening. How are screens causing these glands to dry up in kids? She told me that when staring at screens, kids aren’t blinking. Blinking is like milking a cow. When you don’t milk a cow, the milk dries up. It’s the same for our oil glands. If kids stop blinking, the oil isn’t released and the glands dry up. This is dangerous because once you lose them, they don’t come back.

“So what is the solution for these kids?”

She says someday we may be able to regenerate the glands with stem cells, but that’s just her hypothesis, and it hasn’t been tested. The kids who lose them will have dry eye for their whole lives, constantly working with drops to keep their eyes lubricated so that scar tissue doesn’t build up. And if scar tissue does build up, it can ultimately lead to blindness.

Dr. Cremers says we are seeing an epidemic of dry eye because of screens. It’s affecting all ages, but young people should have zero dry-eye symptoms. She believes screens are actually rewiring the brain not to blink. She spends a lot of time trying to teach children and adults how to blink. She will tell patients to blink, and they won’t, but they will have thought they did. We don’t know exactly what is happening to the brain-blink connection because of screens, and according to Dr. Cremers, it will take brain anatomy studies and likely years to find out. In the meantime, she sees about twenty kids each week who have dry-eye symptoms.

I asked her how many hours on screens a day is safe to avoid dry-eye damage. Her answer: We don’t really know. Dr. Cremers explained that a study from Japan more than fifteen years ago found that Japanese workers who were on screens more than four hours a day were more likely to develop dry-eye symptoms.[34] Four hours then became a line in the sand, but she says that study wasn’t based on the understanding of the meibomian gland structure and function that we have now. Dr. Cremers told me, “I can only say that I think [recommended limits] need to be much stricter.” What she’s seeing firsthand in her practice—the damage to children’s eyes from not blinking sufficiently—is enough to convince her that we should be dramatically minimizing screens during childhood.

A Constant Battle

Molly and Tim decided to let Emma get a smartphone in large part for the sake of their relationship with her, so they wouldn’t have to keep saying no. What they weren’t prepared for was that the phone would create forty new battles a day.

All the screen-time parents I’ve spoken with are similarly frustrated and exhausted by the constant battles.

One mom of five from Utah, Alyssa, shared with me how she wants to be a gentle parent. She was raised with overly strict parents and decided that she wasn’t going to be like them. But she’s realized that gentle parenting and allowing tech don’t work well together. She says, “It’s me, a drug-dispensing machine, and an underdeveloped child.”

The screen-time parents are constantly having to stand between a drug-dispensing machine and an underdeveloped brain. It’s an untenable, exhausting situation. Alyssa says it also brings out the worst in her. She puts herself in her children’s shoes to imitate their thought pattern: “Mom, I know you have the crack-laden brownie in the cupboard, and you’re putting broccoli on the counter. I know the only thing that’s standing between me and the crack-laden brownie is your willpower.”

Time limits clearly haven’t delivered on their promise to help parents. In fact, they seem to be hurting relationships between parents and their kids and between spouses trying to figure all this out.

And you’re not to blame. Silicon Valley companies are. They’re the ones who have created these highly addictive products and sold a lie to parents that time limits will help.

So what if, instead of fighting these battles, parents just go ahead and kick the screens out of the house? Or better yet, don’t let them in in the first place? It may not be as impossible as it seems.

But before we get to examining a different path forward, we need to assess the other dominant protection strategy: parental controls.

Chapter 2

Parental Controls Are a Myth[*]

I got into technology policy work because I wanted to protect children. After college, I worked in Guatemala for an organization training justice system officials—police, prosecutors, and judges—on how to better handle cases of child sexual assault. Then, after returning to the United States, I continued working to combat exploitation at the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. We found that these crimes were increasingly facilitated online. Predators were finding their victims on social media, or the abuse itself was happening over the web as victims were exploited into sending nude material or performing sexual acts via webcam, after which the content would be propagated across social media platforms.

I learned something critical from my work. Victims can be in loving homes with involved parents. Exploitation can happen to almost any child.

My passion to protect the vulnerable—and especially to protect children from predators—motivated me to get into policy work and to write this book.

It’s not just the inherent addictive design of digital technologies that makes them dangerous. They are also a threat to children because the online world is rife with predators and dangerous content.

Parents aren’t unaware of these dangers. They turn to parental controls for protection, and the question, like before, is whether this harm reduction measure works.

Social Media Gives Predators Incredible Access

Bill Woolf and I worked together on anti-human-trafficking initiatives at the Department of Justice. He lives in Virginia, is a father of six, flies small aircraft in his free time, and is the founder of a nonprofit called Anti-Trafficking International. With his dark hair and beard, dark brown eyes, gentle demeanor, and kind voice, Bill might seem harmless. But don’t be mistaken—he’s tough. In his fifteen years as a law enforcement officer, he took down gangs and human traffickers. He even helped launch a human trafficking task force in northern Virginia that, in its first two years, identified 217 victims of sex and labor trafficking, recovered 126 of them, and initiated investigations into more than a hundred traffickers. I met with Bill over Zoom to get his perspective on what parents need to know about predators online.

The smartphone-based childhood has created what Bill calls “an ecosystem where traffickers and predators have unfettered access to young people.” He explains, “When we were growing up, our parents would lock the doors and windows at night and that kept the bad guys out. You can lock the doors all day long, all night long, and the bad guys can still get in through the airwaves. It’s just the reality of it.”

One in three minors report having an online sexual interaction (and one in five report having one with someone they believe to be an adult). An online sexual interaction involves being asked for a nude image or video, being asked to go “on cam” with a nude or sexually explicit stream, being sent a nude image or video, or being sent sexually explicit messages. And sadly, of these minors, only 21 percent tell a parent or another trusted adult. Which means more than three out of four of them don’t.[1]

“Social media has connected people that would never have been connected before,” Bill summarizes.

This is what happened to a sixteen-year-old boy from Mississippi named Walker Montgomery. He was scrolling Instagram in his room one night when he got a message from a pretty teen girl who appeared to have mutual friends. After messaging back and forth for hours, Walker agreed to a video chat and engaged in a sexual act. But minutes later, it became clear that this was not a local teen girl when the real person on the other end said that the act had been recorded and threatened to share it unless Walker paid them a thousand dollars. Of course he couldn’t pay it. He felt trapped. And so, sadly, that night Walker took his own life.[2]

Walker is far from the only young boy to fall prey to sextortion. The FBI reports that sextortion is happening at alarming rates.[3] Bill attributes its prevalence to access. He says a predator’s access is “just incredible right now and there’s so many different platforms…from just regular text messages, to social media platforms, to online gaming.” The smartphone and its myriad apps, many with messaging capabilities, introduce hundreds of entry points for parents to keep track of.

But surely parents could prevent predators from accessing their kids if they enabled parental control settings on their devices.

Not necessarily.

App Settings Are More Like Suggestions

Social media companies have worked to convince parents that if they just enable the parental controls on their apps, their children will be safe. Instagram, along with many of the other major social media platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Discord, offers “parental supervision” tools, but in all cases, with the narrow exception of certain new defaults for Instagram accounts for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds that require parental approval to change, the teen has to accept the supervision and can cancel it at any time (though the parent will get a notification if it’s canceled). And even that supervision is extremely limited. The controls mainly allow the parent to set daily time limits and breaks, manage privacy settings and content restrictions, see the child’s following and followers lists (or in the case of Instagram and Snapchat, who they are messaging), and view any reports the child submits. But the parent has no insight into posts in the child’s feed or the content of messages sent and received.[4] If parents can’t meaningfully oversee their children’s online activity and communications, and if account restrictions can’t truly be locked in by a parent, then the idea that these are parental controls is a myth. Platforms essentially put teens, with their underdeveloped brains, in the driver’s seat when it comes to their experience on social media.

The companies don’t give parents real tools to supervise children. And the companies have a financial incentive to keep parents in the dark: If they saw fully what was happening on these platforms, they would never let their children use them. And that would mean tech companies would lose business.

Instagram and TikTok also advertise to parents that teens who are under eighteen years old are automatically defaulted into a private account when they join (parents don’t have to set it), which means people have to request to follow teens to see their posts (and teens have to accept them).[5] However, by not requiring age verification or parental involvement, a child can simply sign up for an adult account by lying about their age. And because the platforms reward likes and followers, children aren’t incentivized to have private accounts. So even if parents enable supervision on children’s accounts, there is a trend among children to create fake Instagram accounts—Finstas, as they are called—where they can follow or be followed by whomever they like. Parents get no alerts that this has happened. Instagram, of course, makes it easy for kids to switch between accounts within the app.[6] Protective settings are no match for the incentive structure of social media.

The result is that children are easily accessible to predators. Parents can’t effectively control children’s social media activity. Kids want more followers. So it’s far too easy for predators to “slide into their DMs,” as the kids say. And parents are none the wiser.

Peers Can Be Predators

Privacy settings and parental supervision tools especially fall short when predators are peers. Even if a child’s account is set to private, it doesn’t keep out the predators who are their “friends.”

Apart from the combination of a youthful sex drive and an underdeveloped frontal lobe, boys are easily persuaded to send images to a supposed-teen girl because sending nudes to peers has become normalized for teens today. Kids don’t identify it as exploitation. As Bill explained to me, “They think it’s just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a friend that’s joking around.” This is why boys like Walker so easily fall into sextortion schemes.

My conversation with Bill led me to look further into the data on peer-to-peer exploitation. He wasn’t exaggerating. I found that teens are using their smartphones to produce their own porn and distribute it to one another at alarming rates.[7]

At North Penn High School in Pennsylvania, explicit images of teen girls “were uploaded alongside, in some cases, girls’ names…. The photos and videos were apparently first shared with only one person, sometimes through social media apps like Snapchat, before being saved and uploaded to the Dropbox, according to students.”[8] This high school isn’t unique.

One college student I spoke with told me that boys in his high school regularly swapped nude pictures of girls from their school and neighboring high schools. Before meeting a girl at a party, odds were, they had already seen her naked.

External Controls Are Limited

Parental controls can help to some extent in protecting children from the exchange of nude images. Apple has a built-in nudity detection tool that parents can enable to detect nude images in incoming or outgoing messages, and when nudity is detected, the photo is blurred and the child is given the option to message a trusted adult.[9] And now Apple’s iOS 18 “will require that the Screen Time passcode for the Family Sharing group be entered on the child’s device in order to view or send a sensitive image.”[10]

External parental control software can also help parents monitor or block dangerous material. For example, Bark monitors a child’s texts, emails, web browser activity, and some apps using its AI technology and sends the parent alerts if it detects explicit images or other unsafe content, like cyberbullying, violence, or drug/alcohol content.[11] Another software called Canopy also uses AI to detect nudity in web browsers or photos taken on or downloaded to a device, blocks out explicit content in real time, and prevents a child from accessing or sharing a potentially risky photo until it’s reviewed by the parent.[12]

But some of the most common places that illicit photos and other dangerous content are shared or viewed, like Snapchat, TikTok, and Discord, all block third-party controls, or in the case of Instagram, block their access to messages.[13] Parents are flying blind when it comes to social media.

One mom lamented to me, “I hoped that getting a parental app would kind of solve all my problems, and it really doesn’t. It just gives me a little more information about where they’re spending their time online and not necessarily what they’re doing on those apps.”

Porn Filters Fall Short

Most parents are aware of the dangers of online pornography, so they set up filters to block it on their children’s devices, on their family computer, and even on their home Wi-Fi router. Filters, however, often fall short, especially when it comes to app-based devices. They don’t always work to block sites accessed inside apps (via in-app browsers), which is dangerous when a child can get to PornHub inside of Snapchat in just five clicks.[14]

One mom in an online community I am in shared that even the good apps have back doors that filters don’t catch. She recounted how her son ironically used a parental monitoring app on his phone to access porn. He opened the parental app, clicked the Support button, and a browser opened within the app that he could use to view porn—and the separate porn filter she had installed on the phone didn’t block it. That’s only one example of the many loopholes in filters.

But kids don’t even need to go looking for porn on the web—it finds them on social media. In one leaked study, nearly a fifth of teens ages thirteen to fifteen saw sexually explicit content at least once a week on Instagram.[15] Filters that can block adult websites or nudity in a web browser are powerless to filter out the explicit content being distributed within the apps themselves.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal into teens’ experiences on TikTok confirms that explicit material is on social media. The reporters created dozens of automated accounts of minors aged thirteen to fifteen to see what their feeds looked like. One fake account of a thirteen-year-old user searched the app for “Onlyfans”(a platform primarily used by adult content creators to post pornography), and the pretend user watched a handful of videos in the results, including two selling pornography. The user then turned back to the personalized For You feed, and the app quickly served up more sexual content, including dozens of role-playing videos where people pretended to be in relationships with caregivers. The feed was soon almost entirely dominated by videos involving sexual power dynamics and violence. The investigation found that “the app’s algorithm had pushed the user into a rabbit hole many users call ‘KinkTok,’ featuring whips, chains, and torture devices. Some of this content is banned from the platform.”[16] Yet there it was in this (fake) minor user’s feed.

And when users try to help Instagram out by reporting content for removal, “with a simple, well-positioned flower over a nipple, or a slight blurring of certain private parts, an otherwise nude person isn’t flagged as inappropriate.”[17]

Or even worse, rather than trying to remove adult content, X’s guidelines now explicitly allow it.[18] X claims it will block this content for users under eighteen, an empty protection when the app has no age-verification process. Despite its adult content, X remains available on app stores for children to find and download.[19]

Instagram advertises that they default teens under eighteen into the Less setting of their Sensitive Content Control, which they say limits teens’ exposure to potentially sensitive content.[20] But teens over fifteen (unless they have accepted parental supervision) can make changes to this setting at any time. Other platforms, like Snapchat or TikTok, have no default content restrictions for minors, though they do allow parents to set stricter content restrictions when they pair their accounts with their children’s (although as mentioned earlier, the teen always has to opt in to this supervision).

Even when content restrictions are enabled for an app, they can be ineffective. One mom who had activated TikTok’s Restricted Mode found during her test run that all the videos in the feed were still inappropriate for her child, including one video that was a play on ejaculation.[21]

The ubiquity of online pornography, the ineffectiveness of app content restrictions, and filters’ loopholes and their inability to filter out the explicit content inside apps’ feeds, mean children are being exposed to porn young and often. In a 2022 study, 73 percent of the teens surveyed reported that they had been exposed to porn. The average age of first exposure was twelve. More than half had encountered it accidentally. Of those, 63 percent said they had been exposed in the past week, suggesting it’s a frequent experience. Much of the accidental exposure came from online means, such as social media, a link they didn’t realize was porn, search results, or an online ad.[22]

And the porn that children are stumbling across online today isn’t your uncle’s Playboy; it’s dehumanizing, violent, and grotesque.

Isabel Hogben accidentally stumbled across Pornhub at the age of ten. She shared her story of what that was like: “When I talk to adults, I get the strong sense they picture a hot bombshell in lingerie or a half-naked model on a beach. This is not what I stumbled upon back in fourth grade. I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence. The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.”[23]

Indeed, research shows it’s common for teens to see pornography depicting rape, choking, or pain.[24]

And they aren’t just seeing it. Nurses, teachers, and principals are reporting young children acting out on others the mature content they have consumed.[25] Eoghan Cleary, an assistant principal of a secondary school in Ireland who coordinates health education at the school, has found that students’ 24/7 access to hardcore pornography is affecting their real-life relationships. He has his sixteen-year-old students make a list of what they think is expected of them in a sexual interaction and what they think is expected of the opposite sex. He says, “For our male students, they expect to chase the woman, to slap and to choke her, to be dominant, to be aggressive, to be in control, to know what you want, and to be with as many as possible…. For my female students, it’s to be submissive, to be kinky, and to be slapped, choked, to do what he says and to do what he likes.”[26]

Controls Can’t Filter Out the Dangerous Environment

Controls also can’t filter out the environment that these apps create, where teens are incentivized to post sexualized content of themselves or participate in illicit sexual activities.

A Forbes review of hundreds of TikTok livestreams revealed “how viewers regularly use the comments to urge young girls to perform acts that appear to toe the line of child pornography—rewarding those who oblige with TikTok gifts, which can be redeemed for money, or off-platform payments to Venmo, PayPal or Cash App accounts. It’s ‘the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds,’ says Leah Plunkett, an assistant dean at Harvard Law School.”[27]

The medium is also the message. Bill told me the entire atmosphere of social media sends dangerous messages to children that sex is normal and everyone is doing it and that, like all the social media influencers, they, too, can make easy money. All these subconscious messages play right into predators’ hands.

Social media is thus not only a mechanism by which predators gain access to children but also a medium by which strangers and predators are changing children’s self-image and understanding of society in a way that makes it much easier for them to manipulate kids into unsafe situations. And that is a deeper problem that no parental control can change.

Devices Make It Worse, Not Easier, for Parents

Maybe you think, I’ll just give a smartphone but not allow social media on it. I’ll lock the phone down, and I won’t allow any dangerous apps. Not so fast. Kids are very good at finding ways to get to social media. One professional in the field of protecting kids online shared with me, “I’ve never seen a smartphone without Instagram. The two are one and the same. If a child has a smartphone, they will get to social media.” It’s technically possible to prevent, but it’s extremely difficult to police and enforce.

And it’s not just social media apps parents need to keep track of. Smartphones introduce a world of thousands of apps and entry points. To give one seemingly innocent example, take YouVersion’s Bible app. Parents assumed their children were spending all this time on the app reading Bible verses. It turns out, however, people were using the app’s community feature to establish connections, “in some instances linking younger users with strangers sharing illicit content.” Children were also using the share-a-scripture-image feature, which allowed them to choose an image from their camera roll, to share nude photos with their connections. (YouVersion has since removed the ability to share photos from camera rolls.)[28] Most of the external parental software available on the market isn’t even set up to monitor smaller apps like this.

Device companies like Apple and Google advertise that they have parental control settings to help parents, like filters to limit adult websites, parental consent for app downloads to the device, and other content restrictions a parent can enable, but these settings aren’t automatically enabled for minor devices (though the companies know each user’s age since their birth date is part of the Apple or Google Account), and they aren’t always in an intuitive place, sometimes making it difficult for parents to find them and turn them on. For example, Apple’s Screen Time is a horrible name for its parental controls because it doesn’t even indicate that this feature includes an adult website filter and other content restrictions a parent can turn on.

Even if a parent does navigate their way to activating device controls, they are buggy and don’t work effectively.

A Wall Street Journal reporter tested Apple’s controls. She writes, “My son’s iPad is set to restrict him from visiting most websites. And yet I was able to use it to access the most X-rated parts of the internet. Porn, violent images, illicit drugs. I could see it all by typing a special string of characters into the Safari browser’s address bar. The parental controls I had set via Apple’s Screen Time? Useless. Security researchers reported this particular software bug to Apple multiple times over the past three years with no luck…. The bug is a bad one, allowing users to easily circumvent web restrictions.”[29]

Dr. Adam Pletter, a child and adolescent psychologist in Maryland, started a campaign to get Apple to fix Ask to Buy, a parental consent feature for purchasing apps and other products.[30] When a parent deletes an app (whether paid or free) from their child’s phone, the child can redownload it without asking permission again.[31] Ask to Buy happens only once, so there isn’t a way to effectively take apps away from kids once they have them.

The device companies aren’t making parental controls easy or effective or fixing bugs in them once found, but even worse, their own products are promoting material that is inappropriate for children.

Alyssa, the mom we met from Utah, said she noticed that whenever she opens the Apple App Store for her ten-year-old, it tells him that his must-have apps are Tinder, TikTok, Hinge, and Bumble. She has her child’s device set up to allow him to have only apps rated nine-plus.

And scarily enough, it’s working. According to one study, a quarter of pre-teen boys say they’ve been on a dating app. Yes, you read that correctly. One in four nine- to twelve-year-old boys reported they’ve been on an online dating app.[32]

Inappropriate ads aren’t confined to app stores. Parents also say ads promoting sexual content are showing up inside apps intended for children.[33] It doesn’t matter if a parent uses the device’s parental control settings to restrict available apps to a certain age rating if inappropriate ads can be shown in any app. Even parents who pay for the ad-free version of gaming apps rated twelve-plus have been alarmed to see their children prompted to view mature or explicit ads in order to earn more tokens or points in the game.[34] What child can resist clicking yes to earn more tokens?

Thrust into an Adult World Without Adults

A parent used to be able to poke their head into the basement or step outside to check on what their kid was doing with friends. They didn’t need to monitor a child’s behavior constantly, but they could keep an eye out, and there was an expectation on the child’s part of accountability, knowing that Mom or Dad was nearby and could pop in at any minute. Not so in the online world.

Miriam Cates, a former member of Parliament in the UK, has been a champion of online safety legislation. She tried to paint a picture of the dire reality of the online world in a speech she gave to Parliament: “Imagine if our streets were so lawless that it was unsafe for children to leave their homes. Imagine if, on their daily walk to school, our children had to witness the beheading of strangers or the violent rape of women and girls. Imagine if, when hanging out in the local park, it was normal for hundreds of people to accost our child and encourage them to take their own life. Imagine if it was a daily occurrence for our children to be propositioned for sex or blackmailed into stripping for strangers. Imagine if every mistake that our child made was advertised on public billboards, so that everyone could laugh and mock until the shame made life not worth living. This is not a horror movie or some imaginary wild west; this is the digital world that our children occupy, often for hours a day.”[35]

Without real parental control over smartphones and social media, children are thrust into a virtual adult world without any adults to guide them or look out for them there. And they don’t know how to handle it. How could they? They’re children.

—

One frustrated mom, Kathleen Linder, got tired of hearing that parental controls are an effective way to protect kids on social media, so she wrote a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal to push back on this argument. She explained how she’d tried parental controls, which didn’t work, and ended her letter by saying, “The only way I can successfully limit my children’s time on their devices and social media is to take away their iPhones. As a society, maybe that’s what we should consider.”[36]

She’s right. That is what we should consider. We don’t take our children to bars and strip clubs and blindfold them or have them wear earplugs. That would be absurd. We just don’t let them go to those places. It should be the same for the virtual world.

Skip Notes

* Content advisory: This chapter contains descriptions of adult sexual matters.

Part II

Fast

Chapter 3

Trying Out a Screen Detox

Let’s be real. You already know that the half measures don’t work. But maybe you don’t feel like getting rid of the screens is possible. Maybe you feel like you’re in a complete lose-lose situation. Other parents and your school don’t make it easy on you either. Phones are required for soccer practice updates and class assignments. All the outside pressures push toward screens. You feel forced into settling for devices with screen-time limits and parental controls, because that is the least worst option.

As I mentioned, I lived in Guatemala after college. Guatemala is a developing country. The tap water isn’t safe to drink. If you drink it, you will be on the toilet for days. It’s not pleasant. All the ex-pats and most of the locals I worked with drank bottled water. We had jugs of water delivered to our office and to our apartments. It’s what everyone did.

One time I was out in a rural village with a co-worker. We were on a weekend trip to see Guatemala’s famous Semuc Champey, a series of beautiful cascading turquoise pools with little waterfalls and caverns to explore. But it was remote. We’d driven on backcountry roads in a Jeep to get there. We were sleeping in a tent. And we’d brought in all our own bottled water. Near the end of the trip, we ran low on water. I was trapped. Either I could go without water and risk dehydration, or I could drink the tap water at the local restaurant…. I chose the latter. It was the least worst option.

But the least worst option when it comes to kids and screens isn’t cutting it. When we put time limits or parental controls on screens, we’re already admitting that something about them isn’t good for kids. We don’t put time limits on kids riding their bikes or reading books, and we don’t install parental controls on their Legos or board games. We don’t have to.

Parents don’t feel like they have a choice with screens. It’s how I felt in Guatemala. You feel forced to choose between one bad experience and another slightly less bad experience. Between screens unleashed with all their adverse effects or screens with limits and controls you have to police constantly.

But what if there is another way?

Trial Period

Ryan and Mary Thorne live in Arizona with their three boys, Dallas, Dylan, and Jax.[1] Their second son, Dylan, was diagnosed with autism at age three, and when they received his diagnosis, the doctor warned them, “If you lose him to the world of video games, you will never get him back.” The doctor explained why the virtual world pulls these kids in. They don’t have to interact in person, and it feels easier for them to navigate a screen than real life. So he repeated, “You’re not going to get him back.” The Thornes got it. No video games.

However, they allowed all their sons to have iPads. They thought they were educational tools. In fact, they got the idea from one of Dylan’s therapists, who used flashcards on an iPad. If this was something that could help him, it couldn’t be bad.

Fast-forward a few years. The Thornes were told their youngest son, Jax, wasn’t ready for kindergarten. He couldn’t focus, and he was getting into fights at preschool. The Thornes kept him home another year—a year Mary admits he spent with his face in an iPad. One day, Mary and Ryan were out of the house when their oldest son, Dallas, called them with an emergency: Jax had lost at the game Angry Birds and taken an enormous bite out of the iPad. Shards of iPad glass were in his mouth.

Two months before Jax was supposed to start kindergarten, medication seemed like the only option. But Mary didn’t feel comfortable with the idea, and she was determined not to medicate her son until she’d exhausted every other option.

Around this time, close friends of the Thornes had started talking about how they had taken their kids off screens and were seeing the benefits. It sounded great, but the Thornes were hesitant. “We couldn’t picture dealing with this child without the iPad that seemed to make him better.”[2] The Thornes had hit rock bottom. They didn’t know what else to do, so they decided they had nothing to lose by following their friends’ advice and trying out a screen detox for thirty days.

The first two weeks were hell. When they told their boys that they were getting rid of their devices, it was as though they had said “we’re killing your dog.” There were tears from all three boys—the most tears they’d seen out of them about anything. At first, Mary felt like she was going crazy. “If you’re going to take it away from your kids, you have to replace it with your time. Do I love playing Monopoly for five hours? No, I don’t. Did I do it? Every day.”

The Thornes kept going. It got better. The boys got over their initial distress. After the first two weeks, they started playing more independently and needed less parental involvement. They were excited about what they would get to do each day. Their sons’ friends even started getting involved, playing Monopoly and chess tournaments with them.

Ryan warns parents, “It’s going to be hard. It’s going to seem overwhelming, but you just have to try it.” And Mary emphasizes that it takes the full thirty days to truly see results. “What’s the point of going halfway? Because you’re not going to see the benefits if you don’t actually do it.”[3]

“Aren’t you curious to know what the best version of your kid [is]?” Mary asks. “Even if you think your kid is perfect right now, aren’t you at least curious, if it only took thirty days, to see even how much better they could be? Because I promise you even the best kid would be better.”

It didn’t take long for the Thornes to see the benefits of the detox. Jax’s teachers told them that he had done a one-eighty. “He’s like the happiest kid in class. He’s not doing any of the things that he was doing before.” Other people also noticed. They had known Jax and what he was like. One mom asked Mary, “What did you do? He’s like a new person.” The Thornes had gotten rid of the iPads. That was it.

Especially amazing to his mom, Jax had grown in self-awareness. One day she picked him up from a summer camp where someone had brought an Xbox to play while they waited for the parents. Jax didn’t even play the game, but when Mary went in, he was glued to watching the other kids playing. When they got in the car, she recalls, “he threw this fit that I hadn’t seen for months, and I was like, ‘Jax, do you realize what’s happening right now, how you’re acting?’ ” He told her, “It’s because of the video games. I don’t know why I do that, Mom.” Jax came to see for himself what the screens did to him, and he didn’t want to go back to that. Mary says, “Right now, if there’s ever screens around…he goes the other way because he knows the old him.” He doesn’t want to go back to the kid who got in trouble every day for exploding in rage. “He loves the kid he is now.”

A Total Detox Is Needed

Melanie Hempe, a mom of four living in North Carolina, had her first career as a labor and delivery nurse, helping families bring their babies into this world. Melanie is a parent who, like the Thornes, has struggled with the destructive impacts of screens on a child. Her oldest son, Adam, developed an intense video game addiction, and that experience led Melanie to reverse course completely on screens for her younger three children.

With passion in her North Carolina twang, Melanie told me that “little video game players grow up to be big video game players.” She lamented to me how she had kept thinking her son Adam would outgrow the video games. That was a myth. From the age of twelve, his video game use only kept getting worse, to the point where at age eighteen he dropped out of college because video games had destroyed his life and he couldn’t function or live on his own as an adult.[4]

These screen-induced problems that start in childhood don’t go away on their own. And they lead to the exact opposite of what parents hope for their grown children.

Adam, now free of his addiction, thanks to going through a total screen detox program known as boot camp when he joined the U.S. Army, encourages his mom to tell other parents that they have to (figuratively speaking) rip the screens out of kids’ hands.[5] There is no pulling the Band-Aid off slowly. A total detox is needed to get the screens out of kids’ systems.

Dr. Victoria Dunckley, whose work we looked at in chapter 1, confirms this. After helping more than five hundred children, teens, and young adults detox from screens to address the overstimulation and hyperarousal of the nervous system characterizing their symptoms, she shares that “even small amounts of gaming or computer play often renders the Reset useless.” The reset program she outlines in her book has parents eliminate all interactive screen time, no exceptions.[6]

After learning from her own experience with her son Adam, Melanie founded an organization called ScreenStrong and now has a second career in helping other families deliver their children from the destructive virtual world back into the real world. Melanie and ScreenStrong walk parents through how to detox their children from screens and set up a family lifestyle without addictive screen technologies.[7] They give parents a playbook for a thirty-day digital detox. Both Dr. Dunckley’s and ScreenStrong’s detox plans start with a set of ground rules.

Detox Ground Rules

A few basic rules make up a digital detox:

no video games

no iPads or other tablets

no smartphones

no social media

no TV (except for family movies)

school screens for homework only

In sum, a digital detox means total abstinence from addictive screen technologies (social media, smartphones, video games, tablets) and extremely minimal use of other screens (TVs and computers).

Prepare

Before you dive into a detox, you should first prepare yourself, your spouse, a plan, and your house and family.

Yourself

The first step is preparing yourself as a parent. To make a detox successful, parents should educate themselves on the harms of screens to shore up their resolve and to help them explain their rationale to their spouse and children. Mary Thorne says that whenever she felt like she was going to lose her mind during their detox, she’d go back to the books she’d read beforehand, and they would help her keep going.[8] She had to keep reminding herself why she was doing this—to remember the adverse effects of screens she was helping her kids detox from.

Your Spouse

Being prepared as a parent also means getting your spouse on board. Dr. Dunckley has found that a detox goes most smoothly if both parents are on board.[9] It’s not uncommon for one spouse to think the screens aren’t that bad. Dad may enjoy playing video games with his sons. That’s okay. Your spouse doesn’t need to be exactly where you are. Simply ask them to commit to being a united front with you for thirty days, to try life without screens as an experiment, and explain to them the reasons you want to do this by showing them some of the research you’re reading.

A Plan

Having a plan in place is essential before starting a detox. Many parents reiterated to me that you can’t just wing it and go cold turkey. Throwing the Xbox in the pool isn’t recommended. Follow a step-by-step plan so you can make it through the entire detox. For a small fee, you can access ScreenStrong’s thirty-day detox guide on screenstrong.org, which also includes access to their free online community of parents to ask questions of and get advice from families who have already done a detox. (You can still join the community for free if you don’t want to purchase access to the detox plan.)[10] Or you can use Dr. Dunckley’s four-week plan that she walks readers through in her book. The first week of her reset is preparation, and then the actual detox is three weeks.[11] Both detoxes follow similar principles.

Once you have a detox plan to follow, also plan for how you are going to replace children’s screen time with other activities. Buy board games, art supplies, outdoor toys, or Legos; borrow books from the library; do what you can in advance to set up your house with non-screen options readily available.

The Thornes made a plan before their detox for how they would fill their three boys’ time once the screens were gone. Mary and Ryan divvied up responsibilities (one of Dr. Dunckley’s recommendations).[12] They decided Ryan would take the boys to do fun things outside the house, like playing golf or going to a basketball game. Mary, who is more of an introvert, planned to do indoor activities at home with the kids. When her husband traveled for work, she would take them out for special treats like ice cream when they got tired of being at home. Then when her husband got back, he would take them out to do boy stuff and give Mom a break.[13] (Planning to give each parent break times is something else Dr. Dunckley recommends to help make the reset sustainable.)[14] Ryan and Mary were a team, and they had a game plan.

Be forewarned that the main thing you’ll need to replace screens with at first is your time as a parent. It will initially take a good amount of parental involvement until kids can learn to play independently without screens.

Help kids understand the plan too. Write out a simple schedule of what the days will look like during the detox. The schedule should be a mix of fun activities as well as household tasks, like taking family walks, making beds, and reading for thirty minutes to an hour. Post the schedule in your home where kids can see it, maybe on the fridge or next to the calendar.[15]

Your House and Family

The last part of the prep stage is preparing your house and talking to your kids about it. Melanie finds that the best way to start the detox is going away as a family for the weekend on a screen-free wilderness trip together, like camping or staying at a cabin. Before you leave, you need to get rid of all the screens in the house.[16] Do a total “screen sweep,” as Dr. Dunckley calls it: Gather everything up—smartphones, iPads and other tablets, gaming consoles, all handheld games, e-readers, laptops, and even old flip cellphones—put them all in a box, and get them out of the house so that when you come back from the weekend, all the screens are already gone.[17]

Use the time away as a family to talk about the detox together, why you are doing it and what it will look like, and get your kids excited about all the things they can look forward to doing as a family without the screens.

Talking to your kids in preparation for the detox may also involve apologizing to them. One principal of a low-tech school has encouraged parents to consider reversing course on smartphones by asking, “What’s wrong with apologizing as a parent?” He explains that parents can say, “I have to apologize. I put you in a situation that I should not have put you into. I have done a disservice to you…. We’re going to change this.”[18]

Detox parents share that it’s never too late. Even if your child is a junior or senior in high school, you can take the smartphone back for a detox period or completely until they go to college. Help them reset and start their adult life not addicted to the phone. We know these devices aren’t good for adults, either, so help your teens form good habits without these devices while still in your home to prepare them for healthy habits in adulthood. One mom who did the ScreenStrong detox shared, “I was surprised that my 14-year-old actually seemed very relieved when I finally took away the screens and his phone. He only had two minor melt downs.” She says that after two months her son even told her he saw how much screens had been wasting his life.[19] A reset can help anyone at any age at any time.

Parents, You Too

Parents, you don’t have to get rid of your smartphones entirely like the kids during the detox, but reducing your own use shows kids that you are a team player. To make your screens less addictive during a detox, ScreenStrong recommends setting your phone to grayscale and deleting social media apps.[20] You can also put your phone physically away from you when at home with your kids. Some families have phone boxes, or “freedom baskets,” where parents leave devices once they are home from work. Chapter 5 and the appendix have more resources on how to reduce your own phone use.

Find One Other Family

A final word on preparing: If you can, find one other family to do the detox with you, for accountability and encouragement. Talk to a classmate’s or another peer’s family that may be experiencing similar frustrations with screens, and ask if they will join you in doing a detox just for thirty days. Detoxing together can make it easier on each family, because the children have peers going through it with them and parents have allies. It’s also helpful to be able to send your children over to each other’s houses to mix up the environment during the detox, because you know both families are following the same rules of no screens.

Try Just Seven Days

Maybe three weeks or thirty days still feels like too big of a jump. Then try seven days. Simply use the detox rules above, and start small by following them for a week. You can start with seven days, and maybe you even do a few seven-day detoxes before going for a full thirty days. Even a screen-free week can make a difference in a child’s or teen’s behavior and self-awareness regarding screens.

ScreenStrong’s online community offers a free seven-day challenge guide that parents can follow.[21] Or if you’re a teacher or school administrator, Melanie recommends having your students try this seven-day detox together. She helped one group of forty eleventh and twelfth grade students take seven days off screens, and then they wrote essays about their experience. She says, “Some of the essays were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I really like my dad. I didn’t even know I liked my dad. I hadn’t really ever talked to my dad, but now that I don’t have my phone, I’m talking to my dad.’ ”[22] Getting kids to taste life without screens, even for a week, can make all the difference. They just might discover that they like hanging out with you.

A side note: Summer is a great time to try out a screen detox. A lot of screen alternatives are available when the weather is warm. Have your kids join the swim team or spend time at the pool; do the summer reading challenge at the local library; plan a family vacation (maybe the vacation is even the time to test out a screen-free week). There are also many tech-free overnight summer camps for kids off in the woods. Parents have shared with me how much their children loved being off their phones for a week at an overnight camp where all their campmates were likewise without devices. The memories they made with camp friends helped give them a positive vision for life without screens.

A Phone-Free Day, a Phone-Free Hour, a Phone-Free Meal

Start even smaller. While it takes a longer detox of twenty-one or thirty days to see hyperarousal symptoms from screens truly abate, trying smaller periods of time free of devices can still invite your child to notice what it’s like being without them, both negatively and positively. If your child is always on their phone, try a detox at any level. Maybe a phone-free day, hour, meal, or outing will help them notice their unhealthy attachment to their phone and get them thinking about it.

For example, invite your child to go on a thirty-minute walk around the neighborhood with you without their phone. Invite their curiosity by having them do something they wouldn’t normally do and then asking them to notice their feelings about it. Ask them questions like, “Why do you think you feel anxious leaving your phone behind? Do you wish you didn’t feel attached to it in that way?” Try to help them see their unhealthy relationship with technology for themselves.

In taking these moments to be phone-free, you can help your child practice being intentional with their time in a different way. A detox, whether it’s thirty days, seven days, or a single day or hour, gives children a different vision of themselves. It helps them taste and see what they and their lives can be like without screens. You can even gamify a detox with your child and make it into a challenge for them. Ask them to start off with an hour and see how high they can go, how long they can last without their devices. As they do these little detox challenges, what children observe may make them desire to do a longer detox themselves.

See the Results and Keep Going

Detoxes work. There is science behind them. Dr. Dunckley explains that, by the third week without screens, “biorhythms and brain chemistry may be close to normalizing, and as healing continues, stress and sleep hormones rebalance and promote calmness rather than hyperarousal.” She goes on to say, “In contrast to the survival state [induced by interactive screens], which is inherently selfish, impulsive, and one-track-minded, your child is now on his or her way to becoming healthier in mood, thought, behavior, and relationships.”[23]

Dr. Anna Lembke also says that “tech holidays or digital fasts are very effective for restoring baseline mood, motivation, energy and sleep, as well as decreasing the constant cravings to check our devices.”[24]

The Thornes found all of this to be true.[25]

They started their screen detox for their youngest son, Jax, because of his behavioral issues. They were shocked when they also saw huge changes in their second son, Dylan, who is on the autism spectrum.

Dylan had always been behind academically. The classroom was a constant struggle for him. Year after year, when Ryan and Mary went in for Dylan’s school evaluations, it was painful to hear how he was behind.

After they got rid of the screens, it was time for Dylan’s fifth grade evaluation. Although they had seen some positive changes in him at home, they still braced themselves for what they would hear from his teacher. Ryan recounts, “I still remember the teacher that said, ‘Hey, he’s my best kid in class. He’s at the top in every subject.’ And I remember I lost it. I just started crying there in the evaluation.” When Dylan received his diagnosis at age three, the Thornes didn’t think he’d have a normal life. Mary says, “He graduated sixth grade with straight A’s. When he started kindergarten, he was nonverbal.” Not only did he get straight A’s, but his teachers also told the Thornes he was doing better in the district assessments than all his peers. And it’s not just academics. Dylan made a club basketball team. He’s doing well socially. He has real friendships.

A support coordinator from the state goes to the Thornes’ home every three months to check on Dylan. He’s in charge of about two hundred families, and he told the Thornes, “I see kid after kid every single day, and Dylan is the only one that shows progress like this. I just wish that I could make the other families that I go to see the importance of the screens.” In every other home he visits, the kid on the spectrum is either using an iPad or playing a video game, and maybe the kid looks up when he comes in and maybe they don’t, but Dylan comes in and greets him. The Thornes never expected this much progress. “We didn’t think that…taking [the iPad] away would create a kid who made a club basketball team and has straight A’s. We didn’t know. That was a gift.”

Once they saw these changes in their kids, the Thornes could never go back. “After those thirty days were up. We’re like, let’s do thirty more. They didn’t even ask for their screens back…. Once they saw how it changed their lives, they didn’t want to go back.”[26] Mary tries to reassure other parents who have fears in contemplating a detox: “It’s so much easier than you think. Expect the worst, and know that you will be pleasantly surprised because after it gets out of their system and if you hold your guns, you will see these versions of your kid that you’re like, ‘Well, if I had known this, I would have done this forever.’ ”[27]

Part III

FEAST

The Thornes kept going. When Ryan and Mary saw the changes in their boys, and they pushed through an initial pain point, their kids stopped asking for the screens and they decided to exit screens for good.

Many other families have done the same. I call them Tech Exit families. They choose to adopt the rules of the detox permanently. They practice total abstinence from addictive screen technologies.

This is the definition of the Tech Exit: no smartphones, social media, tablets, or video games during childhood.

How do they do this? For most of us, it feels like we’d have to overcome too many points of resistance for our kids to go without smartphones and social media over the long haul. They require access to smartphone apps for legitimate reasons, like getting soccer practice updates or checking in for school assemblies. All their peers socialize over social media and interactive online games. You may also have concerns about how they’ll communicate with you or with their friends without a phone. You don’t want them to feel left out. You also wonder if restricting screens while they are at home means that when they go off to college, they’ll binge and go crazy on them.

It’s one thing to be convinced that what you’re doing isn’t working. It’s another thing to be convinced to try out something else.

I interviewed Tech Exit families across the country. They have different-sized families and children across a wide age range, but I found they share five core commitments that have made a screen-minimalist lifestyle sustainable and helped them overcome any resistance to it. We can remember these commitments with the acronym FEAST:

F: Find Other Families—they find other families to exit with them and create countercommunities

E: Explain, Educate, and Exemplify—they get buy-in from their kids by explaining their rationale, educating them about the dangers of digital technology, and exemplifying healthy tech use as parents

A: Adopt Alternatives—they resist smartphones by adopting alternatives and finding work-arounds

S: Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules—they set up digital accountability in their families, disallow private technology, and establish family screen rules

T: Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits—they replace screens with positive real-life responsibilities and activities

FEAST is what follows the tech fast of our previous section. Fasting requires giving something up, sacrificing—oftentimes with great struggle. But it doesn’t leave us empty; instead, it ushers us into something better—an altogether different kind of life, one of flourishing: a feast. In the next five chapters, we’ll look at each of these five commitments in turn.

So that you can see these commitments lived out, I’m going to introduce you to some parents. You’ll note that most of them are moms. You’re not going to meet as many dads. I was struck by this, and as a mom myself, I’m not really in a position to solve this problem, but it seems like something that dads might want to think about seriously.

Now I recognize that the burden of implementing tech decisions for the family and handling any resistance to them often falls more heavily on moms. Moms also tend to socialize more with other moms and are natural community builders, so it’s easier for them to take initiative to find other families with whom they can resist tech. But I wrote this book for dads too. It doesn’t have to be moms always leading the charge. Dads have an important role to play in helping both their own families and their communities make a childhood free of social media and smartphones possible.

Chapter 4

Find Other Families

It was one of the greatest engineering feats of all time when the Chicago River reversed course. The river originally flowed slowly into Lake Michigan from the plains. As the city grew during the 1800s, sewage and other pollutants were dumped into the river, which was Chicago’s source of drinking water, and started contaminating it, causing public health problems like typhoid fever and cholera. Residents called it “the stinking river.” Fear of disease spread, and officials decided they needed to permanently reverse the river’s flow. How would they do this? By digging a canal deep enough so that gravity and a series of canal locks would increase the flow of clean water from Lake Michigan into the river and force the polluted water to drain into the Mississippi River instead.

It took eight years for engineers to build a twenty-eight-mile canal to connect the Chicago River to the rivers that flow into the Mississippi. On January 2, 1900, when a steam shovel removed the final bit of dirt separating the river from the new Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, new counterpressures of water from Lake Michigan were released and the river reversed its course. It was an engineering miracle. Chicago’s citizens were saved from polluted water and the diseases that came with it.[1]

Creating Counterpressures

The river of screens has been flowing one direction: into childhood. Parents lament all the pressures that push them toward giving their children smartphones and social media. All their children’s friends have them. Schools and extracurricular activities require certain apps. And so on. But the screens are polluting childhood. The kids aren’t all right. They are anxious, depressed, lonely, and withdrawn. Their well-being is suffering. Yet individual parents find it difficult to stand against the strong current of screens. The only successful approach to pushing screens out of childhood is to stand with others and build counterpressures through communities.

We need new counterpressures today that will cause screens to flow away from childhood rather than into it. Tech Exit families help create these counterpressures by building communities that resist screens together. They find other families.

Exiting with others gives families two key things they need to be successful in resisting screens in the long run. First, it gives parents allies, and second, it gives kids friends who also aren’t on screens. As chapter 1 explained, smartphones and social media don’t just cause harm at the individual level; they also create negative group dynamics. This means social media can affect even those children who aren’t on the platforms. Individual parents are no match for combatting these negative social dynamics, even if they keep their children off all these technologies. Tech Exit families, therefore, find others to exit with them.

How can parents build these countercommunities? Where do families find others?

Start with Your Neighbors

A neighborhood in a suburb of D.C. was described to me as looking like 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. These kids don’t have phones. I had to find out how they had done this.

Lexie and Brad live in this neighborhood with their two boys, a sixth grader and an eighth grader. I asked Lexie to tell me about their street and how it came to be so special, with kids playing outside free of screens. As I spoke with her, it became clear that the low-tech ethos of their block evolved organically over time from two simple things: kids playing outside and parents talking together. There was no grand strategy. It all started from one conversation Lexie had with her neighbor across the street.

When Lexie and Brad’s family moved into the neighborhood several years ago, back when their boys were little, as they were getting to know their neighbors, the neighbor across the street naturally brought up in conversation with Lexie her own family’s thinking around technology and concerns over pornography exposure. She and Lexie quickly realized their families shared a lot of the same values, and they became comfortable with sending their kids back and forth to each other’s houses. The parents were friends and allies on the street, and the kids were play buddies, running around in the woods behind the neighbor’s house.

Get the Kids Outside

Once their kids were playing together outside, another kid from school started coming around, too, and then a few years ago, a new family moved in who, Lexie said, “honestly might not have even shared the same views necessarily, but because it’s what we’re doing—we’re playing outside—they joined in too.”

You don’t need every family on the street to have the same views on technology. Lexie said there are a couple of kids in the neighborhood who don’t often come out with her kids. But that doesn’t matter, because her kids have other friends to play with outside. You just need a few families to come together to create a core group. Others have joined, attracted by the sounds and sights of children running through the woods, throwing balls, squealing and laughing together. A group of kids outside, living within two blocks of one another. That’s all it took to shift the momentum on the street away from screens and make it look like it’s back in the 1970s.

You also don’t need every family in the core group to have the exact same practices or policies around technology. Of the families in their neighborhood, one does give their kids smartphones, but they don’t have browsers or social media on them. Lexie’s family has Gabb phones for her boys that are mainly kept at home. The other families don’t have any phones yet. So far no one has social media. Lexie and Brad’s family doesn’t have any gaming devices, and though the other families do, no one would allow their kids to be on them all day. Video games are a rainy-day activity and not the go-to.

When a group of parents comes together around a vision of the good things they want to give their children, like being outdoors, it allows each family to then determine where their own restrictions will fall.

And a positive vision is a powerful force for change. These families in the neighborhood know what they want their children’s childhoods to be filled with. They all agree it’s not screens. They have created a street culture of kids playing outside by themselves. Screens have lost their attraction.

There was never a set agenda of “here are the rules we want” from any parent on the street, but rather, over the years the parents have talked with one another about what they love, celebrating the good they are seeing in the neighborhood that they want to keep going. They focus on the positive. Lexie says the result of these conversations among the neighbors is “now if you were going to be the parent to introduce a smartphone to the neighborhood, the other parents are going to be like, ‘Oh, why’d you do that?’ ” They love the counterculture they have fostered, and talking regularly about it keeps the momentum going.

Create a Haven

These neighborhood kids all go to the local public school together, where the majority of kids do have smartphones. Lexie’s kids may be in the minority at their school, but they come home to a vibrant community of other kids who also aren’t on their phones. Their neighborhood and home have become a screen-free haven they return to at the end of each day, serving as a buffer against peer social dynamics that revolve around phones and social media, because they have friends to play with in the real world. And when they’re at school, these kids have one another. They’re not the only ones without smartphones.

These families now feel a responsibility to maintain the counterpressures they have created and preserve the gift they have.

The neighbors across the street from Lexie and Brad ended up moving a few years later. When they put their house up for sale, two families were interested in buying it. When the sellers showed the first family the woods behind their house that the neighborhood kids always played in, they showed little interest but lit up when they saw the basement: “Oh, this would be perfect to put a big screen up on the wall to play video games.” The second family, on the other hand, asked about kids’ activities in the area and was excited that there were woods in the back. The first family offered them more money. But they sold their house to the second family because, they said, “you can’t take those woods for granted and, second, we need to give the block the gift of an active family.” It worked. The new family that moved in has become part of the core group whose kids are out running around together. “That’s just one example,” Lexie said, “of how now that we’re all here and recognize this as a gift, if any of us go to sell our house, it’s our duty to pick out someone who will go well in the neighborhood.”

Find Other Parents Through Your School

On a beautiful morning in April, I loaded up our minivan with my two toddler boys and my two-month-old baby girl and drove forty-five minutes to talk with a Tech Exit mom named Margaret in the scenic town of Potomac, Maryland. We talked as I nursed my baby on her couch and my boys destroyed her basement (she didn’t seem to mind), and our conversation continued as we meandered outside to let the boys roam her backyard in the warm spring sunshine.

Margaret told me she started reaching out to other parents in her daughter’s sixth grade class and organized a group discussion about the dangers of technology and how parents could work together.

I told my sons to stop throwing the gravel rocks from Margaret’s patio into her grass as she explained that this group now gets together once a month and the majority of the parents in her daughter’s class of forty-five students are still hanging with her on not giving smartphones and social media yet. A tool Margaret likes to use as the basis for proposed collaboration is the U.S. surgeon general’s recommendations on kids and technology. “You can’t tell anyone else how to parent,” she says, “but you can propose to them, ‘How can we take the surgeon general’s advice, which is start when they’re young and collaborate with the other parents so that your child is not the only one, for the benefit of our kids and for the benefit of our relationship with our kids?’ ”[2]

Another mom, Hannah Oertel, who lives on the other side of the Atlantic, has also found winsome ways of talking to other parents about delaying giving kids smartphones and social media. Hannah and I met over Zoom.

Hannah, a Scottish mum of two tween girls, has worked as a therapist and life coach for the last decade. She started increasingly seeing clients dealing with intense anxiety related to social media. She would spend five sessions on a girl’s boyfriend liking his ex-girlfriend’s picture on social media, for example. That kind of intense fixation was the first alarm bell for Hannah about the dangers of social media. Then a few years ago a student in her daughter’s choir, a group of kids Hannah describes as pretty nerdy, showed her daughter a beheading video on a smartphone. And that was when Hannah realized this problem was urgent. She decided to start her own nonprofit called Delay Smartphones to encourage parents to delay giving their children smartphones. She had already been trying to warn people about the negative effects of smartphones for several years, but it wasn’t having much impact.

So as she was starting up her nonprofit, she decided to look into what makes people change their minds. How had Brexit happened? How do hostage negotiators work? She found that the main lesson is people don’t like being told what to do. She laughed as she told me, “I had fully gone down that route.” No wonder it wasn’t working.

She decided to try a different tactic. She contacted all the parents in her daughter’s class individually and told them she was trying to find out where parents were at in thinking about smartphones for their kids. Then she mentioned in her email that she was aware of new research that had come out in the last year about children and smartphones and asked if they’d be willing to come over to her home to talk with her about it. There was no obligation—it was just an invitation to come and talk.

She ended up meeting with fifty-one sets of parents. The meetings mainly consisted of her asking parents thoughtful questions: “Have you gotten your kid a smartphone? If so, how’s it going? If not, when are you planning on getting them one? Why? What do you want it for? Are there things that you’re worried about with the phone?” Once the parents opened up about their thinking on the phone situation, she’d ask them if they’d like to see some of the latest research on smartphones. Hannah had made twenty cards with research findings on them, each related to a different aspect of a child’s life. She had a card for physical health, a card for mental health, and so on. She would hand the parent a card and ask if they were aware of that issue. On the back of the card were statistics the parent could look over. She would give parents one card at a time so they’d take time to consider each finding. She found that this approach really got people thinking. Once she went through all the cards, she’d spread them all out on the kitchen table. Staring at all the harms laid out together, parents would get quite upset. They’d lament to her, “What are we doing to our kids?”

But that’s not where it ended. Hannah would respond, “I’m here with hope. I’m an optimist that things can be different. We’ve got this insight that we didn’t have ten years ago.” And then she’d pull out all the alternative devices she keeps on hand to show parents other options than a smartphone to stay in touch with their child, like a Nokia flip phone. Hannah held one up during our Zoom call to show me what she was talking about and how parents can even attach a magnetic tracker to the back of the flip phone if they’re concerned about tracking their child’s location. She tells parents this phone is completely safe and super cheap. It’s just £25 (about $30).

Of the fifty-one sets of parents she initially met with, two had already given smartphones to their kids, and all the rest were planning to give them to their children at age ten. At the end of her conversations, Hannah asked the parents, “Now knowing this research and knowing the alternatives available, would you consider delaying the smartphone until age fourteen?” Of those fifty-one sets of parents, forty-eight said yes.

Once she realized she had a method that worked, she wanted to figure out how to do it at scale. That’s when she launched Delay Smartphones and created a website with a pledge for parents to sign electronically, and she started a volunteer ambassador program where parents, grandparents, and teachers can get trained online on how to be an ambassador, signing up through their site. She trains ambassadors on how to use the non-judgmental and compassionate approach she tested, and volunteers are sent their own pack of research cards to use for conversations with other parents and with their schools. They now have more than 350 volunteer ambassadors across the country.

Volunteer ambassadors are also encouraged to recruit other volunteer ambassadors. The idea is to encourage parents to find a couple of friends to delay smartphones with. Hannah role-played a conversation for me: “If we were in the same school, I would be saying to you, ‘Clare, look. I’m really worried about smartphones. Shall we together just say at least we’ve got each other as accountability and support to delay?’ And then I will go out and find someone else, and you’ll go out and find someone else, and now before you know it, we’ve got five families to do this together.” That’s what she encourages parents to do: Just find five families you can do this with.

As a last piece of advice on how to talk to other parents about delaying smartphones and social media, Hannah suggested having parents road-test social media for their kids themselves. She thinks part of the challenge for parents is that our experience of social media as adults is extraordinarily different from that of a ten-year-old. She says parents think it’s just some dance videos. Hannah advises them, “Set up a Snapchat account as your ten-year-old child. Interact as you think that your child would, add their friends, use it as much as you think they would use it each day, and do that for a week, and then decide if you’re still okay letting them on social media.” Every parent she knows who did that road test came back to her and said, “No way.”

Email other parents in your child’s class. Invite them over to your home. Start a conversation. Don’t tell them what to do, but ask questions, share the research you’re finding like Hannah or point to the surgeon general’s recommendations like Margaret, and just talk about it. It’s possible to find others who are willing to talk about resisting technology together. It’s possible to get other parents on board once you open the conversation.

Build a Child’s Social Life

Your kid can’t be the only one. “The fear that my kid is going to be the only, like, weird, socially isolated kid without a phone and social media, if you’re not collaborating with other parents, is a real danger,” Margaret warns. Children need friends who also aren’t on screens. And parents need to help their kids find those friends.

When parents start coordinating with other parents to resist phones, the kids without phones naturally gravitate toward one another because they talk about in-person things, Margaret observes. “They’re talking about reality.”

Helping your children find friends and build a healthy social life off screens does take work. You may be able to find other screen-free peers for your child in your neighborhood, like Lexie and Brad have. Or you may have to drive your kids over to the houses of like-minded families, like Margaret and her husband, Patrick, have. The families they have found through their school community aren’t in their neighborhood. She explains, “On a Friday night, I would love to get in my pajamas and have a glass of wine by the fire with my husband. But no, I’m going to keep my jeans on because I’m going to drive my daughter to her friend’s house and then I’m going to drive back to pick her up at nine-thirty.”

Margaret gave me a word of caution: As a mom of young kids, I’ll have to work at helping my children build a social life, especially when they’re tweens and teens. “These things used to happen much more naturally, but because kids are so plugged in now, you have to be far more intentional about it as a parent.” She offered some ideas of social activities parents can help facilitate for their children, like having a firepit in your backyard for teens to hang out around and make s’mores or putting a ping-pong table in the basement. She also got her teen son a poker set and would buy junk food so he could host poker nights at their home for his friends. Besides hosting teens at your house for game nights or a bonfire, “the outdoors are great.” One of her sons in particular would get together with his friends in high school and go for hikes. Another idea she mentioned is helping teens do service projects together. “That’s a good thing especially as you’re integrating the boy crowd and the girl crowd.”

Another mom told me she found low-tech friends for her kids simply through volunteering at their local public school. She naturally gravitated toward like-minded parents who also had active families with minimalist technology, so that’s who her kids started spending time with from a young age. It was easy to resist screens as they got older because her kids’ main friend group didn’t have them either.

Engage Your Faith Community

Some Tech Exit families have found others to exit with by engaging their local church or other faith community. One family started a group by emailing their church Listserv.

Jeanne Schindler drove from Hyattsville, Maryland, to my house in the city one night in early May while my husband was away on work travel so that I could interview her as my three children slept. That’s the kind of generous and thoughtful person she is. We sat at my dining room table and munched on a big tin of pepparkakor, Swedish gingersnap cookies, that my mother-in-law had just brought us from Stockholm when she came to meet our newborn. With graying blond hair and glasses, Jeanne is an extremely warm and kind woman. A former professor at Villanova, she is now a full-time mom to three teens and tweens. Three years ago, without meaning to, she sparked a low-tech movement among families in her area, centered loosely on her church.

It started when her oldest son was thirteen and his friends started getting phones. Jeanne told her husband, “We have to do something proactive.” She laughed and said, “The irony of this next step is not lost on me: I emailed my Listservs—a Listserv associated with our local parish and my neighborhood homeschooling Listserv—to ask if anyone was interested in coming to talk about both the desirability and the feasibility of creating a lower-tech environment for our kids, specifically smartphone-free.” She was pleasantly surprised by the initial response. Twenty-four couples responded, so they divided the families into two groups for the discussions, one for families with teenagers and one for families of kids twelve and under. They hosted the two groups in their home with twelve couples at each dessert reception.

The invitation she sent out to the Listservs was just to talk. “Let’s figure this out. Let’s have a conversation.” The response at the two discussions was so strong—there were forty-eight parents from the get-go who wanted to do something together—that Jeanne sat down one evening shortly thereafter and drafted the Postman Pledge, named after Neil Postman, the media critic.[3] “I then beamed it to all these folks. And then when we got together again, people brought in their copies. They were signed. And then we were off to the races.”[4] Jeanne brought a copy of the Postman Pledge for me to look over. (I’ve included an excerpt in the appendix.)

Jeanne explains that the pledge has two dimensions. The first dimension is the restrictive dimension. It states, “We pledge for the next year not to allow our children to have smartphones or use social media. We also pledge to conscientiously limit our family’s use of electronic technologies in general.” She made the pledge an annual thing because she wants people to revisit it and take it year by year. The restrictive dimension, she says, “is meant to encourage families to reduce our use of technology and to not give our kids things that are going to undermine their well-being.”

People aren’t required to sign the pledge. Jeanne says, “We are trying to foster an ethos.” So while they invite people to sign it, they also have people in their group who haven’t signed the pledge but who are “fellow travelers,” as Jeanne calls them. “I want them to do things with us. The signing of it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not interested in policing whether people are in fact trying to cut down their own tech use. It’s all about ‘let’s try together to promote real things.’ ”

Focus on the Positive

The emphasis isn’t on the restrictions, because the much-larger focus of the pledge, Jeanne explains, is its second, positive dimension. The pledge ends with these words: “We pledge, finally, to foster friendships among our families in the natural, traditional ways human cultures have always done.” She told me, “This is absolutely the bulk of what we do. Let’s celebrate together by replacing the technologies with positive real-life experiences.” She sees the pledge as a modest attempt to revive traditions and ways of humans being together that are real, like music, dancing, and games. She said as she laughed and shook her head in disbelief, “Five minutes ago people did this.” What they are doing is nothing new. They are simply trying to revive the ways people lived together for centuries before.

By focusing not on restricting tech but on pursuing real life, she has found there’s an impressively common spirit in their group, even though they may differ in their family tech arrangements. But despite differences, Jeanne is finding that, as a result of the pledge, parents are slowing down on giving technology to their kids. Roughly half the group doesn’t give any kind of phone to their children, even teens.

The pledge group has also grown since its inception. Three years in, they now have forty families regularly coming together. After she initially cast a broad invitation on her two Listservs, the group grew by word of mouth, and requests to join have come from other people. They are starting to max out capacity for their events. On an almost monthly basis, they organize two kinds of events: one for parents and one for families.

These social events bring parents and children together to fulfill the commitment of the pledge—to foster friendships as they enjoy the beauty of life together. The pledge has had an impact on her own children’s friendships. For example, her son attends a private high school in the area, and out of his class, six of the roughly twenty kids are from Postman Pledge families. That’s a significant percentage, and it makes a difference.

Jeanne says their church has been a real support to the pledge group, allowing them to use the basement for dances and parties. Churches and other houses of worship can be a natural place to host the kinds of social events that Jeanne and her group try to put on.

On the contrary, churches and other faith communities can do things to hinder families from living a low-tech lifestyle. Alyssa, whom we met earlier, recounted to me how their church youth group was requiring all the students to communicate through an app called GroupMe. And then a few years later, her church also started pushing social media on the kids as a means to share their faith. “Everyone get on Instagram and go post with this hashtag.” She finds that churches unfortunately have started viewing social media as a necessity for promoting their faith and message, without recognizing the ramifications of these technologies for young people.

After she spoke with her church leadership several times to explain the negative impacts on kids, they stopped pushing social media. She encourages churches, especially their youth groups, to resist social media and instead help parents by building an environment free of smartphones and social media for the youth. Tech-free environments for kids are needed younger and younger, and can even start in your local outdoor park.

Start Young

Children in rainsuits and mud boots. Jumping off tree trunks. Digging in the dirt. Picking up leaves and pine cones. Throwing rocks in a creek. Finding big sticks to whack against trees. The noise of children’s laughter, screams, and cries. This is what we call “forest school.” And can you imagine this taking place in Washington, D.C.?

A few years ago, a group of moms of young kids, ages six and under, living in and around D.C. started a forest school that meets at a large outdoor preserve called the National Arboretum every Monday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., where the whole point is to get our children outside, to enjoy and explore nature together. Sometimes a mom will give a short, informal lesson about leaves, trees, or the life cycle of a butterfly, but mostly it’s just free play outdoors where the kids can run around together and be kids and no parent has to worry about a kid running into the road. There are no cars around.

Forest school takes place year-round. We dress them for the weather. As my Swedish mother-in-law says, “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.” From this group I’ve learned how to outfit my kids for rain, cold, mud, and the like so they can play outside through all four seasons. Enjoying each season for its own glory.

Learning how to better outfit my kids to play outdoors is an example of the second main benefit of forest school: moms coming together to learn from and support one another. These moms are committed to a screen-free childhood for their kids, and they encourage other moms in how to do this too.

This weekly meeting helps each of us keep going in resisting screens for our kids. While they splash in the mud and we talk about life and parenthood, we serve as examples to one another as we see how our different families live out similar tech-minimalist principles. We young moms aren’t living lives of drudgery without technology; rather, through venues like forest school, we are finding friends for ourselves and providing a rich, positive alternative for our children.

We moms at forest school have all been on our own journeys with technology. In prior seasons many allowed their kids more screen time but have since pivoted. Leslie shared that when she had two-and-a-half-year-old twin boys and was experiencing bad morning sickness while pregnant with her third, she let them watch lots of Daniel Tiger. Daniel Tiger was her hero in the first trimester. But she recognized that she wasn’t good at moderating the amount of screen time. She said her personality tends to be all or nothing. Letting her children watch shows made it too tempting to just keep the screen going. She’d think, I am getting so much done. What’s one more episode? Leslie realized she had to shift to doing no screens at all. They now have no screens. And her six-year-old twins don’t ask for them.

This group isn’t unique. There is nothing special about us. We are just moms with young kids living in a metropolitan area who need mutual motivation to get our kids out in nature, living off screens, so we do it together. Anyone can start a forest school. You just need to do three things: Find other parents, find some green space, and dress your kids for the weather. The kids will do the rest.

Starting to talk to other parents while children are young can help build strong counterpressures against screens before the pressures for smartphones and social media really ramp up in the tween and teen years. Set the precedent early.

Cast a Wide Net If Needed

Sometimes parents may need to cast their nets a bit wider. Two moms in the UK started a WhatsApp group for parents to promote the idea of a smartphone-free childhood, and it took off. Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell, who had become friends at school, hoped the group, Smartphone Free Childhood, would encourage parents to not give their children social media until sixteen and smartphones until at least fourteen. Much to their surprise, what they thought would be just a small group of local parents helping each other resist smartphones for their kids became a nationwide campaign overnight. Within twenty-four hours of posting about it on Instagram, Fernyhough and Greenwell’s group reached the thousand person capacity, so they had to encourage participants to spin off and create their own local groups: “Before our eyes, within half an hour, there were 30 local groups that sprung up across the whole country and that is just expanding and expanding.”[5] Beyond the local UK groups, there are now international groups in various countries, including a U.S. group.

My interest was piqued, so I joined the U.S. group and can tell you it’s an inspiring conversation to be a part of, where both moms and dads share what they are doing in their schools and communities, resources they’ve created, and articles, videos, and other research to help parents learn. Parents ask questions, troubleshoot challenges, crowdsource creative ideas, promote advocacy campaigns for policy solutions, share presentations they used to talk to their school, and so much more. All over the world, parents are coming together to pool their knowledge and resources and to encourage and spur one another on in their own communities.

You can start a WhatsApp group in your area or join one of the Smartphone Free Childhood groups to find others to resist smartphones and social media with you, and you might be surprised by how many parents join you as it gets shared. It’s amazing what counterpressures can build up over time from parents coming together and having conversations.

Chapter 5

Explain, Educate, and Exemplify

Finding community to exit tech with you is an important first step. But even when parents band together, do Tech Exit kids willingly accept their parents’ practices and parameters around screens? Or do they resist the rules and resent their parents’ decisions? How do these parents get them on board?

To make the Tech Exit sustainable over the long term and to preserve a good relationship with your children, it’s important to work to get their buy-in—or at least their understanding and acceptance of the tech commitments you are calling them to. Parents do this by treating kids like reasonable people who deserve to be respected, telling them the reasons behind decisions, educating them on the adverse effects of digital technologies on their minds and bodies, preparing them to face digital dangers, and exemplifying a healthy use of technology as adults.

Explain Your Reasons

Tech Exit parents positively and proactively explain the reasoning behind their rules and train their children how to handle the temptations these technologies pose. They are also emphatic that their practices around technology aren’t handed down as edicts from on high but are grounded in relationships of love and trust with their children.

Give Clear Standards

This starts with being clear on the standards.

Lexie and Brad’s goal in parenting is to raise independent kids who can make good decisions on their own. To that end, they strive to be authoritative parents—not authoritarian, where they make every decision for their kids, nor permissive, where there are no rules and the kids rule the roost. Authoritative parenting, they explain, is “you’ve got rules, you expect them to obey them, but you need them to learn to make decisions on their own.”

What this means in their home is that they’ve been clear with their boys about technology standards up front. They’ve had many conversations that set those standards and gave them the opportunity to explain to their children what they would encourage them to do as independent adults. “We say, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to have social media when you’re in our house. When you turn eighteen, you can choose to on your own, but we would actually encourage you not to.’ ” She said the result is her boys don’t ask for social media.

Maybe you are more of a gentle parent than Lexie and Brad, and you can’t see yourself being as firm on the rules. But even gentle parents have hard lines in the sand. You can be strong on no screens, the same way you would be for smoking, gambling, or doing drugs. These are non-negotiables with your kids. You don’t have to change your parenting philosophy; you can just add social media and smartphones to your list of non-negotiables.

Educate Kids on the Harms

A major part of explaining your reasons is educating kids on the harms you are trying to protect them from.

Margaret and Patrick like to use the film The Social Dilemma to educate their kids on how social media companies manipulate people. “Nobody wants to be manipulated,” Margaret says. The Social Dilemma is a documentary that features former tech employees and other experts and researchers to explain the addictive design, attention economy, and data extraction behind social media platforms and to show how these products are reprogramming our civilization in ways not aligned with the best interests of humanity.

Haley and Jasper from rural Wyoming have likewise found it helpful to pull out The Social Dilemma every few years as a refresher with their kids. In addition, their family has a lot of ongoing conversations about the dangers of social media and internet addictions.

Films like The Social Dilemma or another called Childhood 2.0 can be powerful tools because they allow kids to see the unhealthy nature of digital technologies for themselves. Another strategy some parents use is having children research the negative side effects of social media and smartphones on the home computer. They have them look up certain topics or studies and report their findings. Other families might listen to a podcast or watch an interview or TED Talk on the topic and then discuss it. (If you need ideas of good resources for children to use, see the appendix.)

In training children toward adulthood, parents want them to understand the dangers of screen technologies for themselves. No one likes being told what to do, but if we discover something for ourselves, we are much more likely to remember and believe it.

Another powerful aid to parents is when their kids start to notice the destructive effects of screens on their peers. Haley and Lexie both share how their teens are much more aware of how boring and disengaged their tech friends are in social settings, as they are always on their phones, and their kids get annoyed by it. Their own observations have helped them buy into their parents’ decision to not give them smartphones or social media. Parents can use children’s observations of friends’ screen behaviors as prompts for discussion of their rationale.

Hear Kids Out

The goal of explaining the rationale for your technology practices to your children is to create a reasonable family culture that kids can accept.

Forming a reasonable family culture means that rules make sense, that there are valid reasons for them. And parents explain those reasons to their children by being clear on the standards and educating them on the dangers. But another key part of explaining is listening to children and hearing their difficulties with the restrictions. Haley says that parents need “to understand where your kids are coming from and explain your approach to them.” Showing them that you are trying to hear them out and help them understand goes a long way in and of itself.

Tech Exit parents listen to their children’s appeals and come alongside them to find solutions to their challenges or ways to accommodate their requests without giving in on non-negotiables. Here are some examples Tech Exit parents shared with me:

Lexie and Brad’s older son asked if he could get his own phone because the family Gabb phone (a non-smartphone) that he and his younger brother were sharing was getting bombarded with group texts to his brother, full of emojis and other silliness that he had to wade through to find legitimate communications from his baseball coach. His reasoning made sense to his parents, so they got him his own Gabb phone in eighth grade.

A Tech Exit dad, Mike from Virginia, shared that their high school son was struggling with his dumbphone because it didn’t have GPS and he was getting frustrated by having to print directions and maps or call his parents to navigate him another way if he was stuck in traffic or diverted. Mike and his wife, Liz, were clear he wouldn’t be getting a smartphone, but they did some research and found him a different phone alternative that has GPS navigation, and their son has been much happier.

Another family doesn’t allow any social media or phones, but they’ve accepted their high school son’s request to participate in a Gmail chat with all his classmates. He’s allowed to go on once a day on the home computer so he can be part of those conversations with his peers.

Several families don’t allow video games in their own homes, but they will let their children play games at a friend’s house. And some families who normally watch movies only on Friday nights together will allow their kids to watch movies when they have friends over.

These parents have allowed certain exceptions to their rules for good reasons. They aren’t cruel dictators. They work to create a reasonable culture of open conversation with their kids, where they are both clear on the non-negotiables and flexible enough to make concessions to requests or challenges when they can. And when they can’t accommodate a request, they at least hear their kids out and show them they care by acknowledging their frustration.

The Tech Exit isn’t without cost. Parents don’t try to hide the costs from their kids but explain that they are trying to spare them from greater costs. They ask their kids to trust them that the long-term benefits will far outweigh any short-term costs.

Even if a parent does all they can to listen and explain, there will still be frustration and resistance at times. Parenting is never free of resistance. But as Haley says, “If they don’t understand, just say, ‘It’s okay. I’m your parent. I love you. And I’m going to do what I think is best for you. And one day when you are grown up and you have children, you will do what you think is best for them regardless of what they think. And that’s part of being a parent.’ ” She’d say that over and over again, reminding her kids that she loves them.

And even if a teen doesn’t like it at the time and wishes they had a smartphone, they can still reach a place of accepting their parents’ tech decisions and seeing the benefits from those decisions. Victoria, a teen in East Lansing, Michigan, who now has a smartphone, recounts, “I was pretty mad that the answer was always no, but I think I was more jealous than upset with my parents to be honest. Kids weren’t outright mean to me at all, but I did feel like there was some judging or condescension maybe.” But then she adds, “On the whole, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t awful, but it also wasn’t the best. Yes, I hated it, but it wasn’t that bad, if that makes sense?” She told a reporter that she’s not as addicted to her phone as her friends are. And even though her younger sister wants a phone now, too, Victoria thinks waiting longer is beneficial. “You can get a serious addiction,” she says.[1]

Victoria exhibits a common dual mentality seen in Tech Exit kids, where they wish they had tech like their friends but also recognize why their parents have resisted.[2] And that is a win.

Or take another Tech Exit kid, Peter, who is still in a phase of resisting his parents’ decision on no phones. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy, so it’s not just the phone: He also likes to blast rap music, much to his mom’s chagrin. When his dad asked him, “Do you think you’ll give your kids a smartphone?” he said, “No way.” His answer doesn’t seem to make sense given his own frustration over his parents’ decision to withhold a phone. But he clearly understands their reasons.

It’s a revealing exercise to ask teens how they would raise their own kids. They seem to evaluate things differently when they put themselves in the shoes of the parent. A resistant teen can understand the detrimental effects of these devices that their parents have explained and trained them to notice. So even though Peter doesn’t like it at the moment, he intends to replicate his parents’ decision with his own children.

This should encourage parents. If your child begs for a phone or social media like their peers, they can simultaneously understand the reasons for saying no—and they can respect your decision, even while protesting it.

Get over the Hump and Lay the Foundation

Many Tech Exit parents spoke of an initial period of intense resistance from their kids, but they found that once they pushed through for a period of time, they got to the other side. The resistance went away, and it became much easier to keep going.

Lexie told me that there is “a hump that you have to get over and, once you pass it, it’s not a problem.” Their kids don’t fight them about it anymore. She added that her sons are at a point now where they don’t even want tech because they see the negative impacts on their peers. Others shared similar experiences. The amount of time to get over the hump varied depending on the child’s personality and age, from a few weeks to a few months.

Haley and Jasper’s oldest son, Noah, who was most resistant to their decisions at first, now embraces these principles for himself as a college student. For several years in high school, he asked them for a smartphone, sometimes forcefully, but they stood their ground. Now at college, he still uses a Light phone and is the least techy of their three college-aged children, being notoriously off the grid and hard for them to reach via text or email. He came around to see the value of their decisions. Noah has also become an example to his younger siblings. Jasper told me, “The best thing that happened is we did it for our older kids and now there’s no expectation from the younger kids. The precedent is set.” All three of his college kids have now come alongside him and Haley to help get their younger siblings on board, explaining to them the benefits they’ve already experienced from their tech-free childhood.

Many parents, like Jasper, shared that it was the most work to get their oldest children to buy in, but once these parents worked through difficulties and resistance with the first child to establish a family culture, the younger kids followed. When I spoke with Margaret and Patrick’s fourth child, Jack, now off at college, and asked him if he ever resisted or resented his parents’ decisions around technology, he said, “No, because I saw my three older siblings go through high school without a smartphone, so I knew there was no chance I was going to get one.” The foundation was laid. The expectations were set. There was no resistance by that point.

Every one of the parents I met has a close relationship with their kids, both grown and in the home. Their technology restrictions haven’t caused rifts in the family or distance. Melanie Hempe shared that reversing course on screens brought their family closer together. Instead of competing with phones at the dinner table, they talk to one another and share life.[3]

Families share that exiting tech has not hurt their family relationships but improved them.

Prepare Them for Dangers

Not only do Tech Exit parents protect their children; they also prepare them. These parents aren’t naïve. They know that even if they do all they can to shield them from digital dangers, kids can still be exposed to bad content from a friend’s screen and will have to face digital temptations as adults. So they talk to their children to train them to face these dangers.

Haley and Jasper have a conversation with each of their kids around the age of eleven or twelve when they start allowing them to go online. They like to use the book Good Pictures, Bad Pictures to talk to their kids about safety online and what to do if they come across pornography. The book gives kids a plan of what to do if they come across a bad image: Look away, close the screen, and go tell a parent. It also gives strategies to help a child’s brain forget the image they saw.

My friend Chris McKenna, founder of the organization Protect Young Eyes, recommends “10 Before 10”—parents having ten talks about pornography with their child before they reach the age of ten. Each conversation is not a long sit-down ordeal but the simple repetition of letting your child know that if they come across naked people or anything that makes them uncomfortable, you the parent are a safe space, you won’t freak out, and they can talk to you about what they saw.[4]

Mike says that while their family uses an internet buddy system, they start allowing teens in their junior and senior years of high school to use the internet without a buddy. This involves frank conversations about the internet and teaching moments like pointing out when they look tired because they were up late the night before and cautioning them that it’s not a good time to surf the web, which allows them to learn for themselves how to use the internet wisely.

Bingeing Later Is a Myth

A common refrain I hear is that parents give screens to their children in order to keep them from bingeing later. Tech Exit families find it’s exactly the opposite. Giving children screens too young, even as teens, only serves to habituate them to these devices. By contrast, giving children a low-tech childhood, including high school, means that once they’re on their own and they can binge, they don’t want to. As Haley puts it, “They have this little Jiminy Cricket in the back of their mind that tells them, ‘I don’t want to live this way. This isn’t a healthy way to live, and I know it.’ ”

Melanie Hempe emphasizes that “kids continue to do what they have always done when they leave the nest…little gamers grow up to be big gamers.” She shares, “Our son binged on gaming in college even after we allowed it in high school; that experiment didn’t work out so well.” With their daughter, they waited to give her a smartphone until she went off to college. “When our daughter finally got her phone,” Melanie says, “she was older and had established good time management habits and excellent social skills. She continued to do her favorite things that fulfilled her, and the phone was just the tool it was meant to be. She even turned it off at night so it wouldn’t wake her up, and she didn’t use it while driving. When she got to college, she didn’t go crazy with social media. She ended up taking the Snapchat app off her phone when she realized it was ‘causing her too much stress’ (her words).”[5]

Melanie’s daughter isn’t unique among Tech Exit kids. Jack, Margaret and Patrick’s son, told me when we spoke his freshman year that his college friends who grew up with more tech have a lot more trouble managing it and disconnecting from it. He says, “I’ll see their phone out at meals or if we are chatting in a group. They’ll pull out their phone by habit, checking to see if they have any notifications or anything. It’ll bug me a little bit, because it’s like, ‘I’m right here.’ But I know they’re not doing it to be annoying but because it’s a force of habit.” One day he and two of his friends were comparing the Screen Time stats on their iPhones for fun. One of the metrics is pickups, how many times a day you open your phone. His average was sixty-four pickups a day. His friends were shocked to find that their average was more than 250 times a day. They didn’t even realize they were doing it.

Instead of bingeing, many Tech Exit children go the opposite direction and choose not to get social media at all once they can. After watching The Social Dilemma with their parents, they are repulsed by the idea of being manipulated by the tech companies and their algorithms. Some of them also choose not to get a smartphone as an adult, like Noah, who still has his Light phone.

While Jack now has a smartphone, he ended our conversation by telling me he’s very grateful he wasn’t allowed to have one in high school. He added, “I’m definitely not going to give my kids a smartphone, because I think, growing up without it, you’re able to recognize the dangers of all the time sucking and all the bad stuff that’s out there and be able to push it away if you need to.”

Even if Tech Exit kids do end up using smartphones and social media in college and as adults, they will always have mature memories of themselves without these technologies that will be a tether for them. They will be better able to regulate themselves with the technologies, if only because they know what they’ve lost by using them. Creating that cognizance is what these families are doing for their children, regardless of the outcome. None of us can control what our children do when they become adults, but we can give them the gift of a positive, tech-free vision of themselves that will always stay with them and serve as a guide and correcting force.

Tech Exit families have found that knowing how to use technology well is not about learning the tech but about developing self-mastery. You don’t want to erode a child’s developing self-mastery by giving them a powerful technology too young.[6]

The solution to bingeing isn’t giving kids screens; it’s helping them form habits without them and proactively training them through many conversations and through modeling a healthy use of digital technology yourself.

Exemplify Responsible Tech Use

Children learn best by watching their parents. And they imitate what their parents do, for better or for worse. Parents, we don’t have to have the same exact tech practices that we require of our children. There are differences between children and adults. As adults we have fully developed brains with the ability to exercise self-control in order to handle devices more maturely, so we don’t have to completely exit smartphones and social media, though it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing if we did. But we should be aware that phones still have addictive effects on us too. We aren’t immune.

In fact, the impact of digital technologies on parent-child relationships today, dubbed “technoference,” has created a whole new body of research. Studies suggest that technoference negatively affects children’s language learning, social and emotional development, and behavior and emotional regulation, increasing their risky attention-seeking behaviors, emotional outbursts like tantrums, and rates of anxiety and withdrawal.[7]

When parents don’t allow technology to interfere and they give their children their full attention and emotional presence, it yields amazing results. In one experiment, fifty children between the ages of three and twelve were told to run around a softball diamond as fast as they could—twice. One time, their parents were hunched over their phones and turned away from the field, while the other time, they had no phones and were fully engaged in watching their children. When parents were engaged, children “ran about three seconds faster and were 17% less likely to trip, fall, or false start.”[8] Don’t we all want those results for our kids?

Separating Ourselves from Our Phones

While Tech Exit parents don’t necessarily give up their own smartphones, they do recognize their potential negative impact and powerful allure, so they set up boundaries for themselves to ensure their phone use doesn’t intrude on family life or their relationships with their kids. The most common practice of Tech Exit parents is to physically distance themselves from their phones when they are at home with their children. These boundaries not only protect family relationships but also serve as a model for children of how to have good boundaries with technology when they are grown.

In Margaret and Patrick’s house, there is a “freedom basket” where everyone, parents included, deposits their devices when they come home. Their meals and family interactions are free of phones. Margaret even recognized that having her smartphone next to her bed overnight was too distracting, so she leaves her phone downstairs in the basket (in fact, all the family phones go in the basket overnight). Their children know this. They have a landline in case their children off at college have an emergency in the middle of the night.

Jasper shared, “The best way I could help my kids navigate socially is just by being an example of what that looks like and living it out with our friends.” When he has friends over, he models what he wants his kids to emulate by creating phone-free social contexts. He asks those friends to leave their phones away from where the group is hanging out, and his children get to observe how adults socialize off their devices.

Dumbing Down Our Phones

Some parents also dumb down their smartphones to reduce their addictive properties. Catherine Price wrote a helpful book called How to Break Up with Your Phone that is instructive for how we as adults can make our phones less distracting. She offers recommendations like turning off notifications, ruthlessly deleting apps that we don’t need (especially social media and other messaging apps), hiding apps away in folders, and setting the phone to grayscale.[9] Other Tech Exit parents I spoke with recommended blocking tempting URLs in the settings, and having your spouse or a friend be the password holder for these settings so you can’t easily change them back yourself in a moment of weakness, and to even consider disabling the phone’s internet browser entirely.

Maybe you aren’t sure whether you could make all these changes permanently. Like with the digital detox, you could try dumbing down your phone for a day, a weekend, a week, or a month and see if it makes a difference. If nothing else, it will help you identify what you are most tempted to do on your smartphone and what changes you can sustain in the longer term, like eliminating one or two of the most tempting features.

Other Tech Exit parents do, in fact, choose to use a non-smartphone alternative. It’s not as impossible as it seems. I made the switch two years ago to a dumbphone, and it’s been incredibly freeing as a mom.

Most Tech Exit parents also have no social media accounts or very minimal social media use. They may have an account or two, but if they do, most don’t have the apps on their phones. This is a wise practice. One study found that “depression was higher in teens when their parents reported higher levels of personal social media use.” In fact, “adolescents are nearly four times as likely to be depressed if their parents are high level social media users.”[10]

Of course, there are still times when a parent needs to use their phone while with their children. In these situations, Tech Exit parents try to resist texting and emailing as much as possible and instead make more voice calls or dictate their texts so children can know what they are doing and observe good conversation skills. They strive to have technological transparency.

Parental Tech Transparency

Ten years ago, Susan Dominus wrote in The New York Times Magazine about a phenomenon created by the smartphone, which was the loss of transparency between parent and child:

It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information…. All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent.[11]

A younger mom named Emily Thomas, who writes a Substack called The Connected Family about her family’s low-tech lifestyle, was inspired by this article and has adopted practices to fight for technology transparency with her kids:

She prioritizes phone-free tasks when her kids are around.

She narrates what she’s doing when on her phone.

She reaches for her laptop over her phone (it has greater visibility and is less likely to lead her into distractions).

She chooses the analog option where possible (keeping a paper calendar, using a recipe book, reading physical books and magazines).[12]

Many Tech Exit parents likewise use analog options where possible to reduce their dependency on their phones. They use physical tools instead of apps. They have a family calendar on the wall. They use a notepad and pen to jot down to-do lists or grocery lists. They put an alarm clock next to everyone’s bed. They and their children wear real watches. They have a family camera to take pictures and videos.

Far and above everything else a parent does when it comes to their own tech use, though, is simply putting their phone down and giving their children time and attention.

Remember, they are watching us all the time. We are their models for everything, including tech use. Our children will value what we value. Let’s show them we value people more than phones.

Chapter 6

Adopt Alternatives

Even after finding other families and working to get their kids on board, Tech Exit parents still have practical challenges to navigate. How do they push smartphones out of childhood in our tech-saturated, app-based culture?

Most fundamentally they start by rejecting the premise of the inevitability of smartphones and social media. The question of their child getting their first smartphone is a matter of if, not when. They don’t assume their child will have these technologies even as an adult.

Most of these families have decided that once their child goes off to college or is financially independent and wants to pay for a smartphone, they can. But as parents they aren’t going to fund that purchase. Mike, whom we met earlier, said to me, “Why should I be the one to give my child a smartphone…something I know is bad for him? Let society or his workplace force it upon him.” Some parents even motivate their child to stick with a dumbphone after they leave home, offering to pay for the phone plan if they keep a dumbphone.

How, then, do these families communicate with their child if they don’t give them a smartphone? What about when their kid needs certain apps for school or activities or if they need GPS once they’re driving?

Once the commitment to reject the inevitability of these technologies is firmed up in parents’ minds, the answer becomes quite simple: They adopt alternatives and find work-arounds.

Alternatives to Smartphones

Let’s look at what a few of these Tech Exit families use as alternatives:

Haley and Jasper give their children a Light or Gabb phone at sixteen or when they get their driver’s license. They keep their children on an alternative phone through college, until they are completely financially independent and can make their own decision to get a smartphone.

Mike and Liz take a more staged approach with their children. Once a child starts driving on their own or when they are out and about more independently, which usually falls around sophomore or junior year of high school, they get the most basic dumbphone with just talk and text: no group texting, no receiving or sending images. Their family has used Gabb phones, stripped down to the most basic features. Then once a child is a senior in high school, they get a Bark phone, with no access to the internet, social media, or email but with more features like GPS, an app store, and a warning mechanism that alerts parents of any inappropriate content in texts or images.

Margaret and Patrick give their children their first phone, a dumbphone, the summer after eighth grade. Then once their college applications are in during senior year of high school, they are eligible to get a smartphone—if the child can demonstrate they are ready to handle it. They have developed certain tests to see if the child has the self-mastery necessary to handle a smartphone. For example, do they make their bed every day? Margaret shares that “we would make each of them go through some demonstration that you have enough self-discipline before we give you this really powerful device,” which meant generally their children didn’t get a smartphone until about halfway through senior year. They encourage their children not to always carry the phone around with them in the house but to leave it in the family’s “freedom basket.” They also have a landline. She says, “For questions on homework or arranging a playdate, your younger child doesn’t need a phone and they don’t need to use your phone. Have a landline.”

Another family doesn’t give their kids any kind of phone even through high school. They have a landline their children can use, but the parents have found that any texting is too distracting and compulsive for children. Because their oldest son is about to start driving, they are contemplating getting a Tracfone that would stay in the car. For years people lived without cellphones and managed. They made plans and stuck to them. Their family does the same. “I’ll come pick you up at 3 p.m.,” Mom tells her son. He knows to be ready and waiting at 3 p.m. It’s that simple.

When Lexie and Brad’s two sons were in third and fifth grade and started to gain more independence, they bought a Gabb phone. It became the family phone for the boys to share, since they didn’t have a landline. The vast majority of the time, the phone sat at home on the shelf. They weren’t allowed to take it to school or around the neighborhood with them. But as they were allowed to bike farther from home, like to a fishing hole a mile away, the boys took the Gabb phone, which could only call and text, so they could get in touch with their parents if needed. Lexie says when they are at school, they can go to the office if they need to call her, or when they are out in the neighborhood, they can borrow a neighbor’s phone or just walk back to the house if they need something. And as mentioned in the last chapter, they only recently allowed their older son to get his own Gabb phone. But he still isn’t allowed to take it to school or carry it around the neighborhood. It, too, lives at home, and he has to ask his mom or dad if he needs to take it somewhere.

The common denominator in all these families is they significantly delay the age of first cellphone to a time when a child becomes more independent. When a parent decides it’s an appropriate time to get a child a first phone, they purchase a non-smartphone alternative. Many alternatives are available today—Light phones, Gabb phones, Wisephones, Bark phones—all of which allow the child to call and text without the distractions of an internet browser, social media, email, and other apps (see the appendix for a full list of alternative phone options). Before any cellphone, the child can use a landline or Mom or Dad’s phone, borrow a neighbor’s phone, or use the school phone to get in touch with parents as needed.

Once a child does have a phone, Tech Exit parents still put restrictions on it, like leaving it at home during school or leaving it on a shelf or in a “freedom basket” at home, not carrying it constantly on their person. No phones are allowed in bedrooms. Many families also don’t allow group texting on dumbphones, as they find it creates a similar environment to social media. The types of social dynamics that happen in group texts can be harmful at worst, distracting at best.

“But They Need This App”

One legitimate challenge that parents face in delaying giving their kids smartphones is our increasingly app-based culture. Smartphone apps are being imposed on more and more aspects of our children’s lives. One mom of two high school boys shared that her kids are required to use an app to get into their high school building and another app to check in at mandatory school-wide assemblies. Other parents said that communications for their kids’ activities, like sports games and practices, are all done through an app. If a coach needs to change the practice time or location, it’s all on the app.

But Tech Exit parents are undeterred in their resistance to the smartphone tyranny. They find or create work-arounds. If they are told an app is required for a school assignment or child’s activity, they don’t accept it. They talk to teachers or coaches to find an alternative. They push back. And every parent that pushes back makes it easier for the next parent.

One such set of parents is Haley and Jasper, whom we have already met. They live in Wyoming in a town of eight thousand people. It’s so rural that Haley’s internet connection was pretty spotty when she tried to connect to our Zoom call. As her video slowly loaded, I saw that her backdrop was a log cabin wall. Haley is an artist and a free spirit. She was wearing chunky jewelry and a felt hat over wavy blond hair that was unstyled and slightly knotty. She and Jasper wear Chacos and eat organic, and as I mentioned, they write and perform folk music together. They are the definition of hip. So you wouldn’t guess that they haven’t given smartphones, social media, or video games to any of their children.

Haley’s free-spirit vibe started to make more sense as she talked to me about how she stood up to the tyranny of smartphones. That morning, her high school daughter had signed up for an outdoor recreation sports class through the local community college but needed to have a smartphone app to track her heart rate and other metrics. With fire in her piercing blue eyes, Haley told me, “I’m getting ready to call the professor. I get it’s a community college, but even some adults don’t want to have a smartphone, and I think it’s time for people to just stand up a little bit more to this assumed smartphone culture…. Parents need to stand their ground.”

Smartphones are relied on so much by our society because they have taken all these separate tools we used to have—camera, clock, calculator, calendar, and notepad—and turned each of them into an app instead. Now we just have to carry this one device that has everything we need in it.

As alternatives to apps, Tech Exit families return to the analog options that existed for decades or centuries before the smartphone, and it’s no problem. If a child needs to know the time, they get a watch. If a child wants to listen to music, they get a boom box. It’s that simple.

“But My Kid Won’t Have Friends”

Many parents, like Molly and Tim, whom we met at the beginning, fear that if they don’t allow any smartphones or social media, especially in the teen years, their kids will be left out socially. Friendship is a real concern. You don’t want your kid to be the only one. This is why Tech Exit parents work to find other families so their children can have friends who are off screens.

And while families do find or create countercommunities to make it easier to opt out and help their children build a social life, make no mistake—they aren’t living in Luddite bubbles. These are normal people. They are your neighbors down the street. Their children aren’t socially isolated. In fact, they have friendships with other tweens and teens whose families don’t share the same low-tech standards.[1]

Mike and Liz found the reality to be the opposite of parents’ fears. Their decision to not allow video games or social media has not deprived their children of friends but rather accelerated the process of “friend filtering,” helping them find their true friends faster. Mike explains, “If a ‘friend’ is so shallow that because you are not on the group text or social media chat, then you are dead to them and they won’t reach out separately to make sure you know about the social event, then that’s not a true friend.” It spares their children from investing a ton of time in friendships that aren’t going anywhere, and instead, they find their good friends pretty quickly. “Finding good friends who look out for you and will accommodate your difference—that’s real friendship,” Mike concludes. And that’s what their kids have found.

Jasper shared that when his kids would ask to get on an app like Instagram because all their friends were making plans over the app and weren’t even texting one another anymore, he would respond by encouraging them to “contact one of your group of eight people that are making plans to find out what’s going on.” He says, “They figured it out. It was never an issue.”

Jack, Margaret and Patrick’s grown son, shared that in high school his soccer coach used group texts to update the players on practices and send other announcements. All his teammates knew that his dumbphone had trouble receiving the group messages, so they would text or call him with anything he needed to know. He was never left out of the loop. The team found a way to keep him informed. And he was fine. Talking to me about it, he conveyed no traumatic memories or emotional scarring from this experience. He honestly didn’t seem to care that much.

In high school, many of their peers came to respect the Tech Exit kids for not having these technologies. Two families in different states and different types of schools told me how their Tech Exit children got elected to leadership positions in high school. One family shared that two of their daughters, who didn’t have smartphones or social media, each got elected senior class president. “They couldn’t have been isolated weirdos,” the mom told me.

And rather than envying friends who have digital technologies, as mentioned before, Tech Exit children often see the detriments, finding that their techier friends aren’t as fun or interesting.

“What About Driving?”

Tech Exit parents help their children learn to drive without smartphones, many without GPS at first. Margaret says she bought her oldest son a Rand McNally map when he started driving. “I told him, ‘I want you to learn the roads. I want you to know where you’re going.’ ” She observes that it’s safer for a new driver to know where they’re going than to be looking at a phone for directions.

And she isn’t wrong. Research shows links between smartphone usage and increased risk of car injury or death.[2] The best drivers are undistracted drivers who know where they’re going. In other words, the teens without smartphones.

Stepping Stones

Maybe you can’t do it all. Maybe abandoning or delaying smartphones, social media, video games, and tablets is too much for your family. Then try eliminating one or two of these screen technologies. Or remove all gaming devices from your own house, but allow them to play at friends’ houses, which is what some Tech Exit families do. Some parents dumb down smartphones to not have an internet browser, gaming, or any social media apps (just be aware that this isn’t as effective as giving a dumbphone and you will need to stay on top of it since it’s easy for kids to find work-arounds to get on social media or hide apps). Or parents give a child a non-smartphone alternative in high school without any social media apps, and then in late high school, they allow the child to open one social media account that they can access only on a web browser from the family computer. Separating the smartphone and social media so children aren’t getting access to both technologies at once is helpful in training them to be responsible in their use of digital tech as adults.

Doing something is better than nothing. Reducing the number of addictive screen technologies in the ways you can will make a difference. Start by eliminating one interactive screen or app, and go from there.

Chapter 7

Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules

Restricting smartphones, social media, and video games isn’t the only thing families need to do to keep children safe from the negative impacts of screens. While adopting alternatives and finding work-arounds in order to opt out of the most addictive screen technologies is a big piece of the equation, Tech Exit families also limit the presence and use of other screens in the home. They do so by creating digital accountability structures and setting up family screen rules in order to protect their children from online dangers and unhealthy, isolating uses of technology.

Digital Accountability

Tech Exit children don’t have smartphones or social media, but they may have access to other forms of digital communication. In Tech Exit families, all a child’s communication channels, like an email account or texting on a dumbphone, are subject to parental oversight. My friend Bill Woolf, whom we met in chapter 2, shares how he spot-checks his children’s communications as needed to keep them safe, to ensure they aren’t engaging in anything inappropriate or dangerous or communicating with strangers. His checks include emails, texts, Google Messages—anything his children are using to communicate. He also suggests parents have their children’s email accounts added on their own phones for easy access.

Creating accountability doesn’t mean that Tech Exit parents constantly snoop on or surveil their kids. They recognize that isn’t healthy. They aren’t helicopter parents. Rather, their principle of no private technology use is about creating a shared understanding between children and parents that the parents’ role is to protect their children; so as long as children are under the parents’ roof and authority, they have no absolute right to privacy. Parents, if they have a concern or question, need to be able to access children’s communications for their safety and to help them correct mistakes to train them for adulthood.

Bill emphasized to me that this shared understanding of accountability is itself the protection. The spot checks serve as a deterrent from unsafe behavior since his kids know he has the ability to access their messages if he has concerns. He says, “The opposite, letting kids do things in secret, does not help foster trust or open communication between parents and kids.” Bill and his wife openly explain what they are doing and why to their children and remind them that their safety is the number one priority. With these conversations to build understanding, they haven’t had issues with their kids resenting the spot checks or trying to hide things from them.

Accountability doesn’t equal third-party software. Some Tech Exit families employ internet filters or parental monitoring software as a supplement to back up their in-person accountability structures and serve as an additional layer of protection, but they don’t rely on these exclusively. Their accountability is centered on parental involvement and public use.

Having digital accountability also means that, in Tech Exit families, any device that a child is permitted to use is treated as a family device on loan to the child, not as the child’s personal, private device. Some families, like Bill’s, use phone contracts that lay out the conditions for the child having and using a phone. If the child breaks the rules, they lose the privilege of the phone, all of which is laid out in the contract so they understand the conditions and consequences. Margaret and Patrick’s family doesn’t use a contract, but every child’s phone—a dumbphone through most of high school and then their first smartphone senior year—has the same password so anyone can access and check it at any time (and so parents can easily remember the password).

It’s important to keep in mind that there is a balance to strike in monitoring children for their safety without surveilling their every move. And this isn’t a one-and-done decision. As teens approach adulthood, you will have to loosen the reins and give them more privacy. Practicing technological accountability as a family will thus look different at different ages and for different kids. And a big part of not oppressively surveilling our kids is giving them greater freedom of movement and independence in the real world, which we will consider more in the next chapter.

Family Screen Rules

The Tech Exit families I met have two sets of foundational family screen rules: (1) Screen use is public and purposeful, and (2) screen entertainment is sparing and shared.

Screen Use Is Public and Purposeful

Tech Exit parents don’t believe in private technology use during childhood. Period. Not only are children’s communication channels accessible to parents, but all technology use by children is also public to others in the home. Tech Exit homes are built around tech transparency. Tech Exit parents both model tech transparency and require transparency from their children. Any internet use is mediated through a parent and visible to others in the family. Tech Exit families don’t deny their children access to the internet; rather, they help their children learn to use it wisely, with supervision. Transparency protects everyone from digital dangers and ensures healthy use.

In Haley and Jasper’s home, around age eleven they allow their kids to start doing some basic internet searching, “but it has to be with Mom’s half an eye on them or an older sibling’s half eye,” she says. Any devices that connect to the internet in their home are passcode protected all the way up until age eighteen when the child leaves the house. This means all internet devices are inaccessible when the parents aren’t home; a child can’t use the internet and has to find something else to do. Their concern is to protect their children from secret addictions. Haley acknowledges that, every once in a while, it’s really inconvenient for their kids. But it’s worth it.

In Mike and Liz’s family, likewise only Mom and Dad have the password to the computer, so a child has to get a parent to log on. Then once the child is online, they have to have another family member present or nearby to keep an eye on it. As mentioned before, they call it “the internet buddy system.”

Internet use is also purposeful in Tech Exit families. If Haley and Jasper’s kids want to get online, they have to have a valid reason and there is always a conversation: “What do you want to use the computer for?” “I’d like to check my email.” “Are the dishes done? No? Then go do the dishes first.” “Have you read today?” “No.” “Read first.” “What do you want to look up?” “I was going to try to buy a pair of jeans.” “Okay, that sounds great.” Haley explains she needs to know what they’re going to do online and that all the important things have been done first. And she always keeps an eye on it. “After twenty-five minutes of getting lost in online shopping, I tell them to shut it down. If you haven’t found a pair of jeans in twenty-five minutes, get off the computer.” They aren’t going on the computer to play games or watch YouTube videos. No aimless surfing of the web or scrolling is permitted.

Many screen-time parents I’ve spoken with justify giving screens to their kids so that they won’t be behind in our technological society. They don’t want to disadvantage them in their future education or work. But social media, smartphones, tablets, and video games don’t teach kids technology skills. They are just forms of entertainment. In fact, they steal away kids’ time that could be spent learning more valuable skills. Opting out of digital technologies doesn’t mean Tech Exit children can never access the internet for certain beneficial purposes. Rather, Tech Exit families help children learn to use the internet and computers as the tools they were meant to be—not for mindless entertainment, but on purpose to accomplish tasks.

One Tech Exit mom shared how her nephew, who has no access to smartphones, social media, or video games, has become a computer coding whiz at the young age of thirteen because he bought a bunch of old computer science textbooks, read them cover to cover, and taught himself how to code on an old desktop computer. He’s allowed to use the desktop on a limited basis to practice his coding. He has learned to use a computer to create, not to entertain himself.

Screen Entertainment Is Sparing and Shared

In Tech Exit families, screen entertainment is a rare treat, not a daily occurrence. If they own a TV, it’s used sparingly, for family movie nights or on exceptional occasions when a parent needs some extra assistance like if a child is ill or a mom is sick in her first trimester of pregnancy. When a screen is used for entertainment, it’s time limited, the content is curated by the parents, and it’s enjoyed with others, either as an entire family or by the siblings together.

Margaret shared with me, “The only sort of screens our kids had were movies that we would put on, because I had complete control of the content that they were getting and it was a DVD that would end and not just roll into the next program.” These families opt for time-limited media instead of smart TV streaming services with millions of options and auto-play features.

Screens for entertainment are simply not a fixture in these Tech Exit homes. Not having interactive screens lying around and keeping other screens, like TVs, out of the central living areas remove the visual cues that would draw us to turn them on. Screens have a powerful allure. I learned this firsthand.

When our first child was a toddler, we had a smart TV on display in our living room. I initially didn’t turn it on for our son very often, but as he got older, if he was having a hard time waking up after a nap or I was trying to make dinner or just survive until my husband got home from work, I found myself increasingly drawn to it. He wasn’t even asking for it, but I was tempted to turn it on out of parenting fatigue—and laziness, if I’m being honest. I didn’t like what the screen was doing to me as a parent. It was too easy to turn to as a crutch.

Fast-forward a few months. My son’s Little Tikes shopping cart hit our TV stand at just the right angle for the TV to fall, shattering the screen. And that was the end. We decided not to replace it, to take a break, and went without a TV for two years. (If my husband and I wanted to watch a show together after the kids were down, we pulled out a laptop.) Taking it away entirely meant I no longer had to exert large amounts of self-control to resist giving it to my toddler. It wasn’t around as an option. We later got an old-school TV without internet that now lives behind our couch, and we pull it out only on Friday nights to watch “family pictures,” as my kids call them, also known as home videos. When the TV is a non-option, you figure out other things to do to help a fussy toddler in the afternoon. I take my kids outside. Pull out bubbles or chalk. Have them play in their kitchen set while I make dinner or do Play-Doh at the table while I clean.

—

When you are on a diet, you don’t keep a stash of junk food in your pantry so you can eat it in a moment of weakness. You get it out of your house. It’s the same for Tech Exit parents and screens. Parents recognize that it’s hard to resist the temptation to turn a screen on or hold to time limits if your child is walking by it all the time and asking for it. I know I don’t have the self-control to resist the power of a screen on a toddler all the time. Maybe I can last a few hours or a few days, but I won’t make it indefinitely. Not to mention trying to exert that much self-control on a daily basis is exhausting as a parent who is already worn down by attending to the needs of my kids. Tech Exit parents know this, so they make their homes as low-tech and screen-free as possible.

Their kids get used to the screen parameters the parents set, like using the TV only on Friday nights, and they stop asking for screens otherwise.

My friend Donna shared with me how one evening they were on a walk in their neighborhood and walked by a home where they saw a TV on through the window. Her four-year-old son turned to her, aghast, and said, “Mommy, it’s not even Friday night!” Her son was used to their family screen rules. He didn’t know any different.

Chapter 8

Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits

Though they adopt alternatives when necessary for communication and safety and set family screen rules to limit the use of tech in the home, Tech Exit families don’t only resist screens; they also seek to fill their children’s lives with the goods of the real world. Getting kids on board with a low-tech lifestyle means giving them the connection, attention, independence, and leisure they are looking for in real life so the powerful allure of devices is diminished.

Family Relationships and Responsibilities

The most important real-life good that Tech Exit families replace screens with is parental time and attention. Their lives are built around their family relationships. Parents prioritize spending time as a family and fostering sibling relationships, creating environments where their children learn how to play with and entertain one another.

Melanie Hempe tells parents that children need three main things: attachment, touch, and movement. They need attachment time every day with their parents, like family dinner and parents taking the time to talk with them. They need touch. Physical affection, like hugs. Boys especially also need rough-and-tumble play, like wrestling with Dad. And beyond these two needs that their parents meet, all children need movement, to get their bodies moving outside every day, like riding bikes or playing with balls. Initially parents may have to help kids meet this need too, showing them how to get outside and play, but then they will start to learn how to do it themselves.[1]

The second most important alternative to screens is real-world responsibilities and opportunities for service to others, first in the home and then to others outside the home. Older children and teens need growing independence. While Tech Exit parents are more restrictive in the virtual realm, they allow their children greater freedoms in the real world.

Tech Exit parents give children tools and tasks that foster independence and adult responsibility in the real world. For teens, it can be a car or a first job. For tweens and younger children, it can be a bike they are allowed to ride to their friend’s house, the neighborhood pool, or the local fishing hole; a pet that is their responsibility; chores around the home; or even early informal jobs like raking a neighbor’s yard or babysitting. Real-life responsibilities channel a child’s time and energy toward building productive life skills like work ethic, care, responsibility, creativity, and problem-solving that will help them flourish both in the present and in the future. Cars, bikes, pets, jobs, and chores help children progress toward adulthood. Phones and other screens stunt them.

Hannah Oertel, the Scottish mum who founded Delay Smartphones, says her nine-year-old daughter is responsible for what people in the UK call “the weekly food shop.” They have it delivered to their home, and her daughter is the one who takes charge of ordering it all online. Hannah writes out a list and then has her daughter go through the cupboard and see what else she may need to order. Hannah laughs and says, “Obviously she gets some stuff wrong, she spells things wrong, we end up with some funny sauces or whatever, but you know, that’s her responsibility.” Her daughter loves it.

Another family uses the slower pace of summer to teach each of their children a new chore so that every year they gain a skill they can contribute to maintaining the household. For younger kids, it started with learning to fold laundry and put away dishes and progressed to cleaning the bathrooms and doing their own laundry, and their high schoolers are learning how to shop for and cook seven homemade meals. Their mom has told her high school boys that now she expects them to be the first ones to sign up for Meal Trains for friends or neighbors who are ill or families that have a new baby.

Giving children tasks—not only basic chores around the house but even more adultlike responsibilities like shopping or cooking—builds their confidence that they’ll be able to take on the adult world. They also learn ways they can serve others, which gets them thinking of other people rather than themselves.

Unlike their peers, Tech Exit children are oriented not toward screens, self-absorbed in the virtual world, but toward real-world responsibility and service to others, grounded in family relationships of obligation and mutual dependence.

Real-Life Pursuits

Tech Exit parents also provide a variety of real-life alternative forms of leisure and activity for their children. They fill their homes with materials children can use to create and entertain themselves. And they push their children to get out in nature, building forts, playing chase, starting up a game of Wiffle ball, and just running around together.

Tech Exit families go on a lot of walks, play music together, and do puzzles or board games. Their kids often like to make up their own games or scavenger hunts, host family drawing competitions, or put on home plays and music recitals. These families have lots of good things to read and do lying around, like art supplies, board games, coffee table books of interest, and printed newspapers with comics and puzzles.

Many families also get their children journals and help them grow the habit of keeping private thoughts there (as opposed to posting them publicly on social media). Social media has meant the death of “Dear Diary,” but Tech Exit families are working to bring it back.

Lexie and Brad’s younger son has a tackle box full of old light switches, battery packs, alligator clips, and other odds and ends that he calls his “inventor’s box.” He spends time constructing all sorts of things, cutting up cardboard, gluing everything together, and putting propellers on. It started when he was eight and hasn’t stopped (he’s now twelve). Lexie and Brad encourage parents to push through letting kids be bored and not always entertaining them, because it’s amazing the things they’ll come up with on their own.

Tech Exit homes are also full of books. Many families read aloud to their children in the evenings before bed. For one family, it’s become a tradition to gather at the end of the day on their parents’ bed to listen to Mom or Dad read the next part of the story, as they work their way through different books or series. This includes their sophomore in high school down to their five-year-old. (They advise always reading at the level of the older children to keep it interesting, observing that the younger ones will be able to grasp enough.)

Tech Exit lives are not boring but rich with non-digital entertainment and leisure. These families may not have TVs in their living rooms, but they often have pianos. Their homes are not silent but boisterous with music and laughter.

Tech Exit families also pursue fun adventures together. They take trips and share experiences that deepen their bonds. One dad of four leads his family on an off-the-grid camping trip every summer. He finds it helps them disconnect from the temptations of screens, especially him and his wife from their own smartphones. They often go somewhere remote in the woods without any cell service or electricity. Getting away from modern conveniences not only allows them to enjoy nature together without interruption but also teaches their children how to survive in less comfortable conditions, building resilience and a sense of accomplishment. The yearly trip strengthens their kids’ skills, builds character, deepens their family relationships, and restores balance to their lives when they return home.

Filling children’s lives with the goods of the real world helps them lose their taste for the cheap digital substitutes that screens offer.

Sometimes It Takes a Truck

Mike and Liz had initially promised their oldest son he would get a smartphone his senior year of high school if he was well behaved and responsible. But when they saw the slavish way he was working toward it, how it was consuming his attention before he even had the device, they changed their minds. They had already bought the phone, but the closer they got to handing it over, the more they were repulsed by its effects on their son, so they decided to reverse course last minute. Mike says it’s not a parenting strategy he would recommend, but they saw it as necessary. It’s never too late to do what you think is best for your child.

A stormy few months ensued. Their son fumed at them, hurled insults, and swore that as soon as he turned eighteen, he was going to get himself a smartphone. Mike says, “There’s this incredible social pressure, which, frankly, we just gritted our teeth and dealt with the onslaught of teen angst over. It was exhausting and unpleasant.”

Mike’s brother-in-law stepped in and suggested an alternative to help smooth things over. As long as he didn’t have a smartphone, the boy could have the free use of a family legacy truck, his uncle Gene’s cherry-red Ford that sat on the family farm.

Mike and Liz’s son had been trying to convince them for months that he was mature enough to have a phone, making arguments that he was a man now and could handle it without giving in to temptations. They realized that not misusing a smartphone reflected the lowest bar for maturity and adulthood. Instead, they challenged him to take the truck and get a job. It would be a manly milestone to do something positive that he could actually be proud of. They double-dog dared him to take the truck.

He took the truck, started a moving business with his little brother, and made a bunch of money over the summer and into the fall. The truck provided a great reframing for him and changed his attitude and understanding of what it means to be an adult. Mike laughs and says, “It’s an embarrassing story that it took a truck. But the truck hilariously came into our story and wound up being providential to show our son what real manliness is. Manliness has nothing to do with resisting the dumb temptations of a phone. That is a low bar. The truck showed him real manliness is about being more positive and serious with your life.”

Their son has come around. He isn’t sure whether or not he will get a smartphone when he goes off to college.

A red truck changed everything.

Part IV

Collective Solutions

Chapter 9

Getting Screens Out of Schools

The school board in Orange County, Florida, knew they had a discipline problem. Students were constantly on their cellphones, texting about student altercations, spreading rumors through texts and social media, and taping fights between students and posting them on social media. Teachers and administrators were exasperated. Vice chair of the Orange County school board, Angie Gallo, told me, “Discipline was an increasing issue across the state of Florida and across the country, in our classrooms, on our campuses, and on our buses.” All of it was disrupting student learning. The Orange County superintendent decided to create a discipline task force to investigate the challenges and make recommendations to the school board.

Orange County’s discipline task force was made up of experts in the fields of mental health, principals and other administrators, law enforcement, and parents. After reviewing the discipline challenges and current practices across the school district, they came back with one overwhelming recommendation for the board: Remove cellphones from the entire school day, from bell to bell.

That’s when everything changed.

A Solution That Works: Phone-Free Schools

The work of Orange County’s discipline task force was happening in 2023 in parallel with the Florida legislature considering a bill to remove phones from all instructional time during the school day and to prevent student access to social media over school Wi-Fi. The state bill passed in May 2023, and the Orange County school board decided to go a step further. They adopted a policy that went into effect the following school year, fall of 2023, not only to ban phones during instructional time but also to require that all “wireless communication device(s) be silenced and put away (in a backpack or purse) during the school day while on campus, including lunchtime and transitioning between classes.” Wireless communication devices include cellphones, smartwatches, and earbuds. Any violation results in a confiscation of the device until the end of the school day. Multiple violations could escalate the consequence to detention or even suspension.[1] They mean business.

As I spoke with Angie Gallo about the policy, she shared that she had initially been hesitant about the change. She had concerns about taking students’ phones away from them during lunch and about how the students who struggled socially would adjust. When she voiced her concerns during the board’s work sessions for the policy change, several teachers reached out to tell her, “You don’t know the disruption it causes to my class, just [students] having the phones out at lunch, and the discipline issues I deal with from them having it at lunch.” Her teachers were quick to tell her she was wrong. She laughed as she told me she is fine with admitting when she gets something wrong.

Though she was one of the school board members that initially struggled, Vice Chair Gallo says now she is “a big believer.” In the first full year of implementing the bell-to-bell policy in the district, there was not only a decrease in discipline issues but also a large increase in student interaction.

That’s the biggest difference teachers and administrators have seen. The policy created a sense of camaraderie between students—the interaction and communication between them noticeably rose. Now when Vice Chair Gallo walks through her school campuses, she sees students interacting and playing pickleball during lunch. She says students “got really creative with things that they would do at lunch to keep them busy.” Student leaders plan themed lunch days, like days when they play music or bring in a cart with board games. Kids who are shyer or need a break from the noise are going to the schools’ media centers (aka libraries). They are seeing more students checking out books. The schools’ media specialists have been great about making sure that the centers are open during lunch so students can go there and sit quietly and read after they eat if they don’t want to stay in the loud cafeteria.

Marc Wasko, the principal of Timber Creek High School in Orange County, which has 3,600 students, finds the policy has made a night-and-day difference. They saw a lot of bullying before. But phone-related discipline incidents have decreased, and students now look him in the eye and respond when he greets them. Teachers have remarked how students are more engaged during class time.[2]

Orange County isn’t the only school district going phone-free in Florida. Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa also adopted a new cellphone policy that warns students, “We See It—We Take It.”[3] Vice Chair Gallo says other counties and superintendents, and even the Florida Department of Education have reached out to them, asking how they are doing this.

And Florida isn’t alone. South Portland, Maine; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Forest Hills Public Schools in east Grand Rapids, Michigan—among others—were all early school districts to ban phones throughout the school day.[4] In all the districts, bullying and other behavioral incidents have decreased and students are reporting benefits. One student in Michigan said eighth grade was better than seventh:

In seventh grade, I used to spend over an hour getting ready in the morning. I had to make sure I looked perfect. All of my friends had phones, and I just never knew when one of them was going to whip out their phone in class, in the hallway, or in the bathroom and take a picture. Because of this, I felt a constant, daily pressure to look a certain way so that I felt pretty in the pictures. No blemishes. I wanted to look perfect. Now, without phones being used by everyone, the pressure is off. There’s nothing to worry about. I can be more natural. I can finally be me.[5]

Other districts and even entire states are increasingly jumping on board. Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the United States, announced a bell-to-bell phone ban to go into effect in January 2025.[6] Granite School District in Utah, another of the largest school districts in the nation, also changed its policy in the spring of 2024 to ban all phones for elementary and junior high students for the entire school day.[7] More districts across the country are considering changing their policies to restrict phones not only during class time but from bell to bell.

Some states have passed policies on a higher level to get phones out of schools. Several states have followed Florida’s lead to pass laws that restrict phone use during instructional time or require school districts to adopt policies on student phone use at school.[8] Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia have gone a step further with bell-to-bell phone bans, removing phones from the entire school day.[9] It’s a growing movement.

Individual Schools

A school doesn’t need to wait for their school board or state to adopt a broader policy. Individual schools are taking action. The Washington Post reported in 2024 that “scores of schools across the country—from California to Indiana to Pennsylvania—have taken…steps to remove cellphones altogether rather than rely on rules around their use.”[10] One such school is Illing Middle School in Manchester, Connecticut, where an assistant principal named Raymond Dolphin in December 2023 convinced the school leadership to ban phones. The school spent $31,000 to buy Yondr pouches, gray synthetic rubber pouches with magnetic locks, so students can’t access their phones during the school day. When school ends, students touch the pouches to an unlocking base by the exit.

Initially some students and parents objected to the new policy, but it has led to overwhelmingly positive results that include the end to harmful behaviors facilitated by phones, like exchanging inappropriate photos during class or coordinating to meet up in the bathroom for a vaping session. And students initially upset by the policy have come to appreciate how they can focus better in class.[11]

The tide is turning. More and more schools are joining Illing in banning smartphones from the school day.[12]

In fact, individual schools adopting stricter no-phone policies can spark higher-level change. A couple of schools in Orange County had already implemented a bell-to-bell no-phone policy. Vice Chair Gallo says, “Some principals had decided on their own that they were going to ban cellphones, which they had autonomy to do because there wasn’t a district-wide policy.” The schools where a bell-to-bell policy had been implemented were seeing an increase in communication between students and less disruption during instruction. The positive results from this kind of policy helped push the board to adopt the district-wide no-phone policy. Principals should not underestimate the impact of setting a bolder policy in their own schools.

Don’t Leave It up to the Teachers

More than three-quarters of all U.S. public schools report they already do not allow cellphones in class.[13] But it’s difficult for teachers when they’re the ones having to enforce the policy. Having a bell-to-bell no-phone policy enforced top-down by the school administration makes it much easier for teachers to do their actual job of teaching students, rather than constantly policing phones. At Illing, teachers are seeing the difference. Dan Connolly, an eighth grade science teacher, who was tired of constantly asking students to put away their phones, says, “Now the first thing I say is, ‘Good morning,’ not ‘Take your AirPods out.’ ” Another teacher, Justin Pistorius, used to ardently try to enforce no phones in his math classes before the schoolwide ban, but students would complain, “Why are you the dude that’s doing this? The lady last year let us use them. You’re the jerk.”[14]

Spencer Jones, whom we met in chapter 1, shared similar experiences from teaching at two private high schools where phone policies were left up to individual teachers.

At her first school in Boston, it was an “every-teacher-for-herself scenario.” The official rule was no phones in class, and if the teacher saw one, they took it, but Spencer says that “in order for that to work as a teacher, you have to be extremely consistent; you cannot miss anything. If you aren’t 1,000 percent consistent, then students will pick up the message that it’s not going to work.” When she was at her most consistent, she didn’t have a lot of phones in class, but it was exhausting. At the second school she taught at in South Carolina, they had shoe holders at the front of the classrooms where kids were supposed to drop their phones. But plenty of kids didn’t do it.

When phone policies are left up to each teacher, kids are also on their phones between classes and during lunch. At one of Spencer’s schools, they taught in a block schedule where classes were ninety-five minutes long. The transition between classes, the five to seven minutes in the hallway, was meant to be a mental break to let students breathe, regroup, rest for a second, and then come back ready for the next class. She says, “Kids would take that break moment as a phone moment, and it became clear very quickly—you’re not taking a break. That’s not rest. Instead, you’re being overstimulated on your phone for seven minutes and not mentally preparing yourself for a second marathon.” She observes that getting rid of phones from the entire school day not only serves academic purposes but also teaches kids what it feels like to give their brains a real break.

Having a district-wide or a school-wide policy makes the enforcement of no phones much easier for teachers and creates a healthier social environment for students between classes, at lunch, and even in the bathrooms, where they can mentally take true breaks.

Enforcement Is Key

To be effective, no-phone policies have to be enforced. This is especially the case if students are allowed to have phones in backpacks, like in Orange County. Consequences for violations have to be significant and immediate, consistent and visible. In Orange County, as mentioned earlier, the consequence is confiscation initially, and it can escalate to detention or even suspension for repeated offenses. At Timber Creek High School in Orange County, Principal Wasko says more than a hundred phones were confiscated the first day of the policy. But once students realized it was being enforced, the confiscations dropped as students stopped taking their phones out.[15]

Even at Illing, where they use Yondr pouches, Assistant Principal Dolphin acknowledges that the system isn’t foolproof. “Do some kids keep phones secretly in their backpack? Of course. We’re not naïve,” he says. But the students now at least know that they will get detention if they take out their phones.[16] The enforcement has made the policy effective, so the school is seeing positive results.

The Farther Away, the Better

Policies where the phones are more inaccessible to students during the school day make enforcement easier for teachers and administrators.

There are several variations of phone-free policies. Some schools may not allow phones at all on the school premises. Other schools may have students hand phones in upon arrival and collect them again at the end of the school day. Or schools may have students keep phones in a secure location like a central phone locker or Yondr pouches during the school day.[17] For schools where these practices aren’t logistically possible, having a “never used, seen, or heard” or “off and away the entire day” type of policy is the next best option.[18]

Phones should ideally be not only out of sight but also out of student possession.[19] Studies show that the stricter the ban, the more positive the results. A 2024 study from Norway examining results from middle schools found that banning smartphones significantly decreased doctors’ visits for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls, reduced bullying among both boys and girls, and improved girls’ GPA, test scores, and likelihood of being on an academic high school track (in Norway, high school programs are academic or vocational). But “the effect on grades, GPA, and test scores is largest among girls attending middle schools that ban students from bringing their phones to school or schools where students must hand their phones in before classes start” as compared with “schools with a more lenient policy [that] only require students to have their phones on silent mode during lectures.”[20]

A similar study conducted in the UK found that, in secondary schools with effective bans (defined as not allowing phones on school premises or requiring students to hand them in or store them in lockers or the equivalent during the school day), the national exam (GCSE) results were one to two grades higher than in schools with laxer policies. Most encouraging of all, this increase in test scores happened in spite of the fact that the schools with effective bans also had more students who qualified for free school meals (students from lower socioeconomic households).[21]

These findings suggest that simply having phones accessible to students, even if they don’t use them, still has a negative impact. Another study may explain why. The study divided students into three groups and had each participant take the same two cognitive tests. None of the participants could use their phones during the tests, but each group had their phones in a different place. The first group had their smartphones facedown on their desks. The second group was allowed to have phones in the room, but they had to be out of sight in their pockets or bags. The third group couldn’t have their smartphones in the room at all. As you might expect, the first group, who had the visual distraction of their phones on their desks during the test, had significantly poorer results than the third group. But the surprising finding of this study was that the second group did nearly as poorly. Even though they couldn’t see their phones, the second group’s results showed that having the phones physically near them was still distracting enough that it reduced their available cognitive capacity for the tests. The authors conclude, “The mere presence of one’s smartphone may impose a ‘brain drain’ as limited-capacity attentional resources are recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone, and are thus unavailable for engaging with the task at hand.”[22] In less scientific terms, this means our brains are automatically drawn to our phones, so in order to accomplish another task, we have to expend mental effort in order to resist checking them.

Not to mention that many students simply won’t be able to resist checking their phones. Teens on average receive 237 notifications a day, with nearly 25 percent coming in during school hours.[23] And it can take a student who secretly pulls out a phone to check a text in class up to twenty minutes to get back on track.[24]

The evidence is clear: The more physical separation from the device, the better for learning.

Reducing the Achievement Gap

The greatest impact of smartphone bans in schools may be how they help reduce the academic achievement gap.

One of the earliest studies to assess the impact of removing smartphones on academic outcomes was published in 2016. It covered 130,000 pupils at ninety-one schools in four English cities and found that “student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban…. These increases in performance are driven by the lowest-achieving students.” The researchers found that, following a phone ban, schools’ test scores improved overall by 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, but the impact on underachieving students—students in the bottom quartile of prior achievement—was even more significant: Their average test scores rose by 14.2 percent of a standard deviation. These findings suggest that the presence of phones has the greatest negative impact on the most vulnerable students and that restricting phones “can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.”[25]

The study in Norway mentioned above, which investigated smartphone bans in middle schools, also found the largest positive effects of bans were for girls from low socioeconomic backgrounds. These variations by socioeconomic status “suggest that unstructured technology is especially distracting for students from low socioeconomic families.”[26]

And there is a socioeconomic screen-time disparity.

A survey of teens in the United States found that kids from lower-income homes, with an annual income of less than $35,000 per year, spend on average seven hours and thirty-two minutes a day on screens, which is three hours more than kids from higher-income families, with an annual income of $100,000 or more, who spend an average of four hours and twenty-one minutes a day on screens.[27]

Hannah Oertel, who runs the nonprofit Delay Smartphones, laments that in the UK it has mainly been private schools who have banned smartphones. She is worried that “the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to get even wider,” as the children from wealthier, middle class families are the ones whose schools are increasingly banning phones. This is one of the reasons she is advocating for the UK government to ban phones in schools. “If you care about helping poor children, then you’ve got to get smartphones out of school. Otherwise they’ve got no chance.”

Overcoming Parents’ Concerns

Schools have often been hesitant to enact no-phones policies because of how parents will react.[28] While parents may have some initial objections, districts and schools that have successfully implemented bans have worked to address their concerns and found they are largely receptive.

Vice Chair Gallo told me that, during their first year of the new policy, she got only a few complaints from parents. She doesn’t think it was even 1 percent of the parents in her district. She also worked with her schools on putting practices in place to make sure parents could reach their children. She says, “I haven’t heard any parent tell me, ‘I wasn’t able to get hold of my kid.’ ” Rather, she has had a lot of parents thank her. “They’re enjoying the lack of time their child is spending on a phone at school.”

Other school leaders I’ve spoken with mention the main objections they hear from parents over potential phone bans are the fear of not being able to get in touch with their children in an emergency and the desire to be in touch with their children throughout the day for coordination purposes. But classrooms have landline phones, teachers have their cellphones in case of an emergency, and parents can call the main office anytime to get a message to their child (students can also go to the office to call a parent). Schools like Illing and those in Orange County have found that after a policy is implemented, most parents realize their communication needs are met and come to accept it—many even appreciate it.[29]

Schools implementing phone bans have taken seriously parents’ concerns about safety, especially during school shootings. The last thing a school wants to do is make children less safe. But regarding this worst-case scenario, the best thing is for students to focus on hiding and staying quiet, not taking out a phone and calling parents.

According to Dr. Ken Trump, a consultant with more than forty years of experience in the school safety field, phones can actually endanger students in a crisis:

Using phones can distract people from the actions they need to be taking in the moment, such as running, hiding, and listening to directions from first responders.

The sound of the phone, whether ringing or on vibrate, could alert an assailant to a hiding place.

The shooter could be monitoring the event themselves on social media and find more victims or elude capture that way.

Victims and worried family members trying to get through can jam communications, interfering with first responders.

For school security experts, “the weight of the evidence is against having free access to phones in a crisis.”[30]

Getting Rid of Other “Educational” Screens

While phones may be the worst culprits when it comes to distraction from learning during the school day, the “educational” screens many children are using in their classrooms, like Chromebooks, tablets, or other laptops, may also be hurting their academic outcomes more than helping.

Despite the increasing push over the last decade to get every child a laptop or tablet, student math and reading scores have been declining in the United States. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly contributed significantly to the large drops in scores seen in the most recent 2022 assessment, but the numbers have been on the decline since 2012.[31] In 2022, “the math scores for the lowest performing students hit levels last seen in the 1970s, while their reading scores were actually lower than the first year the data was collected, in 1971.”[32]

A study examining the impact of a one-laptop-per-child program found that increasing children’s access to computers and the internet did not improve educational outcomes, such as the number of years of education or enrollment in post-secondary education. “Despite a notable increase in computer access, educational attainment has not increased; the schooling gap between private and public school students has persisted, despite closing the technology gap.”[33]

Countries that have invested heavily in computers have seen “no noticeable improvement” in their results for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education director, says, “If you look at the best-performing education systems, such as those in East Asia, they’ve been very cautious about using technology in their classroom. Those students who use tablets and computers very often tend to do worse than those who use them moderately.”[34]

Other research on how screens affect learning may explain why screens haven’t solved the educational inequalities as hoped. A study out of Norway found that “students who read texts in print scored significantly better on the reading comprehension tests than students who read the texts digitally.”[35] And a study using “MRI scans of eight- to 12-year-olds showed stronger reading circuits in those who spent more time reading paper books than those who spent their time on screens.”[36]

Despite the heavy investment by governments and schools in one-laptop-per-child policies to close the achievement gap, the lowest performers are falling even further behind. On the other hand, when schools took phones away, as we saw above, a little- to no-cost policy change, scores increased, especially for the lowest achievers. It seems removing screens does more to reduce educational inequalities than giving them.

Paper Is Better

The reality is that learning on screens doesn’t yield the same benefits as learning on paper.

Dr. Maryanne Wolf is the director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice and the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Dr. Wolf is concerned that screens threaten children’s ability to develop “full literacy.”[37] She has found that screens are “over-utilizing what we call the novelty reflex that human beings have. This is the last thing we want for child development because we’re wanting them to learn to focus. Instead, they are learning to be distracted.”[38] She is concerned that the skimming encouraged by screens is becoming the new norm for reading and making us lose the deep-reading processes that are necessary for literacy and learning.[39]

Dr. Wolf says, “Print has advantages because it encourages the time-consuming deep reading processes.” And children need to develop strong deep-reading skills in print before reading on screens.[40] The difference between skimming and reading “is the difference between fully activated reading brains and their short-circuited, screen-dulled versions.” For Dr. Wolf, “the digital elephant in every classroom and home is whether our youth will develop full literacy, if learning largely on skim-encouraging screens.”[41]

Research from educational neuroscientists at the Teachers College of Columbia University confirms this. They recently found “evidence that children’s brains process written texts more deeply when they are presented in print rather than on a digital screen.” Brain activations they measured showed that after reading a text in print, children were more able to make connections with new concepts. The authors write that their findings “indicate that the meaning networks built during print reading are richer and deeper than those established during digital reading.”[42]

It’s not just reading that’s being affected; it’s writing too. Research shows that handwriting has cognitive benefits that typing on a screen doesn’t. One study found that writing out the ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better recognition of letters.[43] Thus, we see that “the clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids’ ability to learn the building blocks of literacy—letters.”[44] In addition, writing by hand improves memorization of words.[45]

For these reasons, many schools are returning to pen and paper (or they never abandoned them in the first place). Some employees of Silicon Valley tech companies, the ones designing the laptops and tablets that kids are increasingly using in schools, send their kids to a school that doesn’t allow any tech for elementary and middle school students. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where some employees of Google and Apple send their children, instead uses a hands-on, experiential approach to learning, allowing limited technology only once students reach high school. A prescient article from 2015 about this surprising school choice by tech employees observes how it “begs the question—is the futuristic dream of high-tech classrooms really in the best interests of the next generation?”[46]

The answer we have now from the data clearly is no.

Kids looking at screens all day, even educational ones, is simply not good for their minds, their literacy, their development, or their physical bodies.

Remember Dr. Sandra Cremers from chapter 1? She and her husband were big believers in screen learning, so they were initially pushing their kids’ school to use more technology. Shortly thereafter, she started seeing all these child patients in her practice with chronic dry eye from screen use. She did a one-eighty and now loves sending her kids to their low-tech school.

It’s time to get screens out of schools—not just the phones but also the laptops.

Other Creative Ideas for Schools

Beyond phone bans, many schools are coming up with other creative solutions to help students live more screen-free lives. One private school in Texas has even gotten its students to go social-media-free.

A Social-Media-Free School

Christina Mehaffey has been the principal at Faustina Academy in Irving, Texas, for the last twenty-two years. Several years ago, her teachers started making her aware of what kids were seeing and doing on social media. They showed her the Discover page of Snapchat, and she couldn’t believe she was staring at porn right on social media. At first, she tried to educate parents about the dangers of social media and leave the decision up to them. But as the apps developed and became more addictive, Principal Mehaffey saw the negative impacts snowballing.

She decided to conduct an experiment. Near the end of the school year in early 2020, she had all the parents of the seventh graders meet at her house. “I said, ‘I want to do an experiment and see if we can change the culture within our own high school. I want to start with the new eighth graders the following school year where we don’t give them phones until high school and we don’t give them social media apps.’ ” All the parents agreed to do it.

Unfortunately, COVID hit and impacted these students’ eighth grade year. She thought all was lost because of the pandemic, with kids having nothing to do. But when they started the school year back in person the next fall, she was pleasantly surprised to find that this group of parents hadn’t given social media or phones to their now-ninth graders.

To really see the results of the experiment, she didn’t tell the teachers what she had done and waited to find out if they would notice anything.

Teachers soon started coming to her and saying there was something different about the ninth graders than the rest of the high schoolers. There wasn’t any locker room talk between guys. Their interaction with one another was all very wholesome, and they were respectful of adults.

She then expanded the experiment that year to include the new class of eighth graders. The following school year when the first experiment class went into tenth grade and the second class went into ninth grade, what they saw was a complete divide in the high school. The kids in ninth and tenth grade who didn’t have social media were very different from the eleventh and twelfth graders who were on TikTok until two in the morning. Principal Mehaffey said it was very discouraging to hear that half the high school was engrossed in TikTok, talking only about the latest video. But the other half was still on a path of respecting adults and not having the language or relationship issues that the older grades did.

After seeing the undeniable positive results, Principal Mehaffey decided the whole school would go social-media-free the next school year. She went to her board of governors and begged them to make it a formal written policy. They agreed.

She then talked to the eleventh grade parents and explained, “Next year, your children’s senior year, there will be no social media.” She told parents, “You can find freedoms somewhere else. But we are going to have a different culture here.” Every parent and child had to sign a form promising that the child wouldn’t be on these apps and had to provide the child’s email address and phone number, knowing that the school would be checking to make sure they didn’t get on the apps. To her pleasant surprise, every parent chose to sign it and stay at the school.

I spoke with Principal Mehaffey in May 2024, after the first year of the new social media policy. As we talked over Zoom, she smiled and told me the experiment worked. “We’ve changed the culture. These kids are still innocent. Their friendships are real and solid. They are not fake. They don’t have an entitlement attitude. They promote and uplift each other.”

I asked her how it went for the seniors who had to reverse course on social media, and she shared this story with me. One senior girl was very upset about having to give up Snapchat and made a case about wanting to keep up with friends outside Faustina. Principal Mehaffey told her, “We’re not asking you to cut off all your friendships, but we’re asking you to find another avenue,” and explained the addictive nature of these apps. Although it was a struggle, the student got off the apps because she wanted to stay at Faustina. At the end of the year, Principal Mehaffey followed up with her and asked, “Do you think it made you a better person being off these apps, or do you think it made no difference at all?” And the girl said, “It definitely made me a better person. It made me a better friend. I see now what I did not see before, what kind of person that I turned into. I don’t waste my time anymore.”

Tackling Porn

Grant Beckwith is an attorney who became an educator. He jokes with people that he went through the twelve-step process of getting out of law and into something that really matters: teaching and learning. He practiced big corporate M&A and international finance law at a firm in Washington, D.C., for five years, until in 2005 he decided to take a risk and accept a job as the principal of a small school of 350 students and moved his wife and four children back to Utah. Mr. Beckwith is now the head of school for American Heritage School, overseeing all the school’s campuses, which have grown to have more than 7,500 students.

What I learned about American Heritage School is they take pornography very seriously. All the 7,500 students across their campuses have to sign a technology commitment and abide by a student honor code that prohibits any accessing of pornography, including off campus and on personal devices, and also requires students to inform a trusted adult if they come across pornography, even accidentally.

As I spoke with Mr. Beckwith about their policy, he explained that the school knows children will come across pornography, so they want to be part of the response and solution. If a teenager at the school accesses pornography, they have a meeting with the principal, a school counselor, and a parent to talk about it. Mr. Beckwith said the student will then need “to be working with a parent and a counselor on preventing and avoiding that access to pornography going forward.” They are doing everything they can to come alongside students to help keep them free from addiction to pornography. The school has built a powerful culture where students are in the habit of being transparent with adults about pornography exposure so they can fight it together.

Extracurriculars for All

Another key way American Heritage School works to shield students from the negative impacts of digital technology, including pornography exposure, is by creating a positive, low-tech school culture. They invite students to disconnect electronically and connect in person with other students by investing heavily in alternatives to screens—namely, extracurricular activities.

Mr. Beckwith told me they have a no-cut, all-participation policy for extracurriculars. They tell students, “We’re not going to cut you from any team that you want to try out for. We’re not saying you can be on the highest level of the basketball program, but we’ll create another rec league team for you if you’re just starting.” The result is 75 percent of their four hundred high school students are involved in an extracurricular activity at the school. Two-thirds of the high school was in the school play. They have twenty basketball teams, which is more than the school down the street with 2,500 students. Most schools have only a freshman team, maybe a sophomore team, a JV team, and a varsity team for both boys and girls, so a max of eight teams. They have more than double that for a school less than a fifth of the size. They don’t cut students; they just make more teams.

All students have access to activities after school if they want them—a powerful antidote to screens.

Extending the School Day

Andrew O’Neill is another innovative school administrator. As head of All Saints Catholic College, a secondary school in London, in the spring of 2024, he decided to introduce an option to extend the school day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., which he hopes will do something to break the “100 percent addiction” to smartphones that he sees among children today. The new twelve-hour day offers a hot dinner and art, drama, dodgeball, basketball, and cooking classes for a small fee. Mr. O’Neill says, “We are trying to give children activities in the evening, the kind of play-based childhood I enjoyed growing up…instead of going home to their bedrooms and their phones.” Back in 2016, the school, which has nine hundred students aged eleven to sixteen, banned phones, but the new policy goes a step further to encourage students to stay off their phones even after school ends. All Saints held a meeting with the parents to present the new extended-school-day option and educate them on the risks of smartphones and social media.[47]

Schools like these are employing creative ideas to battle social media, porn, and smartphone addiction, recognizing that they can play an important role not just by restricting devices during the school day but also by providing a positive real-life school culture and alternative activities that make the virtual world less appealing.

Going Light

Buxton School, a fifty-seven-student boarding high school in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has gone smartphone-free. The school had always been a “close-knit community, where family-style meals are eaten at round tables and students and teachers share in chores. But as smartphones became ubiquitous, faculty members say that sense of community eroded.”[48] The head of school decided to implement a smartphone ban in the fall of 2022. Students were no longer permitted to have smartphones on campus, and the school even got teachers to agree not to use them. Their solution for essential communication was to provide all the students and teachers with minimalist Light phones.

Buxton partnered with the Light company, which lends them refurbished phones, and the school pays only for the phone service. Light phones have basic call and text functioning but no internet browser or apps. The results of the Light-phone-only school have been very positive. Students are more engaged. Even teachers have benefited. Math teacher Adrian St. John used to have his smartphone on his desk when he was teaching, “and there were moments of checking in with the outside world. Now, there’s nothing that brings me out of the classroom.”[49]

School administrators at Buxton aren’t the only ones working with alternative phone companies to provide a solution for students. Hannah Oertel and her nonprofit, Delay Smartphones, are working with HMD Global, the company that manufactures Nokia phones, to have them sell hundreds of brick phones (what they call dumbphones in the UK) to UK schools at a massive discount so that the schools can give out the same exact phone to every student. The idea is that the school would allow only those Nokias to be brought to school. Students still couldn’t use them during the school day, but providing brick phones could help create a student culture free of smartphones. If a child has a brick phone that can satisfy communication needs and all the other students have this same phone, the pressures for a parent to give their child a smartphone are also removed.

Parents and Schools Together Can Change Culture

Schools can take many steps to make it easier for individual parents to opt out of smartphones and social media for their kids. Even more powerful, some towns, with schools and parents across the entire town working together to resist these technologies for their children, are starting to change the culture of their local communities.

Greystones, Ireland

Rachel Harper, the principal of St. Patrick’s National School, helped lead an initiative in her town of Greystones, Ireland, to delay smartphones for kids. Schools in the area had already banned phones on school grounds but were still seeing negative effects from social media use on students and their social environment.

With Principal Harper’s leadership, parents’ associations from all eight primary schools in the town came together to agree to a voluntary no-smartphone code to help reduce the peer pressure to give these technologies to their children. “The voluntary pact is to withhold smartphones from children—at home, in school, everywhere—until they enter secondary school.”[50] They are calling the town-wide initiative “It Takes a Village” and set up a website for it to explain its mission and offer resources to parents.

Because of It Takes a Village, children are now far less likely to be exposed to the negative effects of smartphones. Plus, Principal Harper says, “[the parents] love it—now they can blame the schools.” Not everyone is participating, but “hopefully down the line it’ll become the new norm.”[51]

Local initiatives can have a powerful ripple effect. It just takes one school, one community, one town, to inspire others to do the same. The Greystones initiative “has drawn interest from parents’ associations in Ireland and abroad and prompted Ireland’s health minister, Stephen Donnelly, who lives near Greystones, to recommend it as a nationwide policy.”[52]

St. Albans, England

A similar community movement has started in St. Albans, which is, according to the London Times, “striving to become the first British city to go smartphone-free for children under 14.”[53] In May 2024, head teachers from twenty of the twenty-four primary schools in St. Albans wrote a joint letter urging parents to delay giving smartphones to their children. Their letter encouraged parents to “ ‘work together with a wide network of parents and schools to reset the expectation’ and resist pressure from the youngsters.” Most of the schools already had “some version of a no-phone policy but the letter is intended to influence the wider culture in the city of 148,000 in a few years’ time.”

The group of schools in St. Albans is trying to change the local norm around children and smartphones. Justine Elbourne-Cload, executive head of Cunningham Hill Schools and chair of this consortium, reasons, “It is far easier if it is the general norm that no children or very few children have smartphones. If the norm is they will walk around with old Nokia bricks, that’s what everyone will have and that will be fine.”[54]

This movement is in no small part the result of the growing parent-led Smartphone Free Childhood campaign in the UK, which we learned about in chapter 4.[55] The campaign, through its WhatsApp groups and advocacy efforts, has galvanized parents to come together both to delay smartphones in their own families and to encourage schools to get phones out of the school day.

Smartphone Free Childhood, which has now broadened its reach to the United States, has resources on their website, including model letters that parents can use to advocate for a school no-phones policy. Resources are also available through other organizations like the Phone-Free Schools Movement, ScreenStrong, Protect Young Eyes, and Away for the Day. Delay Smartphones in the UK also trains their volunteer ambassadors on how to talk to teachers and school administrators about getting smartphones out of schools and how to work with parent councils to lower barriers for schools to implement no-phones policies. Hannah Oertel says if a school can’t implement a no-phones policy because they can’t afford the lockers or pouches to do so, they will try to work with the local parent council to raise the necessary funds.

Greystones and St. Albans both show how schools and parents can work together to set broader norms in the community that make it easier for each family to resist smartphones for their children and for schools to establish a culture free of the influence of smartphones and social media. This type of joint effort helps remove the pernicious network effects of these technologies.

It really does take a village. Parents and schools working together can be that village that raises children in a healthier way, free of technology’s intrusions both during and outside the school day. By working together, they can change the culture.

Chapter 10

Parents Need Better Laws to Back Them Up

Thirteen-year-old Cari Lightner was walking to a church carnival with a friend on May 3, 1980, in Fair Oaks, California, when she was struck by a drunk driver and thrown 125 feet out of her shoes. The driver had just gotten out of jail two days earlier from his fourth DUI arrest. Cari became the first face of an organization founded by her mother, Candace Lightner, shortly thereafter. The organization is now well known and has been hugely successful. Its name is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or MADD.[1]

Candace Lightner started working to change California’s laws to protect innocent children, like her late daughter, from the deadly consequences of drunk driving. Cindi Lamb, a mom from Maryland, soon joined her. Ms. Lamb and her daughter, Laura, had been hit head-on a year earlier by a drunk driver, also a repeat offender. Laura became the nation’s youngest quadriplegic at five months old. She didn’t make it past the age of six. Other grieving mothers joined in the effort, and their advocacy work started growing. This was all in 1980.[2]

In 1981, just a year later, MADD exploded nationwide. Moms marched in front of state capitols, demanding new laws against drunk driving. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan created the Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, highlighting the national attention MADD was drawing to the issue. And then on July 17, 1984, the minimum drinking age of twenty-one became federal law. Even President Reagan, generally a proponent of states’ rights and limited government, saw drunk driving as a problem that was so serious it needed to be addressed at the federal level. He said in his remarks, “This problem is bigger than the individual states. It’s a grave national problem, and it touches all our lives.”[3] MADD had accomplished historic change in just four years.

All it took was motivated mothers banding together and advocating to lawmakers to get a serious policy change passed to protect their kids and others from a grave danger.

MADD didn’t stop there. A further federal legislative victory followed in 1995, when it became effectively illegal for any driver under twenty-one to have any measurable amount of alcohol in their system, and by 1998, all fifty states had zero tolerance laws.[4] MADD was relentless, continuing to advocate for changes in the law to discourage underage drinking and drunk driving, all in order to protect their kids.

—

The threats of social media and smartphones to our children today necessitate a similar bottom-up parental movement to push for changes in the law.

Smartphones and social media during childhood don’t just affect the individual user. The problems they create aren’t private. Even if a parent opts out, as I’m suggesting in this book, if all a child’s peers in their school and community are on social media, that child can still be negatively affected because of how it changes social dynamics. Like secondhand smoke or drunk driving, these technologies can make the environment unsafe for other children, not just the child using the device or app.

Parents working together in their communities to create counterpressures and schools banning phones are strong steps that help combat the group-level effects of these technologies. But the best protection for all children is to pass laws that restrict these technologies out of childhood altogether. And other laws can serve as stepping stones toward this ultimate goal.

Yes, parents will still always be on the front lines, and it’s ultimately a parent’s, not the state’s, responsibility to protect their own child, but there are times when as a society we recognize something is so harmful to children that we regulate it out of childhood and don’t leave it up to individual parents. This is what our government has done for other dangerous substances and activities like tobacco, alcohol, buying lottery tickets, gambling, and even driving. The research is out. Knowing how detrimental smartphones and social media are to children’s developing brains, friendships, and souls, we want to protect all children, not just those with involved parents.

Raising children is also not a free-market mechanism based on rational choice where order will naturally emerge. It requires social coordination and widespread commitment to certain expectations and norms. Laws are needed to set the norms for what is best for children, for what children should be allowed to see and do. Humans are social beings, and children learn from their environments, so parents must be able to create environments for their children to learn the right things, where their development is protected from negative influences.

Working on laws to protect children from digital dangers is my bread and butter. Over the last three years, I’ve worked with states and Congress on crafting better laws to protect children online and empower parents. I can tell you good news on this front: Change is happening. The tide is turning. States are passing laws. Both sides of the aisle in Congress recognize the problem, and we are witnessing a rare bipartisan moment as they write and sponsor bills together.

We are at a tipping point. And parents can make all the difference in tipping the scales in the right direction so that lawmakers will see these efforts through despite the strong opposition of Big Tech companies and their lobbyists. What, then, are the legal solutions parents should be advocating for?

The Laws We Need

There are several ways we can improve our laws, both federal and state, to help parents successfully resist social media and smartphones for their children and to keep all kids safer online.

Restrict Social Media out of Childhood

The first and most important collective solution is restricting social media entirely for minors under a certain age.

Social media functions as a substance and a place. Both the environment it creates and the nature of the technology are unsafe for children. Social media has created an environment that is full of adult content and adult strangers, like a bar, strip club, or casino, places we wouldn’t let our children hang out in real life. The design features of social media—aggressive algorithms, likes, the infinite scroll, constant notifications—also make it act like a highly addictive substance for children’s developing brains. As we have done with other dangerous substances for children, like alcohol or tobacco, we should restrict social media out of childhood. The same goes if we treat it like an unsafe place for children. Kids aren’t allowed to hang out in casinos or strip clubs; neither should they be allowed to hang out on social media.

Unfortunately, the de facto age for social media and internet adulthood has been thirteen years old because of a law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This law, though, doesn’t restrict minors’ access to sites or platforms; it just requires parental consent for sites to collect information from children under thirteen. Social media platforms, whose business model depends on data collection, therefore, set their age limit to thirteen in order to easily comply with COPPA. But in reality, they don’t effectively enforce this age limit, so eight- to twelve-year-olds are all over these apps, as a recent lawsuit by state attorneys general has publicly exposed.[5]

Congress could change all this and ban social media for minors by raising the age at which they can create social media accounts, in the same way that federal laws have set twenty-one as the minimum age for tobacco or alcohol purchase, and by including age-verification requirements and a strong enforcement mechanism so that the age limit is effectively implemented.[6]

In the meantime, states don’t have to wait to take steps toward restricting social media out of childhood.

In the fall of 2022, with scholars Jean Twenge, Brad Wilcox, and Adam Candeub, I wrote a report with recommendations of policies states could enact to protect children from online dangers.[7] States had been reaching out to me and my co-authors for advice on what they could do so they wouldn’t have to wait on Congress to solve the adolescent social media crisis. They were watching as social media took a devastating toll on children and teens, and their parent constituents were desperate for help.

Parental Consent for Social Media

In early 2023, Utah took the ideas from our report and ran with them, becoming the first state to pass a comprehensive social media bill.[8] The core provision of that law—and a key recommendation in our report—was requiring parental consent for minors to create a social media account. (Unfortunately, Utah later repealed and replaced its law in light of lawsuits about its constitutionality. Now, instead of requiring age verification and parental consent for minor users, social media companies are only required to use an age-assurance system and enable certain default settings and supervisory tools for minor accounts.)[9] On the bright side, the original Utah law forged the way and inspired eight other states—Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee—to follow suit in passing parental consent laws for social media.[10]

These laws require internet companies to obtain parental consent before allowing a minor to form an account. This is an innovative solution that draws on contract law. Creating a social media account and agreeing to its terms of service is akin to entering a contract. In fact, the companies often in the terms of service state that their terms form a legally binding agreement. These terms of service are filled with technical language and fine-print details that nobody takes the time to read and that a child isn’t able to understand fully. As a general legal rule, minors lack the capacity to form contracts, which means parental consent is necessary (and reasonable) to underwrite one. These laws are supported by legal precedents such as laws requiring parental consent for tattoos or liability waivers, and they seek to restore to parents what the Supreme Court has recognized as fundamental to our democracy: parents’ power to control who speaks to our kids.[11] The point is tech companies shouldn’t have the right to speak to kids without their parents’ consent. These laws are constitutional and legally defensible.

A Total Ban

Another idea that our report suggested was that states could even ban social media for minors. In 2024, Florida became the first state to do so. Florida took a tiered approach—banning social media completely for minors under the age of fourteen and requiring parental consent for minors who are fourteen or fifteen years old.[12] Texas has also tried to introduce a ban law, but it hasn’t passed yet.[13] The states don’t have to have a monopoly on these ideas. Congress could also pass a parental consent law for social media or, as mentioned above, a national ban on social media for minors.

Some parental advocates have resisted social media bans for minors because they think it disempowers parents from deciding what’s right for their child. But this is a misunderstanding of the laws’ intent. Both ban laws and parental consent laws are meant to empower parents. With a ban, parents wouldn’t have to fight the constant battle of saying no to social media for their kids, because it would be a non-option, the same way cigarettes for kids is now a non-option. Parents in Florida will no longer have to face societal peer pressure to give their child social media or fear their child’s social isolation by not giving it, since all kids under fourteen in Florida will simply not be allowed on by law. Now some parents might want their minor kids to hang out in bars for their education. But they have no legal right to demand that. The same will now be true in Florida for social media platforms. Bans help everyone keep kids safe.

Twelve-year-olds already shouldn’t have been able to get access to social media because of COPPA, since platforms aren’t allowed to collect data on minors under thirteen without parental consent. But COPPA has been very difficult to enforce against platforms, meaning minors under thirteen are on social media. Florida’s law that empowers the state and individuals to sue for violations with stiff penalties seeks to function where COPPA falls short.

These state laws that age-restrict social media are almost all tied to age verification requirements so that a child can’t just enter a birth date or check a box and easily falsify their age, as in the current setup, and have enforcement provisions so that companies can be held accountable if they fail to prevent a child from getting on. It’s possible for age verification to be done in a way that is both effective at keeping minors off and not burdensome to adults.

Device-Level Verification and Consent

I and some other policy experts have also recommended requiring age verification at the device level and integrating it with age verification for social media platforms and adult websites (more on adult website laws below).[14] In setting up a new smartphone, the user is already required to establish an Apple or Google Account and enter their birth date. Age verification could easily be tacked onto this setup process. The device verification could then be used with age-gated websites and apps by using a stored token or a zero-knowledge proof key on the device. The advantage to this approach is a user would need to verify their age only once. The phone wouldn’t reveal the owner’s identity to any app or website. Instead, the device could automatically communicate to age-gated websites and apps whether the user is over or under eighteen in a way that is seamless for the user and most protective of their privacy. A device verified for a minor could also be required to enable certain protective settings by default, like a filter.

With device verification, parental consent requirements could also be extended to apps beyond social media. A state or Congress could pass a requirement for device manufacturers to obtain parental consent for minor device users to access the app store and for every instance when they attempt to download or purchase an app from the app store. Smartphones already have existing settings that can be activated to require parental approval for any new app download, but a law could make sure such features are the default for all device users under eighteen rather than parents having to find and turn on this restriction themselves.

While I would argue for not giving a child a smartphone or tablet at all until adulthood, legal device requirements would allow parents who do give children these devices to more effectively restrict social media and other unwanted apps out of childhood. It’s extremely difficult in the current system for a parent to keep their child off social media and other apps if they have a smart device.

Any of these laws aimed at restricting children’s access to social media would also make it easier for parents to delay giving their children smartphones. Laws help set norms. Age-restriction laws mean that cigarettes and alcohol aren’t an inevitable part of American childhood. Similarly, social media age restrictions can make it so social media and smartphones are no longer an inevitable part of childhood. If a child or teen can no longer access social media by law, then there’s no reason a dumbphone that only texts and calls won’t suffice for their communication needs.

A legal solution that takes social media away from children would help protect all children, not just those with involved, well-informed parents. Restricting social media out of childhood would help vulnerable children the most.

Protect Children from Online Pornography

Even if a parent doesn’t give their own child a smartphone or social media, no parent wants one of their child’s friends whipping out a phone and showing them porn. While Tech Exit parents proactively train their children and prepare them for how to handle these accidental exposures, public policy solutions are needed to keep children from easily stumbling across or intentionally viewing pornographic content that is degrading to their minds and bodies.

The encouraging news is that in the past few years many states have taken up this mantle and passed laws to make it more difficult for children to access online pornography. This growing momentum all started in Louisiana, when one newly elected legislator decided to take on Big Porn.

Age Verification for Adult Websites

Before becoming a Louisiana state representative in 2021, Laurie Schlegel was a sex addiction therapist and a Court Appointed Special Advocate for abused and neglected children. She knew how much damage pornography caused and how easily children could access it. Once she became a state legislator, she realized she could actually do something to change that, so she decided to introduce legislation that would require porn sites to confirm users are at least eighteen before granting them access. In an interview, Representative Schlegel said, “You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky’s—that’s an adult bookstore in my district. This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.”[15]

To get fellow legislators on board, she asked Dr. Gail Dines, a sociologist whose 2015 TEDx Talk, “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture,”[16] had resonated with her, to give a webinar to the bipartisan Louisiana Legislative Women’s Caucus. “People were shocked at Dr. Dines’ research and the type of pornography that kids can access on the internet,” Representative Schlegel said. The legislators were impacted and members on both sides of the aisle offered their support for her bill, HB 142.[17] It passed easily in June 2022, with only one vote against, and took effect in January 2023.[18]

Since the law took effect, according to Ethical Capital Partners, the private equity company that owns Pornhub (the biggest free porn site), traffic in Louisiana has dropped 80 percent.[19]

Because of Representative Schlegel, Louisiana has led the way for nearly twenty other states to pass laws requiring age verification for porn sites, and that number is only growing.[20] As these laws have passed, Pornhub has dropped out of more and more states. While it remains operational, though diminished, in Louisiana, it has ceased doing business entirely in seven states.[21]

What made Louisiana a perfect test case for this kind of law is that the state had already adopted an electronic ID system, called LA Wallet, to provide residents with digital driver’s licenses and other identification. Representative Schlegel worked with LA Wallet in developing her bill to ensure there would be a way for residents to easily verify their age online and protect their privacy. The law thus specifically includes the use of digital IDs as an approved method for verifying age, and LA Wallet operates a program that can verify that a Louisiana user is over eighteen without revealing any other identifying information about the person. This innovative technology both allows adults to verify their age anonymously, protecting their privacy, and provides an effective means of keeping adult content from children, since children don’t have and can’t easily falsify digital IDs. This kind of advance in age-verification technology helps such laws stand up to possible constitutional challenges that they are burdensome on adult free speech.[22]

These laws are not without legal challenge, but they can and do succeed in court. The Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’s age-verification law for porn sites, and in Utah, the district court dismissed the case brought against its age-verification law.[23]

While Louisiana and other states are leading the way in the battle against porn for our kids, it would be ideal if Congress passed a federal law requiring age verification for porn sites so children’s access to these sites would be restricted nationwide, not just state by state. The last two Congresses, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has introduced a bill toward this end called the SCREEN Act.[24] The more states that pass these laws, the greater pressure it puts on Congress to act.

Automatic Device Filters

States have also passed or are considering mandatory device-filter laws, where devices activated for users under eighteen, like smartphones or tablets, would have to turn on a filter to block adult websites by default. In 2024 Utah became the first state to pass a device-filter bill.[25] A Utah mother who testified on behalf of the bill explained that a phone user already has to enter their birth date to create an Apple or Google Account, so “if the user is identified as a child under 18 per the stated age, this bill mandates that the device automatically enable a preexisting filter. This filter restricts the child’s access to pornographic content.”[26] Utah’s law means built-in device filters, like Apple’s Limit Adult Websites, will have to be turned on as the default setting for all new smartphones and tablets activated by minors in Utah. Many other states are considering these laws, and there is no reason Congress couldn’t pass a federal device-filter law so that this becomes the practice nationwide.

Cleaning Up Social Media

These laws are all strong steps in the right direction to protect children from accessing adult sites, but there is still a persisting problem: Adult and violent content isn’t restricted to adult sites or dark corners of the web but circulates all over social media. If social media is restricted out of childhood, that would be a huge win and would help protect children from viewing this content, but in the meantime, while children still have access to these platforms, dangerous content is a huge problem. Furthermore, even if social media becomes age restricted, children can still access sites like YouTube that don’t require account creation or view social media posts through an internet browser without having an account. TikTok, for example, lets you access videos on a browser as a guest.

Getting social media companies, including YouTube, to clean up their platforms won’t happen unless a law called Section 230 is updated to compel them to do so.

My introduction to Section 230, also known as the twenty-six words that created the internet, was while I was working at the Department of Justice. The attorney general was convening legal experts to understand the current challenges with Section 230 and what updates were needed. This is where I learned that internet companies faced absolutely no consequences for promoting child sexual abuse material or facilitating the finding and recruitment of victims by sex traffickers.

As a result of these convenings, the Justice Department put forth a proposal to Congress with recommendations for amending Section 230 that focused in large part on how to incentivize platforms to remove illicit content. One idea was adding a Bad Samaritan carve-out so that if an internet company is acting like a Bad Samaritan by knowingly promoting or facilitating criminal behavior, then they don’t get to benefit from Section 230 immunity. The department also proposed exempting from immunity specific categories of hosted content, like child exploitation and sexual abuse, terrorism, and cyberstalking, and making clear in the law that Section 230 immunity doesn’t apply when a platform had knowledge that content violated a federal law and refused to take it down.[27]

Shortly after leaving the department, I read about a case called John Does v. Twitter. A 13-year-old boy, John, and his friend had been groomed online into sending sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves to a sex trafficker posing as a peer. A compilation of the sexual material was then posted to Twitter, where it was shared more than two thousand times. Even students at John’s school were sharing it. John and his mom contacted Twitter multiple times, providing evidence that John was a minor, begging them to take down this child sexual abuse material. Twitter’s response: “We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time.”[28]

Immediately my DOJ background on needed reforms to Section 230 came to mind. So I wrote an opinion piece about what Congress needed to do to amend Section 230 so that victims like John could have recourse against social media companies and so children could be protected online.[29] That opinion piece is the short story of how I got into the tech policy space.

As far as John’s story, the images of his abuse were eventually taken down by Twitter once a federal law enforcement agent got involved.[30] John, who brought his lawsuit against the company in January 2021, unfortunately lost his appeal in the Ninth Circuit in 2023. It’s unclear what the next steps will be in this litigation as John still awaits justice. John, sadly, is only one of many children whose exploitation is being promoted by social media platforms; he just decided to take on Twitter and fight back. Most victims don’t. And most cases that are brought against these platforms don’t even make it as far as John’s case did. Instead, they get tossed out at the motion-to-dismiss stage because of Section 230, before any evidence can be explored.

One bill introduced in Congress, the EARN IT Act (hopefully it will have passed by the time this book goes to print), would solve the problem of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on social media by creating a narrow carve-out in Section 230 to remove blanket immunity from CSAM laws.[31] This way victims like John wouldn’t have their suits tossed out but could hold platforms accountable for distributing their abuse online.

Child victims of social media are not only those whose abuse is shared on these platforms but also those who are fed dangerous, even deadly, content by their algorithms.

Ten-year-old Nylah Anderson was found by her mother unconscious, hanging from a purse strap, in her bedroom closet after performing a TikTok blackout challenge. She was rushed to the hospital but died five days later. Deep marks on her neck showed signs that she had fought to free herself. Her mother, Taiwanna Anderson, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against TikTok for the app’s role in recommending the deadly challenge on her daughter’s For You feed. The federal judge on the case, however, dismissed the lawsuit, citing Section 230.[32]

Little Nylah Anderson would likely have never come across such a horrifying and dangerous challenge had TikTok not fed it to her. The app is to blame. Yet hiding behind Section 230, platforms have been able to avoid accountability.

No litigation, no accountability, means no incentives for companies to change their behavior. Children’s deaths will be business as usual unless the law changes. Children’s lives and innocence are just collateral damage for the sake of profits. As Justice Clarence Thomas has explained, Section 230 was designed to give internet companies immunity from publisher liability for content they host, not to also give them immunity from distributor liability, shielding them from legal penalties for distributing illegal content, nor to give them immunity for wrongdoing related to their own product design, like algorithms.[33] Or as Ms. Anderson’s attorney simply put it, Section 230 “was never intended to allow social media companies to send dangerous content to children.”[34]

Section 230 reform is needed to correct the misinterpretation and overexpansion of this law. And rather than dismissing cases outright under Section 230, courts could also help clarify the original meaning of the law. In hopeful news, some courts are stepping up. The Third Circuit recently revived Ms. Anderson’s lawsuit, sending it back to the district court for trial. In his concurrence to the decision, Judge Paul Matey wrote that Section 230 does not shield TikTok for its “knowing distribution and targeted recommendation of videos it knew could be harmful.”[35] Ms. Anderson’s fight against TikTok is not over yet.

Change Their Business Model

Beyond Section 230, other laws could also help to poke holes in these companies’ immunity, to hold them accountable for their own wrongdoing and compel them to change their current business model that endangers children.

Litigation

In October 2023, a bipartisan group of forty-two state attorneys general sued Meta, “alleging that features on its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms are addictive and are aimed at kids and teens.” A joint federal lawsuit was brought by thirty-three of the AGs, and nine AGs filed separate lawsuits in their own state courts.[36]

This is landmark litigation against a social media company, the likes of which we have never seen before. And it’s long overdue. The federal lawsuit alleges that “Meta designed its Facebook and Instagram products to keep young users on them for longer and repeatedly coming back,” via their algorithms, alerts, notifications, and infinite scroll. “The company also includes features that the AGs allege negatively impact teens’ mental health through social comparison or promoting body dysmorphia, such as ‘likes’ or photo filters.”[37]

These lawsuits were brought mainly using state consumer protection laws, often known as unfair or deceptive acts or practices (UDAP) statutes, claiming that Meta violated these laws by making its products addictive and then lying about how they harm children’s mental health. In short, by deceptively advertising their products. (The joint federal suit also accuses Meta of violating COPPA by collecting personal data on users under thirteen without parental consent.)[38]

This litigation approach should sound familiar to anyone who remembers the state litigation against Big Tobacco during the 1990s, which finally caused those companies to stop advertising cigarettes to kids. It started in 1994 when Mississippi filed a lawsuit, and by 1998 the tobacco companies were facing litigation from more than forty states. Facing the mountain of lawsuits, the four major companies entered into a master settlement agreement, and one of the core conditions was that they had to “restrict their advertising, sponsorship, lobbying, and litigation activities, particularly as those activities targeted youth.” They also had to “create and fund the National Public Education Foundation, dedicated to reducing youth smoking and preventing diseases associated with smoking,” to try to clean up the mess of the public health crisis they had created.[39]

Litigation works—if it can succeed.

The fact that it took so long to bring this type of litigation against one of the largest tech companies in the world and that state AGs banded together in such large numbers to do it shows how careful and strategic they are being because Section 230 has made litigation against social media platforms an uphill battle.

States could fuel further litigation efforts against social media by amending their consumer protection statutes to add explicit language that these statutes apply to internet companies and social media platforms.

Making Products Safer

It was a rare moment on Capitol Hill on January 31, 2024, when the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with five major social media executives for Meta, Snapchat, Discord, X, and TikTok. Rare in that Democrat and Republican senators alike were calling for Congress to pass laws to force social media companies to change their business model.[40]

Changes in federal and/or state law could strengthen ongoing lawsuits and encourage more litigation efforts by creating new design requirements for tech companies to keep children safe while using their products.

Some states are already pursuing this avenue of change by passing laws that would prohibit tech companies from employing certain addictive or harmful features, like recommendation algorithms, in children’s accounts or require them to design their products with children’s safety in mind. California and Maryland have passed age-appropriate design codes for social media, and New York is the latest to join them.[41] Many other states are considering similar legislation.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), introduced by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), is one such design-focused bill in Congress. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with options to disable addictive product features and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. It would also create a duty of care, which would make social media platforms responsible for preventing and mitigating a narrow list of specific harms to minors, including sexual exploitation and abuse, physical violence, cyberbullying, eating disorders, substance abuse, and promotion or marketing of products or activities that are unlawful for minors (for example, narcotic drugs, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol).[42] This means that KOSA would open companies up to litigation from state attorneys general or the Federal Trade Commission, tasked with enforcing the law, if they fail to provide these options and mitigate these harms in their product design. It imposes new product liabilities that Section 230 wouldn’t be able to get them out of. KOSA would thus give state AGs further grounds for bringing lawsuits against social media companies. It passed the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 91–3 and will hopefully be signed into law by the time this book is published.

While I still believe the ideal is to restrict social media out of childhood entirely, laws that open up more litigation against tech companies for their product harms and compel them to design their products for child safety can help keep more kids safe right now, which is a strong step in the right direction.

It’s also worth noting that if parents want these companies to change their business model, we shouldn’t be too quick to give them more business ourselves. Parents can help push for change by voting with their feet. If we want the tech companies to feel the cost of exploiting our kids, we shouldn’t give them our own time and attention, which only grow their profits. We can send a message by boycotting these platforms outright or significantly reducing our use of them. Maybe it’s time to delete our Instagram or X?

Parent Voices Are Needed

Not only should parents vote with their feet but we must also raise our voices. One reason it has been so difficult to pass laws that will address online dangers to children is because it’s been challenging for parents to organize enough to exert sufficient pressure on lawmakers. Often as a bill gets close to getting a vote, either in Congress or in a state legislature, Big Tech swoops in with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers, an incredibly organized machine, and mounts a tremendous pressure and intimidation campaign to scare lawmakers away or buy them off. It’s a David and Goliath fight. Individual parents calling or writing their legislators can help, but it’s hard to make much difference while you have Big Tech’s army on the other side.

For example, in the spring of 2024, a group led by Google and Meta spent nearly a million dollars lobbying lawmakers in New York State to try to scare them away from passing two child online safety bills.[43] A lawmaker has to have incredible willpower and personal passion to see their vote through. However, if parents can organize and raise their voices together so it’s hundreds or thousands, not just a few, contacting their legislators, that can tip the scales the other direction and steel the spines of legislators to get these reform bills passed. This is how MADD was able to be so successful. They organized parents to make their voices heard. There is power in numbers.

Join with Other Parents

The encouraging news is that the last few years have seen growing grassroots movements of parents both in the United States and abroad who have had enough of smartphones and social media stealing away childhood. They are coming together to advocate for change. You don’t have to do this alone or even start your own group—you can join with parents who are already engaged in this work, helping provide structure for others to easily plug into.

For years there was no MADD equivalent when it came to social media or other digital technologies. That is, until 2024, when MAMA launched.

Julie Scelfo, who has curly black hair and often rocks bright red lipstick, is the founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) and had said for years that we needed a MADD for social media. But she wasn’t interested in being the one to start it. As we spoke over Zoom in the middle of her packed day, when she was just seven weeks into launching MAMA, she told me, “I kept waiting for another mom to do it. I couldn’t wait to sign up and join.” But as the years went on, no one did it. And the situation with smartphones and social media was only getting worse. Julie realized, Oh, she’s me. If I don’t do this, who’s going to do this? She told me intently, “My goal in life before I die is to see the tween suicide rate go back to what it was before smartphones. If I could help get us there, then I feel like my life had some purpose here.”

I have confidence that Julie will help get us there. While she didn’t set out to be the mom to start a MADD for social media, her background makes her the perfect person to lead this movement and be the spokesperson for all the moms and dads who want to protect their children from media addiction. She is a passionate mom herself of three tween and teen boys. Her career as a journalist with a degree in media ecology has given her the experience needed to get the campaign enough publicity to take off nationwide. And her work as a reporter, where she covered tween and teen suicide for years, has given her knowledge of the costs screens are exacting from kids. A few years ago, she broke a major story on how the tween suicide rate was going up in kids as young as ten and the role digital technology played in that.[44]

I asked Julie to tell me more about the mission of MAMA. She told me three things: “Number one is parent education. Number two is getting phones out of schools. That’s not going to solve everything, but at least it protects eight hours a day for children to develop primarily in-person and real-life interactions. And the third part of our mission is demanding safeguards. Safeguards are policy changes that ensure children’s emotions can’t be exploited for profit.”

Political advocacy is intimidating for the average parent. Maybe you feel like you don’t know all the research or the lingo. You don’t know the political processes or current laws. You had never heard of Section 230 or COPPA before this book. You want change for your children, but you aren’t sure how to talk to other parents or your legislators about it. You feel intimidated and disempowered as an individual parent trying to stand up against giant tech companies and the powerful social pressures they’ve created. But you don’t have to be. MAMA is now here to help you.

Julie continued, “We’re encouraging parents to join us and take part in a local MAMA chapter where they can meet up with like-minded people and get education that we are providing at meetings.” That education is giving parents language to talk about this with others. “A lot of times people just don’t have the language to explain the problem or what is needed, though they know something is wrong with a child being on a phone eight hours a day,” she explained. MAMA helps fill that gap.

MAMA’s curriculum for chapters also gives parents action tools at the end of each meeting. Julie said, “Every meeting will end by giving parents something to do, whether it’s taking ten postcards and giving them out to friends, whether it’s ideas for how they can keep children entertained without screens, or whether it’s writing letters to their elected leaders.” MAMA is action oriented. The goal of the meetings is to empower parents to take back control of their own children’s media diet and to advocate for a healthier media environment in our society for all children.

“People feel they need help to do these things. So that’s what we’re trying to be as the provider of a helping hand, a partnership to walk people through the steps, telling them what to say, how to ask, providing them with templates and all the tools they need to do it,” Julie told me.

You can join MAMA through their website to stay informed of advocacy efforts and MAMA events or even volunteer to host an event—or join or start a local MAMA chapter in your area. If you’re in the UK, they also have parental advocacy groups like Smartphone Free Childhood and Delay Smartphones. You can join the Smartphone Free Childhood WhatsApp group in your area or become a volunteer ambassador with Delay Smartphones. These groups are all here to support and empower you with knowledge, language, and action steps.

Just Be the Awkward Mom

One mom I met has had an outsized impact in pushing lawmakers to take steps to protect kids online in her state. When I called her to ask about how she got involved in advocacy, she told me her story.

“Before I started advocacy work, I think there were like fifteen years of me at home doing nothing but changing diapers.” When she started to become interested in this issue, she thought, I can’t do this. I’m not articulate. I’m not educated. I haven’t written anything in years. But she just had the desire.

Then she attended a conference that one of her state senators was also attending. She didn’t know what he looked like, but someone told her he was there, so she looked up his picture on her phone and spotted him across the room. “I cornered him. I was so awkward, and I think it’s just amazing how receptive people are to the genre of the awkward mom. I am not somebody who runs an organization or something, so I get away with being a lot more raw and emotional than the average person. That’s actually kind of a little bit of my superpower,” she told me as she smiled. She has no business interests. No one pays her. She gets to just be a passionate, awkward mom. That’s her superpower.

She talked to that state senator and got the number for the chief of staff of one of her state’s United States senators. She then emailed him six, seven, or eight times. The staffer was ignoring her until he realized, This mom is not going away. He eventually set up a meeting for her with the U.S. senator. In that meeting she told the senator how there was porn all over Instagram and all over Snapchat. He told her, “I’ve never seen it. My kids have never shown me that.” Right there, she opened up Instagram on her phone, easily scrolled to porn, and slid it across the table to him. The jaws of all the men in suits around the table dropped. She laughed and said to me, “You can’t get away with that sort of behavior unless you’re, like, a nobody.”

My friend Bill Woolf, whom we met in chapter 2, works in the nonprofit anti-trafficking space and likewise told me parents need to know that their voices matter. When it comes to advocacy, he has learned that when no one is talking about these things, leadership doesn’t pay attention and isn’t responsive. “It is only when we are making noise that they truly start to pay attention.”

Parents, we have to make noise for policymakers to hear us. Don’t take no for an answer. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth. It doesn’t need to be polished, and honestly, it’s best when it’s not.

Change the Laws, Change the Culture

Julie Scelfo ended our call by telling me, “The reason Mothers Against Drunk Driving was successful is not only did they succeed in changing the laws, but they succeeded in changing culture. When I was growing up, nobody thought that drunk driving was a huge issue, and it was more of a personal thing. Now we understand it in the public health context that it puts people at risk…. If you’re drinking, you shouldn’t be driving. Now we all know that if you see somebody drunk and they’re getting up, you take their keys. That’s what MAMA hopes to achieve. To change the culture to think about media and tech in a different way.”

It’s possible. All it takes is parents raising their voices together to change the laws. And if you change the laws, you can change the culture.

Conclusion

What We Reenter When We Leave Digital Technologies Behind

In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” giving the world what has become a paradigmatic understanding of a hierarchy of human needs, from more base needs like food and safety to what he considered the highest need: self-actualization. But only a few years before his death in 1970, Maslow wrote another paper that added an even higher need: self-transcendence.[1] He called it “the culmination of 30 years of work in the field of psychology.”[2]

Self-actualization is about achieving one’s full potential. What Maslow learned, however, is that human potential culminates instead in self-transcendence, in pursuing goods that move beyond self-interest, like helping others. Our highest need is to be focused outside ourselves. Maslow described it as “the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than as means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.”[3] We achieve this level by focusing on things beyond the self like altruism and spiritual awakening.

—

The media coverage to date about screens and kids has largely focused on the dangers that smartphones, social media, and other digital technologies pose to children’s mental health and development. The mental health crisis is real and deserves attention. But we risk missing a much greater question about how we are to understand this issue. We can determine what is right for our kids in regard to screens only after we answer the question, What are people—and, in particular, what is childhood—for? When we consider that the peak of human flourishing is self-transcendence, it becomes sharply clear that these technologies are undermining more than just mental health.

The teen mental health crisis is a symptom of a deeper problem: Phones have reoriented kids’ greatest aspirations from a higher purpose to a cul-de-sac of self-involvement. Technology is habituating our children to lives of endless consumption.

Children are always being formed by something—family, peers, teachers, media. As parents, our job is to consider what is forming our children and to manage what they are being formed into. Every time we hand our children a screen, technology answers that question for us. By their nature, screens form children into self-focused consumers. The screen exists to serve them, and it never runs out of content and amusement. Tech companies have designed it this way, with the infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, bright colors, and noises, all to keep children engaged and constantly coming back for more. They begin to believe that life is for entertainment and instant gratification. The medium is the message. And kids have gotten the message.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has proved prescient, as today’s teens are not only amusing themselves but also literally and figuratively scrolling themselves to death. Such a shallow purpose—consumption with no end beyond one’s own satisfaction—only breeds despair, which we see in the spiking rates of self-harm and suicide among teens. As life becomes about living for the next dopamine hit—the next like, the next message, the next video—it isn’t just what kids consume on screens; it’s the very habit of endless consumption that leaves them distracted, numb, and missing out on the meaningful experiences that make us into whole, flourishing human beings.

As this book has tried to explain, harm reduction strategies that have been held out to parents as the solution—like screen-time limits or parental controls—aren’t sufficient. They don’t get us closer to fixing the much deeper problem of how screens are flattening the very purpose and nature of childhood.

Rather, to address this underlying crisis, we need to exit digital technologies completely. We need to restrict screens out of childhood. But that is only the first half of the solution. This book’s message is deeper than just what we need to do to ameliorate the damages from our modern digital devices. It’s fundamentally a call to pursue the path to human flourishing, to embrace the goods that we know are best for life. And that is the second—and arguably more important—half of the solution.

As we have examined throughout these chapters, Tech Exit families aren’t primarily oriented around rules and restrictions to keep technology out but are instead wholeheartedly embracing love and service to one another and the world around them. They are seeking to help their children pursue lives of true flourishing. It’s beautiful and compelling.

When I asked Haley, one Tech Exit mom we met, about her decision not to give her children screens, she shared that her ultimate goal as a parent is to raise children capable of “self-gift,” who will go out and make this world a better place. Rather than raising children who are turned in on themselves, addicted to their phones, she wants to raise children who contribute to their family and community.

All the families I have met in my journey to write this book are focused on filling childhood with opportunities for children to learn self-giving. This looks like helping them develop real skills—art, music, poetry, athletics, cooking, reading, thinking, problem-solving, creativity—and then use those skills to serve others, first in their home and then in the world. Their lives are grounded in real-world relationships of obligation and responsibility, as well as the joy of play and independence.

The self-giving they cultivate in their children extends beyond the home. Margaret told me she would have her kids and their teen friends do service projects together in their community. It helped take their eyes off themselves, and they also developed deeper relationships with those friends. Unsurprisingly, these children living off screens, serving in the real world, are also less anxious. It turns out service is an amazing antidote for anxiety because it takes your mind off your own problems and worries.

The Tech Exit isn’t a life of drudgery and restrictions. Rather, it’s a life of pursuing true flourishing. These families are joyful because the Tech Exit is the definition of a positive no. Their no to screens is a yes to so much more. The whole purpose of exiting digital technology is so that we, our children and ourselves, reenter the real world and reconnect with our fellow humans—our family members, friends, neighbors, classmates, teammates, and church members—in real life. In that way, we can live in real relationships and communities, rooted in the bonds of our families and the boundaries of our neighborhoods.

The Tech Exit is also more than a return to a play-based childhood. While it isn’t less than that, and play is certainly important for children’s development and health, children also need a greater purpose and vision for their lives. They need a higher calling outside themselves, as Maslow found, to others and to God. This is backed up by research.

Leonard Sax in his 2016 book, The Collapse of Parenting, cites a forty-year longitudinal study that followed a thousand children over the course of their lifetime and found that the best predictor of success as an adult is childhood self-control. According to the researchers, “Childhood self-control strongly predicts adult success, in people of high or low intelligence, in rich or poor, and does so throughout the entire population, with a step change in health, wealth, and social success at every level of self-control.”[4] Self-control is fundamentally about learning to have mastery over our desires and impulses for our own good and the common good, to practice self-denial in order to serve others.

If we want our children to be happy and successful, if we want them to reach their highest potential in self-transcendence, then the most important thing we can do is replace screens with activities that turn their focus outward. In doing so, we can form in them habits of self-control, personal responsibility, and care for their fellow humans and the natural world. And this is the path to true joy and fulfillment.

Removing digital tech from childhood is the first step, but the far greater task ahead of us is to reclaim true human flourishing. This is the journey Tech Exit families are on. They have shown us how we, too, can embark on this path. Now it’s your turn. Will you join them?

Acknowledgments

This book would not have happened without the support, encouragement, and practical help of many people.

Foremost, I want to thank my editor at Forum Books, Matt Burdette, who believed in the message of this book from the beginning and who has immensely improved its framing, content, and quality. Matt was more than an editor; he was a writing coach. Not only has he brought The Tech Exit to print, but he has made me a stronger writer. I am forever indebted.

My agent, Keely Boeving, strengthened and refined my thinking and writing throughout the entire process from initial proposal to final book, serving as a vital sounding board at each step.

I also owe a great debt to Ryan Anderson, Mitch Muncy, and many colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). Ryan brought me on at EPPC and let me run with my vision for the Technology and Human Flourishing Project, putting wind in my sails at every step of the way. And Ryan was the first person to tell me I needed to write this book. Ryan and Mitch, both, would not let me give up on it when I encountered initial setbacks. Mitch’s advice and insights on book publishing and promotion have been invaluable. Many other EPPC colleagues encouraged me, offered advice on my proposal, and directed me to helpful resources. I must especially thank Matthew Malec, who served as a vital research assistant for the book and who joyfully did important, yet often mundane, research tasks for it. Hunter Estes, EPPC’s communications director, has helped me greatly in promoting the book.

The Tech Exit would also not have been possible without the generosity and thoughtfulness of all the individuals who spoke with me to share their expertise and experience. I am especially grateful for Tech Exit families—parents and grown children—I met and talked with, who have led the way for all of us. I could not have written this book without their inspiring stories and courageous examples. I am also grateful to all the passionate parents I met raising their voices to advocate for change, educators and school administrators taking bold steps in their schools to free children from digital devices, and state and federal legislators working hard to pass better laws to protect our kids. You have all inspired me. I hope more will join your number when they see your examples in this book.

I am grateful in my policy and legislative work to labor alongside brilliant co-conspirators who I am glad to also call friends, most especially, Michael Toscano at the Institute for Family Studies, and Adam Candeub at Michigan State University Law School and the Center for Renewing America. They have sharpened and refined my own thinking on these issues. Adam’s brilliant legal mind has also helped me better understand our laws and the constitutional issues at stake, and he kindly reviewed sections of The Tech Exit for legal accuracy. Other friends and collaborators like Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes reviewed portions for accuracy as well.

Thank you also to Attorney General Bill Barr and the many colleagues I served with in his office who taught me the ropes of Section 230 and helped me understand the threats from large tech companies to America’s children. Katie Sullivan, Bill Woolf, and others I worked with at the Department of Justice also shed light on the severe dangers of human trafficking and sexual exploitation online, exacerbated by today’s digital technologies. Their courageous work to combat these horrific crimes to children informed me and helped inspire me to write this book as well.

Thank you to the incredible team at Penguin Random House and Forum Books, who have all been a joy to work with. Tina Constable’s leadership and support of this project has meant the world. Thank you for taking a chance on a new author and for believing in the message of this book, and for working tirelessly with careful thought and great effort to help this book reach its readers. An extra thanks to Kayla Fenstermaker, my copy editor, who truly went above and beyond to not only meticulously edit but also scrupulously fact-check this manuscript. The book is much stronger, I would even say unassailable now, because of her work.

To the moms at forest school, thank you for welcoming me into your rich and encouraging community. Thank you for opening your lives and walking alongside me in pursuing tech-free childhoods for our kids, and for showing me how to get my kids outside in all weather.

Thank you to my many dear friends who have constantly asked me about this project and how I was doing, prayed for me, encouraged me, and practically helped our family in the busy book-writing season in which we also had a newborn baby. A special thanks is due to Emily, Anna, and Rebeccah. Thank you also to Kate and Chloe, who helped babysit my boisterous toddler boys so that I could get in extra writing time.

A special thank-you to my friend and former pastor Bobby Jamieson, who offered me wise counsel at a critical juncture in this process and then connected me to my wonderful agent, Keely. Without his intervention at that moment, I don’t know where this book would be today.

I ultimately owe this accomplishment to my parents, Brian and Laura Murphy, who made me the person I am and did so in large part by giving me the gift of a low-tech childhood before I even understood what that meant. Though I complained at the time, thank you for not getting me a cell phone until high school and then getting me the most boring possible flip phone with only a hundred texts per month. I thought you were old-school at the time, but now I see that your decisions were extremely wise and prescient.

Thank you also to my three children, Theodore, Flavius, and Josephine, who endured their mom’s divided energy and attention for the short yet intense season of the book’s writing. Josephine, who was a newborn at the time, also suffered through many Zoom interviews and phone calls. My foremost hope and prayer is that what I have learned from writing this book will make me a better parent to the three of you.

Finally, and above all, thank you to my husband, Caleb: my best friend, my personal editor (he is the better writer), my biggest cheerleader, and my rock. Writing a book with three kids aged four and under, including a newborn, was a bit crazy. It wouldn’t have been possible apart from the many sacrifices Caleb made, not the least of which included me talking about the book to him ad nauseam. Our life with three little kids is loud and busy, so as Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, it can be easy for small joys to pass unnoticed, like “gold in the sand.” Caleb, thank you for always helping me to see all the gold. God has blessed us richly. To Him be the glory.

To Learn More

I write on the topics covered in this book, offer further resources for parents, schools, and policymakers, and cover new research and evolving trends in technology at my Substack, Preserving Our Humanity. You can sign up for free at ClareMorell.substack.com to follow along. You can also see the appendix that follows for a checklist, additional resources, alternative phone options, and sample policies for your family and your school to use. Also see eppc.org/​author/​clare_morell for a complete archive of everything I have written, and eppc.org/​program/​technology-and-human-flourishing for everything our project has done and will do related to public policy solutions to protect kids online.

Appendix

I. The Tech Exit Checklist

Try out a digital fast for thirty days or even seven days as an initial reset and trial period:

no video games

no iPads or other tablets

no smartphones

no social media

no TV (except for family movies)

school screens for homework only

Keep going over the long term, from fasting to FEASTing:

F: Find Other Families

- start with your neighbors

- find other parents through your school

- engage your faith community

- start young

- cast a wide net if needed

E: Explain, Educate, and Exemplify

- explain your reasons to your kids

- educate kids on the harms

- exemplify responsible tech use

A: Adopt Alternatives

- adopt forms of communication other than smartphones

- find work-arounds to app requirements

S: Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules

- set up digital accountability for all your children’s communication channels

- set family screen rules—screens are used only publicly and purposefully, and screen entertainment is sparing and shared

T: Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits

- invest in family relationships and give children responsibilities

- encourage real-life pursuits and forms of leisure

Work with your school to go phone-free and low-tech:

ask for policies that remove phones from the entire school day

encourage your school to move away from tablets and other screens for learning

initiate conversations about other creative ideas like offering more extracurriculars, restricting social media, or working with phone providers to offer non-smartphone alternatives to students

Advocate to your lawmakers for policy solutions:

raise the age of social media use

require parental consent for minor social media accounts

require age verification for adult websites

require automatic filters for obscene material on minor devices

reform Section 230 to compel platforms to remove criminal content

open up tech companies to litigation for their own wrongdoing

II. Healthy Technology Use for Adults

Self-Evaluation

When you wake up in the morning, how long is it before you check your phone? (right away, thirty minutes after getting up, one hour, I don’t check it until I’m ready to leave for work)

Do you lose track of time when you’re on your phone?

When you’re looking at your phone, how many times does someone need to ask a question before you hear them? (once, twice, multiple times)

Do you check your phone when feeling bored or uncomfortable?

Do you spend more than three hours per day on your phone? (On an iPhone, Screen Time in settings shows your daily usage. On an Android, Digital Wellbeing gives similar information.)

Is your phone usually with you at the dinner table?

If you forget your phone at home or its battery dies, how do you feel? (fine, not okay but I manage, anxious)

Healthy Tech Habits

Give up your own smartphone entirely, or give it up as your personal phone if you need a smartphone for work, and adopt one of the many smartphone alternatives available today. See the list of alternatives in Section III of the appendix.

If you can’t give up your smartphone, consider ways to dumb it down to make it less distracting and appealing to you. This includes things like turning off notifications, hiding apps away in folders, and setting the phone to grayscale. Ruthlessly eliminate apps, especially social media and messaging apps, and block tempting URLs in the settings. You can even have your spouse or a friend be the password holder for these settings so you can’t easily change them back yourself in a moment of weakness. Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up with Your Phone offers many helpful suggestions.

Maybe you aren’t sure whether you can do any of the changes in points 1 and 2 permanently, so try them out for thirty days or even seven days. Adults, too, can do a digital fast on any level, whether it’s giving up social media, certain apps, or even a device entirely. A fast can help you observe the effect different technologies have on you and discern what changes you can sustain in the longer term. At a minimum it can serve as a helpful reset.

Establish rhythms of regular breaks from your phone, social media, the internet, and any other digital technology. Andy Crouch, the author of The Tech-Wise Family, recommends resting from our devices an hour a day, a day a week, a week a year.[1] Some families I know practice device-free Saturdays. Regular breaks help keep technology in its proper place in our lives.

Create more distance between yourself and your device. Try not to carry it on your person all the time. Have a designated phone box for your family so that when you get home each day, all your phones go in the box and you can be together without interruption or the temptation to check them. Don’t go to bed with your phone and wake up with it. Consider not sleeping near it but having a landline for emergencies and using an alarm clock instead.

Try to live by the principle “If I’m with my children or other people, then I’m not on my phone.” Separate yourself from the device physically when you are with others, like by using the phone box. Work on developing the skills to be physically and emotionally present with your children and your own peers without distraction. (If you need to do something on your phone while your children are present, resist texting and try to make more voice calls so they can hear you.)

Be more analog in your individual and family practices. Remember, technology is always replacing something, so the best way to limit digital technology is to revert to the analog options. Have a family calendar on the wall. Use a notepad and pen to jot down to-do lists or notes to yourself. Make paper grocery lists. Get an alarm clock for everyone to have next to their bed. Wear a real watch. Buy a family camera to take pictures and videos.

III. Non-smartphone Alternatives

The Gabb phone has talk and text but no social media or internet browser. Plans range from the starter bundle, with only talk, text, and essential apps, to the advanced bundle, which adds image and group texting and a kid-safe music streaming app. One model includes a parent-enabled app store with hundreds of apps, including educational and food-delivery apps. They also have a Gabb watch, which allows calls and texts only from approved contacts. It doesn’t have a camera, but it has a timer, alarm, and stopwatch: gabb.com.

The Light phone offers talk and text but no social media, internet browser, or email. The screen is limited to black and white: thelightphone.com.

The Wisephone has talk and text, along with other tools like a GPS and a camera. Its app store is still under development and will include apps that are functional tools, but it doesn’t have an internet browser, social media, or apps that encourage isolation, like games: techless.com.

The Bark phone is a very customizable smartphone with built-in parental monitoring. The plan designed for younger kids is talk and text only. The plan for older kids allows app downloads with parental approval and gives parents the ability to restrict internet browsers, social media, and other apps: bark.us/bark-phone.

The Pinwheel phone has talk, text, a GPS locator, and an app store with vetted apps available, if a parent decides to allow them, but no social media, internet browser, addictive games, or ad-driven apps. It also allows parental monitoring of texts and calls: pinwheel.com.

F1 Pro and F1 Horizon flip phones call, and most models text. Many also have other features including a weather app and a camera, but there is no internet browser: sunbeamwireless.com.

The Gizmo watch is a smartwatch that can receive calls and texts only from parent-approved contacts and doesn’t have access to the internet: verizon.com/​connected-smartwatches/​verizon-gizmo-watch-3.

The TickTalk watch has talk, text, a camera, and more than twenty parental control settings. It doesn’t have internet access or the ability to download apps: myticktalk.com.

Family Phone is a traditional landline service provider: familyphone.com.

The Nokia 6310 is an updated classic with call, text, and an FM radio: hmd.com/​en_int/​nokia-6310-2024.

IV. Screen Detox Plans

ScreenStrong’s seven- or thirty-day detox: screenstrong.org

Dr. Victoria Dunckley’s Reset Your Child’s Brain

Mindful’s seven-day detox: mindful.sodexo.com

V. Additional Resources

The Impact of Screens on Kids

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

Glow Kids by Nicholas Kardaras

Reset Your Child’s Brain by Victoria Dunckley

iGen by Jean Twenge

Center for Humane Technology’s Ledger of Harms

protectyoungeyes.com (has a blog and newsletter for parents)

childrenandscreens.org (has research on digital media’s influence on children)

After Babel Substack by Jonathan Haidt

Generation Tech Substack by Jean Twenge

Be ScreenStrong Substack by Melanie Hempe or the blog on screenstrong.org

Resources for Adults

How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch

Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

Resources for Kids and Teens

Good Pictures, Bad Pictures by Kristen A. Jenson and Gail Poyner (they also have Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Jr. for younger kids)

The Social Dilemma documentary: thesocialdilemma.com

Childhood 2.0 documentary: childhood2movie.com

The youth-led Log Off Movement: logoffmovement.org

Center for Humane Technology’s Ledger of Harms

Kids’ Brains & Screens: A ScreenStrong Student Course by Melanie Hempe

Screenstrong.org has free resources and a blog with good materials to read with kids

VI. Communities and Advocacy Resources for Parents

ScreenStrong has Connect, which you can join for free, or Connect+ with more features, including their thirty-day detox plan, which you can join for a fee. Both give access to an online community where parents can post questions, advice, and resources to help one another in resisting screens. ScreenStrong moderates it and will respond to parents’ questions. ScreenStrong also offers sample letters to schools and a phone-free school guide: screenstrong.org.

Protect Young Eyes works to help families, schools, and churches create safer digital spaces. Their website offers guides, information about parental controls, recommended books, a safety curriculum for schools and churches, and other resources. Protect Young Eyes hosts The Table forum, where parents can ask and answer questions: protectyoungeyes.com.

Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) is an organization focused on educating parents, getting phones out of schools, and advocating for public policy solutions to protect children from addictive technologies. You can find ways to get involved on their website, including joining or starting a local chapter: joinmama.org.

Smartphone Free Childhood is a UK-based grassroots movement working to keep childhood smartphone-free. They have local WhatsApp groups parents can join. Their website offers resources for parents, like sample letters for schools and other tools. There is a U.S. site (smartphonefreechildhoodus.com) and a UK site (smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk). Smartphone Free Childhood WhatsApp groups can be found at linktr.ee/​smartphonefreechildhood.

The Anxious Generation website has a Resource Library with books, newsletters, podcasts, and more to better equip parents to restore a childhood based on play rather than phones: anxiousgeneration.com. It also has a sample petition parents can use to petition their school to become phone-free: anxiousgeneration.com/​sample-petition.

Delay Smartphones started as a campaign to help parents delay smartphones until at least fourteen. Their website has a pledge parents can sign. And they offer a volunteer ambassador program that provides materials, online training, and live calls to help ambassadors raise awareness with other parents and navigate conversations with parent groups and schools: delaysmartphones.org.uk.

The Phone-Free Schools Movement works with parents, educators, and administrators to help implement phone-free policies for K–12 schools. They have an ambassador program and resources for both ambassadors and school administrators: phonefreeschoolsmovement.org.

Away for the Day offers parents, teachers, and school administrators resources about how to implement a phone-free policy in schools: awayfortheday.org. They also have a sample letter for parents to use: awayfortheday.squarespace.com/​sample-letter.

VII. Real-Life Alternative Resources

Humanality helps high schoolers, college students, and families engage the real world and detach from smartphones and social media. Their website has a pledge for high schoolers to sign and college students can request to start a Humanality club on their campus: humanality.org.

1000 Hours Outside encourages parents to get their children into nature with a challenge to have them spend a thousand hours outside in a year and has a podcast that offers information and advice: 1000hoursoutside.com.

Read-Aloud Revival encourages parents to read aloud to their kids at all ages and has read-aloud book recommendations and tips for parents: readaloudrevival.com.

Let Grow encourages greater childhood independence in the real world: letgrow.org. You could even consider launching a Let Grow Play Club in your area: letgrow.org/​program/​play-club.

Busy Toddler offers activity ideas for all ages, from babies to school-aged kids: busytoddler.com.

The Connected Family Substack follows one family’s low-tech life: theconnectedfamily.substack.com.

VIII. Policy Resources

“Getting Phones out of Schools” by Clare Morell, with assistance from Brad Littlejohn and Matthew Malec, Ethics and Pubic Policy Center, August 5, 2024, eppc.org/​publication/​getting-phones-out-of-schools

“Making Smartphones and App Stores Safe for Kids: Federal, State, and Industry Measures” by Clare Morell and Michael Toscano, Ethics and Public Policy Center and Institute for Family Studies, November 16, 2023, eppc.org/​publication/​making-smartphones-and-app-stores-safe-for-kids-federal-state-and-industry-measures

“Age Verification: Policy Ideas for States” by Clare Morell and John Ehrett, Ethics and Public Policy Center and Institute for Family Studies, June 13, 2023, eppc.org/​publication/​age-verification-policy-ideas-for-states

“Protecting Teens from Big Tech: Five Policy Ideas for States” by Clare Morell, Adam Candeub, Jean Twenge, and Brad Wilcox, Ethics and Public Policy Center and Institute for Family Studies, August 24, 2022, eppc.org/​protecting-teens-from-big-tech

“Four Legislative Proposals for States to Protect Children from Online Obscenity” by Clare Morell, Adam Candeub, and Hayden Parsons, Ethics and Public Policy Center and Citizens for Renewing America, January 24, 2023, eppc.org/​publication/​four-legislative-proposals-for-states-to-protect-children-from-online-obscenity

“Children’s Device Protection Bill” by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and Protect Young Eyes, endsexualexploitation.org/​device-protection-bill

IX. Samples

Excerpt from the Postman Pledge for Parents and Families

We…recognize that technological developments in the culture undermine our capacity to inhabit the world and engage in social life as richly or fully as we ought. Therefore, we pledge for the next year not to allow our children to have smartphones or use social media. We also pledge to conscientiously limit our family’s use of electronic technologies in general and to cultivate the habits of attention and presence that allow us to grow in love of one another and of God. Knowing that we were created for deep bonds of community, we pledge, finally, to foster friendships among our families in the natural, traditional ways human cultures have always done.

School Policies

Excerpt from Louisiana Act No. 313—School Phone Ban (SB 207 2024)

Effective beginning with the 2024–2025 school year and thereafter, no student shall possess, on his person, an electronic telecommunication device throughout the instructional day. If a student brings an electronic telecommunication device in any public elementary or secondary school building or on the grounds thereof during an instructional day, the electronic device shall either be turned off and properly stowed away for the duration of the instructional day or prohibited from being turned on and used during the instructional day.

Orange County School District Bell-to-Bell No-Phone Policy

Pursuant to the Technology in K–12 Public Schools law (CS/HB 379), which took effect on July 1, 2023, section 1006.07(2)(f), Florida Statutes, now provides that “a student may not use a wireless communications device during instructional time, except when expressly directed by a teacher solely for educational purposes. A teacher shall designate an area for wireless communications devices during instructional time.” The 2023–2024 Code of Student Conduct requires that wireless communications device(s)[*] be silenced and put away (in a backpack or purse) during the school day while on campus, including lunchtime and transitioning between classes.

The following actions will be taken if a student violates OCPS’ cell phone policy:

Confiscation (Item returned at the end of the day)

Detention

Positive Alternative to School Suspension (PASS)

Out-of-School Suspension (OSS)

Social Media Policy from Faustina Academy, Irving, Texas

Faustina Academy views technology as a tool to be used when appropriate and necessary. Our larger goal in regard to technology is to support the students in the formation of the intellect, social development, and imagination directed towards the good, the true, and the beautiful. In order to stay true to our mission in its entirety, all enrolled students may not have any active accounts on social media apps directly tied to porn outlets, including Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok (though more may be added as needed).

Excerpt on Pornography Access from the Student Handbook of American Heritage School

Report any inappropriate, hurtful, or obscene messages, or content—whether yours or someone else’s, accessed intentionally or unintentionally, on-campus or off-campus, by personal or school devices—to a parent, teacher, administrator, or other trusted adult….

Intentional Access or Distribution of Offensive or Inappropriate Media: The use of School resources to intentionally access or distribute any form of inappropriate, obscene, pornographic, bigoted, or abusive material is prohibited. Any employee or student of the school that intentionally accesses or distributes such material on or off the school premises, may be temporarily dismissed or suspended or permanently terminated or expelled from the School, irrespective of the medium or network used to access or distribute the material (e.g., paper, electronic, laptop, cell phone, school network, home network, etc.). Students using the Internet are instructed to report any accidental viewing of inappropriate, obscene, or pornographic material to a faculty member or administration immediately.

Excerpt from the Student Technology Agreement from American Heritage School

I will immediately inform a trusted adult if I access inappropriate websites, messages, or content—intentionally or unintentionally, on-campus or off-campus, on personal or school-owned devices.

Skip Notes

* Wireless communications devices include but are not limited to, cell phones and/or auxiliary/ancillary devices such as watches and ear buds.

Notes

Introduction

I use pseudonyms throughout this book, except in those instances when I use a person’s first and last names.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Chapter 1: Screen-Time Limits Aren’t Working Out

Melissa G. Hunt et al., “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 37, no. 10 (2018), guilfordjournals.com/​doi/​10.1521/​jscp.2018.37.10.751; Yvonne Kelly et al., “Social Media Use and Adolescent Mental Health: Findings from the UK Millennium Cohort Study,” eClinicalMedicine 6 (2018): 59–68, thelancet.com/​journals/​eclinm/​article/​PIIS2589-5370(18)30060-9/​fulltext.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Jonathan Haidt, “Social Media Is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence,” After Babel, Substack, February 22, 2023, afterbabel.com/​p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024), 148–50; see also Haidt, “Social Media.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Jean M. Twenge, Brian H. Spitzberg, and W. Keith Campbell, “Less In-Person Social Interaction with Peers Among U.S. Adolescents in the 21st Century and Links to Loneliness,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 36, no. 6 (2019): 1892–913, doi.org/​10.1177/​0265407519836170.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

“The Social Dilemma: Social Media and Your Mental Health,” Mass General Brigham McLean, March 29, 2024, mcleanhospital.org/​essential/​it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

“Social Dilemma.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Arthur Brooks, “Happy Teens: Dealing with Stress and Social Media,” video, 21:34, January 18, 2024, youtube.com/​watch?v=G7HUO1v8ey4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Melissa G. Hunt et al., “No More FOMO.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Christian Montag et al., “Internet Communication Disorder and the Structure of the Human Brain: Initial Insights on WeChat Addiction,” Scientific Reports 8 (2018), doi.org/​10.1038/​s41598-018-19904-y; Daria J. Kuss and Mark D. Griffiths, “Internet and Gaming Addiction: A Systematic Literature Review of Neuroimaging Studies,” Brain Sciences 2, no. 3 (2012): 347–74, doi.org/​10.3390/​brainsci2030347; Fuchun Lin and Hao Lei, “Structural Brain Imaging and Internet Addiction,” in Internet Addiction: Neuroscientific Approaches and Therapeutical Interventions, ed. Christian Montag and Martin Reuter (New York: Springer, 2015), 21–42, researchgate.net/​profile/​Hao-Lei-17/​publication/​315859194_Structural_Brain_Imaging_and_Internet_Addiction/​links/​5c88a59245851564fad9d7d3/​Structural-Brain-Imaging-and-Internet-Addiction.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach, “Pleasure Systems in the Brain,” Neuron 86, no. 3 (2015): 646–64, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.neuron.2015.02.018.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Lauren E. Sherman et al., “The Power of the Like in Adolescence: Effects of Peer Influence on Neural and Behavioral Responses to Social Media,” Psychological Science 27, no. 7 (2016): 1027–35, doi.org/​10.1177/​0956797616645673.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Dutton, 2021), 49.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Susan Weinschenk, “The Dopamine Seeking-Reward Loop,” Psychology Today, February 28, 2018, psychologytoday.com/​us/​blog/​brain-wise/​201802/​the-dopamine-seeking-reward-loop.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Tristan Harris, quoted in Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017), 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Mitch Prinstein, Protecting Our Children Online (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary, February 14, 2023), judiciary.senate.gov/​imo/​media/​doc/​2023-02-14%20-%20Testimony%20-%20Prinstein.pdf; Zara Abrams, “Why Young Brains Are Especially Vulnerable to Social Media,” American Psychological Association, last modified August 3, 2023, apa.org/​news/​apa/​2022/​social-media-children-teens.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Maria T. Maza et al., “Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media with Longitudinal Functional Brain Development,” JAMA Pediatrics 177, no. 2 (2023): 160–67, doi.org/​10.1001/​jamapediatrics.2022.4924.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Alter, Irresistible, 28.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Adrian F. Ward et al., “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (2017): 140–54, doi.org/​10.1086/​691462.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Alter, Irresistible, 16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

“Age of First Smartphone/Tablet and Mental Wellbeing Outcomes,” Sapien Labs, May 15, 2023, sapienlabs.org/​wp-content/​uploads/​2023/​05/​Sapien-Labs-Age-of-First-Smartphone-and-Mental-Wellbeing-Outcomes.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Victoria L. Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2015), 1–2, 9–10, 14–16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 86.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 86–87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 1–2, 9–10, 14–16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Jenny S. Radesky et al., “Longitudinal Associations Between Use of Mobile Devices for Calming and Emotional Reactivity and Executive Functioning in Children Aged 3 to 5 Years,” JAMA Pediatrics 177, no. 1 (2023): 62–70, doi.org/​10.1001/​jamapediatrics.2022.4793.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Radesky et al., “Longitudinal Associations.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Jamie Waters, “Constant Craving: How Digital Media Turned Us All into Dopamine Addicts,” Guardian, August 22, 2021, theguardian.com/​global/​2021/​aug/​22/​how-digital-media-turned-us-all-into-dopamine-addicts-and-what-we-can-do-to-break-the-cycle.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Anna Lembke, quoted in Waters, “Constant Craving.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Nicholas Kardaras, Digital Madness: How Social Media Is Driving Our Mental Health Crisis—and How to Restore Our Sanity (New York: St. Martin’s, 2022), 31–32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Sandra Lora Cremers et al., “New Indicator of Children’s Excessive Electronic Screen Use and Factors in Meibomian Gland Atrophy,” 229 (2021): 63–70, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.ajo.2021.03.035.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Miki Uchino et al., “Prevalence of Dry Eye Disease Among Japanese Visual Display Terminal Users,” Ophthalmology 115, no. 11 (2008): 1982–88, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.ophtha.2008.06.022.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Chapter 2: Parental Controls Are a Myth

“Responding to Online Threats: Minors’ Perspectives on Disclosing, Reporting, and Blocking in 2021,” Thorn, February 2023, info.thorn.org/​hubfs/​Research/​Thorn_ROT_Monitoring_2021.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Mary Jackson, “Speaking for His Son,” World, April 20, 2023, wng.org/​articles/​speaking-for-his-son-1681617491.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Elizabeth Clement-Webb, “Sextortion: A Growing Threat Targeting Minors,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Memphis, January 23, 2024, fbi.gov/​contact-us/​field-offices/​memphis/​news/​sextortion-a-growing-threat-targeting-minors.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

“About Instagram Teen Privacy and Safety Settings,” Help Center, Instagram, help.instagram.com/​3237561506542117; “About Instagram Teen Accounts,” Help Center, Instagram, help.instagram.com/​995996839195964?helpref=faq_content; “Guardian’s Guide,” Safety Center, TikTok, tiktok.com/​safety/​en/​guardians-guide; “Tools and Resources for Parents,” Parents, Snapchat, parents.snapchat.com/​parental-controls.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

“About Instagram Teen Privacy”; “Guardian’s Guide.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Chris McKenna, “Finsta and Spam Accounts. How Well Do You Know Instagram?,” Protect Young Eyes, September 27, 2016, protectyoungeyes.com/​finsta-spam-accounts-instagram.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Researchers have found that at least one in four twelve- to seventeen-year-olds is receiving sexually explicit messages and at least one in seven is sending sexts. See Sheri Madigan et al., “Prevalence of Multiple Forms of Sexting Behavior Among Youth: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” JAMA Pediatrics 172, no. 4 (2018): 327–35, doi.org/​10.1001/​jamapediatrics.2017.5314.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Vince Lattanzio, “Classmates Used Dropbox to Share Nude Photos of Teen Girls: Students,” NBC10 Philadelphia, March 27, 2015, nbcphiladelphia.com/​news/​local/​police-probe-north-penn-high-school-nude-pictures-dropbox/​72516.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

“The Complete Guide to Apple iOS Parental Controls,” Protect Young Eyes, protectyoungeyes.com/​devices/​apple-ios-iphone-ipad-parental-controls.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

“Expanded Protections for Children,” Apple, apple.com/​child-safety.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Home page, Bark, bark.us.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Home page, Canopy, canopy.us.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Some companies, like Bark, have found work-arounds on Androids to access app data from the device itself, but this is not possible on Apple’s closed system, which means since the majority of teens have iPhones, third-party monitoring software has no access to their social media activity on apps like Snapchat that block access. Compare Androids vs. iPhones on “What Bark Monitors,” Bark, bark.us/​what-bark-monitors.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Canopy cannot filter content within non-browser apps; FAQs, Canopy, canopy.us/​internet-safety-faq; Covenant Eyes has said they are not permitted to filter in other third-party browsers, including hidden in-app browsers, though some users have had mixed results on this; “Hidden browsers in apps,” Covenant Eyes Service Center, support.covenanteyes.com/​hc/​en-us/​community/​posts/​15019233976987-Hidden-browsers-in-apps; Chris McKenna, “Warning: Pornhub Is on Snapchat. And Parents Have No Idea,” Protect Young Eyes, June 30, 2019, protectyoungeyes.com/​warning-pornhub-is-on-snapchat-and-parents-have-no-idea.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms et al., No. 1:23-CV-01115-MIS-KK (D.N.Mex. Jan. 19, 2024), Document 36-2, storage.courtlistener.com/​recap/​gov.uscourts.nmd.496039/​gov.uscourts.nmd.496039.36.2.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Rob Barry et al., “How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors,” Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2021, wsj.com/​articles/​tiktok-algorithm-sex-drugs-minors-11631052944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

“Instagram App Review,” Protect Young Eyes, last modified September 14, 2022, protectyoungeyes.com/​apps/​instagram-parental-controls.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Josh Taylor, “X Changes Porn Policy to Opt-In System That Blocks Under-18 Users,” Guardian, June 3, 2024, theguardian.com/​technology/​article/​2024/​jun/​04/​x-twitter-porn-policy-under-18-opt-in; “Adult Content,” Help Center, X, May 2024, help.x.com/​en/​rules-and-policies/​adult-content.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Josh Taylor, “Google and Apple Keeping Reddit and X in App Stores Despite Pornography due to Revenue, eSafety Boss Says,” Guardian, May 30, 2024, theguardian.com/​technology/​article/​2024/​may/​31/​google-and-apple-keeping-reddit-and-x-in-app-stores-despite-pornography-due-to-revenue-esafety-boss-says.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

“About Instagram Teen Privacy.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

TikTok App Review, Protect Young Eyes, protectyoungeyes.com/​apps/​tiktok-parental-controls.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Michael B. Robb and Supreet Mann, Teens and Pornography (San Francisco: Common Sense, 2023), 5–6, 14, commonsensemedia.org/​sites/​default/​files/​research/​report/​2022-teens-and-pornography-final-web.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Isabel Hogben, “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway,” The Free Press, August 29, 2023, thefp.com/​p/why-are-our-fourth-graders-on-pornhub.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Robb and Mann, Teens and Pornography, 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Chris McKenna, “Peer-on-Peer Sexual Abuse. Nurses Point to Porn,” Protect Young Eyes, December 8, 2018, protectyoungeyes.com/​peer-on-peer-sexual-abuse-nurses-point-to-porn-four-recommendations; Protect Young Eyes, “This week, 2 different elementary school principals told me a similar story. Both had just expelled a 4th grade boy. Both for the exact same, tragic reason,” Instagram, April 27, 2022, instagram.com/​p/Cc3N2qUuYj4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Beth McLeod, “Ireland’s Phone-Free Town,” June 11, 2024, in The Documentary, podcast, 26:29, bbc.co.uk/​sounds/​play/​w3ct5mss.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Alexandra S. Levine, “How TikTok Live Became ‘a Strip Club Filled with 15-Year Olds,’ ” Forbes, April 27, 2022, forbes.com/​sites/​alexandralevine/​2022/​04/​27/​how-tiktok-live-became-a-strip-club-filled-with-15-year-olds.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Laura Bennett, “YouVersion Bible App Child-Safety Vulnerability Exposed,” Salt 106.5, May 30, 2023, salt1065.com/​stories/​life/​parenting/​2023/​youversion-bible-app-child-safety-vulnerability-exposed.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Joanna Stern, “How Broken Are Apple’s Parental Controls? It Took 3 Years to Fix an X-Rated Loophole,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2024, wsj.com/​tech/​personal-tech/​a-bug-allowed-kids-to-visit-x-rated-sites-apple-took-three-years-to-fix-it-17e5f65d.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Adam Pletter, “Beyond the Feedback: Calling All iPhone Users,” iParent 101, May 1, 2024, iparent101.com/​beyond-the-feedback-calling-all-iphone-users.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Myrzopyrzo, “How Do I Stop Apps from Re-download Without Permission?” Community, Apple, April 15, 2024, discussions.apple.com/​thread/​255577039.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

“Responding to Online Threats.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Brian Pia, “Sexually Suggestive Ads Appearing on Children’s Apps,” ABC 33/40 News, December 2, 2017, abc3340.com/​archive/​sexually-suggestive-ads-appearing-on-childrens-apps.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Beata Mostafavi, “Advertising in Kids’ Apps More Prevalent Than Parents May Realize,” Michigan Medicine, October 30, 2018, michiganmedicine.org/​health-lab/​advertising-kids-apps-more-prevalent-parents-may-realize.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Miriam Cates, in “Smartphones and Social Media: Children,” May 14, 2024, UK Parliament, hansard.parliament.uk/​commons/​2024-05-14/​debates/​9EEEE3FC-7B2A-45E4-87E8-9449B603B1D9/​SmartphonesAndSocialMediaChildren.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

“Parental Controls Are No Match for Teenagers,” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2024, wsj.com/​articles/​parental-controls-teenagers-smart-phones-social-media-87c1cd5a.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Chapter 3: Trying Out a Screen Detox

Mary Thorne and Ryan Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family Went Screen-Free,” interview by Collin Kartchner, August 17, 2020, in Save the Kids, podcast, 1:19:15, podcast24.co.uk/​episodes/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast-why-the-thorne-family-went-screen-free.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Collin Kartchner, “I’ve been waiting to share this video for months…. I can’t wait any longer. Mary & Ryan are our dear friends and parents of 3 boys, who like a lot of us, let iPads and video games take over their childhoods.” Instagram, August 17, 2020, instagram.com/​p/CEAG7aAF1Rn.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Thorne and Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Melanie Hempe, “How to Screen Detox Your Kids, with ScreenStrong Founder,” interview by Collin Kartchner, August 21, 2020, in Save the Kids, podcast, 1:20:13, podcast24.co.uk/​episodes/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast-how-to-screen-detox-your-kids-with-screenstrong-founder.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Hempe, “How to Screen Detox.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Victoria L. Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2015), 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

“About,” ScreenStrong, screenstrong.org/​about.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Thorne and Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 133–34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

“Start Here,” ScreenStrong, screenstrong.org.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 139–41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 133–34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Thorne and Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 144–45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Melanie Hempe, “Reset Instructions,” in “The ScreenStrong Reset: A 30-Day Screen Detox for Kids,” ScreenStrong, courses.screenstrong.org/​lifestyle/​screenstrong-30-day-digital-detox.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Hempe, “How to Screen Detox.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 151–52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Alvaro de Vicente, “When Is Your Son Ready for a Smart Phone? Mr. de Vicente on Self-Mastery, Technology, and Parental Discernment,” interview by Rich Moss, October 15, 2021, in HeightsCast, podcast, 35:35, heightsforum.org/​podcast/​when-is-your-son-ready-for-a-smart-phone-mr-de-vicente-on-self-mastery-technology-and-parental-discernment.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Quoted in Hempe, “Family Testimonies,” in “ScreenStrong Reset.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Hempe, “Reset Instructions,” in “ScreenStrong Reset.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

“Community,” ScreenStrong, screenstrong.org/​community.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Hempe, “How to Screen Detox.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Dunckley, Reset Your Child’s Brain, 178–79.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Anna Lembke, quoted in Julie Jargon, “This School Took Away Smartphones. The Kids Don’t Mind,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2022, wsj.com/articles/this-school-took-away-smartphones-the-kids-dont-mind-11667614444.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Thorne and Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Kartchner, “I’ve been waiting to share.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Thorne and Thorne, “Why the Thorne Family.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Chapter 4: Find Other Families

“The River Runs Backwards,” Chicago Water Walk, iiseagrant.org/​chicagowaterwalk/​cww5_rtcr_crm_riverruns.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Julie Jargon, “Why 16 Should Be the Minimum Age for Social Media,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2023, wsj.com/​articles/​the-case-for-banning-tiktok-snapchat-and-instagram-for-kids-under-16-37f63180.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

See, for example, Neil Postman’s books Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Technopoly (1992).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

To read more about the Postman Pledge, see these news articles: Matt Stewart, “Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge,” Front Porch Republic, August 21, 2023, frontporchrepublic.com/​2023/​08/​postman-pledge; Evan Myers, “Taking the Postman Pledge,” American Conservative, December 2, 2022, theamericanconservative.com/​taking-the-postman-pledge.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Mabel Banfield-Nwachi, “ ‘It Went Nuts’: Thousands Join UK Parents Calling for Smartphone-Free Childhood,” Guardian, February 17, 2024, theguardian.com/​technology/​2024/​feb/​17/​thousands-join-uk-parents-calling-for-smartphone-free-childhood.

“Join an International Group,” Smartphone Free Childhood, smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk/​global-index.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Chapter 5: Explain, Educate, and Exemplify

Quoted in Liz Krieger, “The Last Kid in Ninth Grade Without an iPhone,” Cut, May 30, 2024, thecut.com/​article/​phones-teens-screentime-restrictions-jonathan-haidt.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Krieger, “Last Kid.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Melanie Hempe, “Can You Raise a Teen Today Without a Smartphone?” Be ScreenStrong, Substack, April 10, 2024, screenstrong.substack.com/​p/can-you-raise-a-teen-today-without.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Chris McKenna, “10 Before 10. Making Porn a Normal Talk,” Protect Young Eyes, March 27, 2022, protectyoungeyes.com/​10-before-10-time-to-make-porn-a-normal-talk.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Hempe, “Can You Raise a Teen Today?”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Alvaro de Vicente, “When Is Your Son Ready for a Smart Phone? Mr. de Vicente on Self-Mastery, Technology, and Parental Discernment,” interview by Rich Moss, October 15, 2021, in HeightsCast, podcast, 35:35, heightsforum.org/​podcast/​when-is-your-son-ready-for-a-smart-phone-mr-de-vicente-on-self-mastery-technology-and-parental-discernment.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Cory A. Kildare and Wendy Middlemiss, “Impact of Parents Mobile Device Use on Parent-Child Interaction: A Literature Review,” Computers in Human Behavior 75 (2017): 579–93, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.chb.2017.06.003; Jenny S. Radesky et al., “Patterns of Mobile Device Use by Caregivers and Children During Meals in Fast Food Restaurants,” Pediatrics 133, no. 4 (2014): 843–49, doi.org/​10.1542/​peds.2013-3703; Brandon T. McDaniel and Jenny S. Radesky, “Technoference: Parent Distraction with Technology and Associations with Child Behavior Problems,” Child Development 89, no. 1 (2018): 100–109, doi.org/​10.1111/​cdev.12822; Jessa Reed, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, “Learning on Hold: Cell Phones Sidetrack Parent-Child Interactions,” Developmental Psychology 53, no. 8 (2017): 1428–36, doi.org/​10.1037/​dev0000292; Sarah Myruski et al., “Digital Disruption? Maternal Mobile Device Use Is Related to Infant Social-Emotional Functioning,” Developmental Science 21, no. 4 (2018), doi.org/​10.1111/​desc.12610.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Brandi Stupica, “Rounding the Bases with a Secure Base,” Attachment and Human Development 18, no. 4 (2016): 373–90, doi.org/​10.1080/​14616734.2016.1170052.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Catherine Price, How to Break Up with Your Phone (New York: Ten Speed, 2018), 92–96, 104–13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Sarah Coyne et al., Teaching by Example: Media and Parenting Practices That Are—and Are Not—Related to Adolescent Mental Health (Provo, Utah: Wheatley Institute, 2022), 5, wheatley.byu.edu/​00000182-8d78-dff6-afab-8ffd11ce0001/​teaching-by-example-pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Susan Dominus, “Motherhood, Screened Off,” New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2015, nytimes.com/​2015/​09/​24/​magazine/​motherhood-screened-off.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Emily Thomas, “My Least Favorite Feature of the Smartphone,” The Connected Family, Substack, March 7, 2024, theconnectedfamily.substack.com/​p/my-least-favorite-feature-of-the.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Chapter 6: Adopt Alternatives

Liz Krieger, “The Last Kid in Ninth Grade Without an iPhone,” Cut, May 30, 2024, thecut.com/​article/​phones-teens-screentime-restrictions-jonathan-haidt.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Erich Muehlegger and Daniel Shoag, “Cell Phones and Motor Vehicle Fatalities,” Procedia Engineering 78 (2014): 173–77, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.proeng.2014.07.054.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Chapter 8: Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits

Melanie Hempe, “How to Screen Detox Your Kids, with ScreenStrong Founder,” interview by Collin Kartchner, August 21, 2020, in Save the Kids, podcast, 1:20:13, https://www.podcast24.co.uk/​episodes/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast/​the-collin-kartchner-podcast-how-to-screen-detox-your-kids-with-screenstrong-founder.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Chapter 9: Getting Screens Out of Schools

“Student Cell Phone Policy,” Orange County Public Schools, ocps.net/​students_and_parents/​student_cell_phone_policy.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Natasha Singer, “This Florida School District Banned Cellphones. Here’s What Happened,” New York Times, last modified November 6, 2023, nytimes.com/​2023/​10/​31/​technology/​florida-school-cellphone-tiktok-ban.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Singer, “This Florida School District”; “Cell Phone Policy,” Hillsborough County Public Schools, hillsboroughschools.org/​site/​handlers/​filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=5516&dataid=1832&FileName=Cell%20Phone%20Policy.pdf [inactive].

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Singer, “This Florida School District”; Chris McKenna, “No More Smartphones. How One Large School District Removed Distraction from Learning,” Protect Young Eyes, last modified March 1, 2021, protectyoungeyes.com/​no-more-smartphones-how-one-large-school-district-removed-distraction-from-learning.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Quoted in McKenna, “No More Smartphones.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Howard Blume and Defne Karabatur, “LAUSD Approves Cellphone Ban as Newsom Calls for Statewide Action,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2024, latimes.com/​california/​story/​2024-06-18/​lausd-board-approved-strict-cell-phone-ban.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Curt Gresseth, “Granite School District Lays Down the Law on Cellphones in Schools,” KSL NewsRadio, May 9, 2024, kslnewsradio.com/​2100985/​granite-school-district-lays-down-the-law-on-cellphones-in-schools.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Ryan Dailey, “Florida Gov. DeSantis Signs Bill to Ban Students from Using Phones and TikTok in Schools,” Orlando Weekly, May 10, 2023, orlandoweekly.com/​news/​florida-gov-desantis-signs-bill-to-ban-students-from-using-phones-and-tiktok-inschools-34164256; Kirsten Adair, “Indiana Lawmakers Ban Cellphones in Class. Now It’s Up to Schools to Figure Out How,” NPR, April 3, 2024, npr.org/​2024/​04/​03/​1240667966/​indiana-bans-cell-phones-schools-social-media-distraction; Cole Behrens and Donovan Hunt, “A New Law Makes Ohio Schools Limit Student Phone Use. Are Central Ohio Districts Ready?” Columbus Dispatch, May 16, 2024, dispatch.com/story/news/education/2024/05/16/will-central-ohio-schools-be-ready-for-new-student-cell-phone-use-law/73698721007; Elizabeth Shockman, “Minnesota Lawmakers OK School Policy Changes on Cell Phones, Book Bans, Literacy,” MPR News, May 15, 2024, mprnews.org/​story/​2024/​05/​15/​minnesota-lawmakers-ok-school-policy-changes-on-cell-phones-book-bans-literacy.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Penelope Lopez, “Louisiana Bans Cell Phones in Schools. Parents and School Official Weigh In,” KATC, July 18, 2024, katc.com/​vermilion-parish/​louisiana-bans-cell-phones-in-schools-parents-and-school-official-weigh-in; Amanda Shaw, “Cell Phone Use to Be Banned in SC Schools by 2025,” Fox Carolina, last modified July 12, 2024, foxcarolina.com/​2024/​07/​11/​cell-phone-ban-planned-sc-schools-by-2025; “Cell Phone–Free Education Final Guidance & Resources,” Virginia Department of Education, doe.virginia.gov/​about-vdoe/​cell-phone-free-education-in-virginia-k-12-public-schools/​cell-phone-free-education-guidance-resources.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Joanna Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School Won the Battle Against Cellphones,” Washington Post, May 1, 2024, washingtonpost.com/​nation/​2024/​05/​01/​school-cellphones-confiscate.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

“Percentage of Public Schools with Various Safety and Security Measures: Selected Years, 1999–2000 Through 2019–20,” Digest of Education Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, nces.ed.gov/​programs/​digest/​d21/​tables/​dt21_233.50.asp.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Singer, “This Florida School District.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Some schools use a combination of policies that vary in degree of freedom according to student grade, like not permitting any phones, smartwatches, and headphones at all on campus for students in grades K–8 but then allowing students in high school to bring phones that must be turned into the main office and picked up once the school day ends.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

“Cville Schools Cell Phones and Personal Devices: Off and Away the Entire Day,” Charlottesville City Schools, last modified August 18, 2023, s3.amazonaws.com/​scschoolfiles/​3437/​off_and_away_chs_and_buford_flyer_august_18_2023.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

“What Is a Phone-Free School?” Phone-Free Schools Project, phonefreeschools.org/​whatisaphonefreeschool.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Sara Abrahamsson, “Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health,” NHH Department of Economics Research Paper Series, no. 1 (February 2024): 1–71, papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers.cfm?abstract_id=4735240.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Iain Mansfield, Sean Phillips, and Niamh Webb, Disconnect (London: Policy Exchange, 2024), 10, policyexchange.org.uk/​wp-content/​uploads/​Disconnect.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Adrian F. Ward et al., “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 2, no. 2 (2017): 140–54, doi.org/​10.1086/​691462.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Jenny S. Radesky et al., Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use (San Francisco: Common Sense, 2023), 6, commonsensemedia.org/​sites/​default/​files/​research/​report/​2023-cs-smartphone-research-report_final-for-web.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Global Education Monitoring Report: Technology in Education—a Tool on Whose Terms? (Paris: UNESCO, 2023), 83, unesdoc.unesco.org/​ark:/​48223/​pf0000385723.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy, “Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance,” Labour Economics 41 (2016): 61–76, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.labeco.2016.04.004.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Abrahamsson, “Smartphone Bans.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Victoria Rideout et al., The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens (San Francisco: Common Sense, 2022), 6, commonsensemedia.org/​sites/​default/​files/​research/​report/​8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Julie Jargon, “Schools Want to Ban Phones. Parents Say No,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2024, wsj.com/​tech/​personal-tech/​schools-want-to-ban-phones-parents-say-no-62889fe0.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Slater, “How a Connecticut Middle School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Erin B. Logan and Anya Kamenetz, “Should the Parkland Shooting Change How We Think About Phones, Schools and Safety?” NPR, February 17, 2018, npr.org/​sections/​ed/​2018/​02/​17/​586534079/​should-the-parkland-shooting-change-how-we-think-about-phones-schools-and-safety.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Ebony Walton, “Performance Declines in Basic Mathematics and Reading Skills Since the COVID-19 Pandemic Are Evident Across Many Racial/Ethnic Groups,” NAEP Plus, November 9, 2023, nces.ed.gov/​nationsreportcard/​blog/​pandemic_performance_declines_across_racial_and_ethnic_groups.aspx.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Lauren Camera, “U.S. Teens’ Reading and Math Scores Feature Largest Declines Ever,” U.S. News & World Report, June 21, 2023, usnews.com/​news/​education-news/​articles/​2023-06-21/​u-s-teens-reading-and-math-scores-feature-largest-declines-ever.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Maria Lucia Yanguas, “Technology and Educational Choices: Evidence from a One-Laptop-per-Child Program,” Economics of Education Review 76 (2020), doi.org/​10.1016/​j.econedurev.2020.101984.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Matthew Jenkin, “Tablets Out, Imagination In: The Schools That Shun Technology,” Guardian, December 2, 2015, theguardian.com/​teacher-network/​2015/​dec/​02/​schools-that-ban-tablets-traditional-education-silicon-valley-london.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Anne Mangen, Bente R. Walgermo, and Kolbjørn Brønnick, “Reading Linear Texts on Paper Versus Computer Screen: Effects on Reading Comprehension,” International Journal of Educational Research 58 (2013): 61–68, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.ijer.2012.12.002.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Holly Korbey, “How to Teach Kids Who Flip Between Book and Screen,” MIT Technology Review, April 19, 2023, technologyreview.com/​2023/​04/​19/​1071282/​digital-world-reshaping-childrens-education-reading.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Maryanne Wolf, “Screen-Based Online Learning Will Change Kids’ Brains. Are We Ready for That?” Guardian, August 24, 2020, theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2020/​aug/​24/​deep-literacy-technology-child-development-reading-skills.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Maryanne Wolf, “Q&A: Printed Books Better than Screens for Young Readers,” interview by Alyson Klein, Government Technology, March 15, 2023, govtech.com/​education/​k-12/​q-a-printed-books-better-than-screens-for-young-readers.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Wolf, “Screen-Based Online Learning.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Wolf, “Q&A: Printed Books.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Wolf, “Screen-Based Online Learning.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

“Children Derive Deeper Meaning from Printed Texts Than Screens, According to New Brain Study from Teachers College, Columbia University,” Teachers College Columbia University, May 29, 2024, tc.columbia.edu/​tcgeneration/​what-we-do/​media-relations/​press-releases/​2024/​children-derive-deeper-meaning-from-printed-texts-than-screens.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Marieke Longcamp, Marie-Thérèse Zerbato-Poudou, and Jean-Luc Velay, “The Influence of Writing Practice on Letter Recognition in Preschool Children: A Comparison Between Handwriting and Typing,” Acta Psychologica 119, no. 1 (2005): 67–79, doi.org/​10.1016/​j.actpsy.2004.10.019.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Jonathan Lambert, “Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning,” NPR, May 11, 2024, npr.org/​sections/​health-shots/​2024/​05/​11/​1250529661/​handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Aya S. Ihara et al., “Advantage of Handwriting over Typing on Learning Words: Evidence from an N400 Event-Related Potential Index,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 15 (2021), doi.org/​10.3389/​fnhum.2021.679191.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Jenkin, “Tablets Out.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Sian Griffiths, “The School Offering a 12-Hour Day to Break Phone Addiction,” Times, April 21, 2024, thetimes.co.uk/​article/​school-to-extend-day-to-12-hours-to-break-pupils-phone-addiction-f5cjdhqrz.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Julie Jargon, “This School Took Away Smartphones. The Kids Don’t Mind,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2022, wsj.com/​articles/​this-school-took-away-smartphones-the-kids-dont-mind-11667614444.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Jargon, “This School.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Rory Carroll, “ ‘Much Easier to Say No’: Irish Town Unites in Smartphone Ban for Young Children,” Guardian, June 3, 2023, theguardian.com/​technology/​2023/​jun/​03/​much-easier-to-say-no-irish-town-unites-in-smartphone-ban-for-young-children; “About It Takes a Village,” It Takes a Village, ittakesavillagegreystones-delgany.com.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Carroll, “ ‘Much Easier.’ ”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Carroll, “ ‘Much Easier.’ ”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Mark Sellman, “St Albans Wants to Be First Smartphone-Free City for Under-14s,” Times, May 21, 2024, thetimes.co.uk/​article/​st-albans-wants-to-be-first-smartphone-free-city-for-under-14s-jwskvks92.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Sellman, “St Albans.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Sellman, “St Albans.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Chapter 10: Parents Need Better Laws to Back Them Up

“Our History,” Mothers Against Drunk Driving, madd.org/our-history.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

“Our History,” Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

“Our History,” Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

“Our History,” Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

State of Arizona et al. v. Meta Platforms et al., No. 4:23-CV-05448 (N.D. Calif. 2023), oag.ca.gov/​system/​files/​attachments/​press-docs/​Less-redacted%20complaint%20-%20released.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

COPPA has no age-verification requirements and presents no credible threat for violating its prohibitions; because the legal standard of liability is actual knowledge, the highest standard in law and very difficult to prove. COPPA has thus created a system where platforms ask new users to enter a birth date that shows they are over thirteen, which is very easy to falsify.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Clare Morell et al., “Protecting Teens from Big Tech: Five Policy Ideas for States,” Ethics and Public Policy Center, August 24, 2022, eppc.org/​publication/​protecting-teens-from-big-tech-five-policy-ideas-for-states.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Social Media Regulation Amendments, S.B. 152 (March 23, 2023), le.utah.gov/​~2023/​bills/​static/​SB0152.html; Michael Toscano, Adam Candeub, and Clare Morell, “Opinion: Utah Has Led the Nation in Standing Up for Kids with Big Tech and Social Media. Don’t Back Down Now,” Deseret News, February 22, 2024, deseret.com/​opinion/​2024/​2/22/​24079641/​opinion-utah-has-led-the-nation-in-standing-up-for-kids-with-big-tech-social-media.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Social Media Regulation Amendments, S.B. 194 (March 13, 2024), le.utah.gov/​~2024/​bills/​static/​SB0194.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Arkansas: Social Media Safety Act, S.B. 396 (April 11, 2023), arkleg.state.ar.us/​Home/​FTPDocument?path=%2FACTS%2F2023R%2FPublic%2FACT689.pdf; Texas: Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment Act, H.B. 18 (June 13, 2023), capitol.texas.gov/​tlodocs/​88R/​billtext/​html/​HB00018F.htm; Louisiana: Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act, S.B. 162 (June 28, 2023), legis.la.gov/​legis/​ViewDocument.aspx?d=1333323; Ohio: Establishes Operating Appropriations for Fiscal Years 2024–2025, H.B. 33 (July 4, 2023), search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/​api/​v2/​general_assembly_135/​legislation/​hb33/​06_EN/​pdf; Florida: Online Protections for Minors, H.B. 3 (March 25, 2024), flsenate.gov/​Session/​Bill/​2024/​3/BillText/​er/​PDF; Georgia: Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act of 2024, S.B. 351 (April 23, 2024), legiscan.com/​GA/​text/​SB351/​2023; Mississippi: Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act, H.B. 1126 (April 30, 2024), legiscan.com/​MS/​text/​HB1126/​2024; Tennessee: An Act to amend Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 47, Chapter 18, relative to protecting minors from social media, H.B. 1891 (May 13, 2024), legiscan.com/​TN/​text/​HB1891/​2023. Note: Litigation over these laws is ongoing, as some states have had their laws enjoined by a court.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

There are legal precedents for protecting the rights of parents over their children’s communications. In the case of Rowan v. U.S. Post Office Department, the Supreme Court upheld a law that allows parents to prohibit mailings from sources known to send sexual or otherwise non-family-friendly solicitations. The Supreme Court in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation also upheld indecency regulations of broadcast radio and television with the goal of protecting children.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Online Protections for Minors, H.B. 3 (March 25, 2024), flsenate.gov/​Session/​Bill/​2024/​3/BillText/​er/​PDF.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Parental consent laws and, even more so, ban laws will have constitutional challenges to overcome—namely, getting around minors’ right to free speech under the First Amendment in the Tinker v. Des Moines case. However, it’s important to note the Tinker case was specifically dealing with political speech and shouldn’t be interpreted to expand to a general right of minors to free speech. Other precedent, recognized for a century in cases such as Pierce v. Society of Sisters, suggests the free speech rights of minors are questionable and limited as compared with parents’ right to raise their children.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

For more solutions at the device level, see this policy brief that I co-authored with Michael Toscano: “Making Smartphones and App Stores Safe for Kids: Federal, State, and Industry Measures,” Ethics and Public Policy Center and Institute for Family Studies, November 16, 2023, eppc.org/​publication/​making-smartphones-and-app-stores-safe-for-kids-federal-state-and-industry-measures.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Nancy Rommelmann, “The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won,” The Free Press, September 21, 2023, thefp.com/​p/laurie-schlegel-stood-up-to-porn.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Gail Dines, “Growing Up in a Pornified Culture,” TEDxNavesink, April 28, 2015, video, 13:47, youtube.com/​watch?v=_YpHNImNsx8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Act No. 440, Louisiana Regular Session 2022, legis.la.gov/​legis/​ViewDocument.aspx?d=1289498.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Rommelmann, “Woman.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Marc Novicoff, “A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It’s Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat,” Politico Magazine, August 8, 2023, politico.com/​news/​magazine/​2023/​08/​08/​age-law-online-porn-00110148.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

“Age Verification Bill Tracker,” Protect Kids Online, protectkidsonline.us/​#wintracker.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Pornhub Pulls Out of Seventh State,” Reason, March 18, 2024, reason.com/​2024/​03/​18/​pornhub-pulls-out-of-seventh-state.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Age-verification laws will ultimately have to overcome Supreme Court precedent set in 2004 by Ashcroft v. ACLU. But the changes in technology the last twenty years that make pornography more accessible to children through smart devices, along with advances in age-verification technology so it can be done in a way that isn’t invasive of adult privacy or burdensome on adult free speech, make that precedent ripe to revisit now. See more here: eppc.org/​publication/​age-verification-for-porn-sites-is-constitutional-and-necessary.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, No. 23-50627 (5th Cir. 2024), ca5.uscourts.gov/​opinions/​pub/​23/​23-50627-CV0.pdf; Jeff Tavss, “Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Challenging Utah Porn Site Age-Verification Law,” Salt Lake Tribune, last modified August 2, 2023, sltrib.com/​news/​politics/​2023/​08/​01/​judge-dismisses-lawsuit.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

SCREEN Act, S. 3314, 118th Cong. (2023), congress.gov/​bill/​118th-congress/​senate-bill/​3314.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Children’s Device Protection Act, S.B. 104 (March 13, 2024), le.utah.gov/​~2024/​bills/​static/​SB0104.html; Utah’s law is based on a model the organizations Protect Young Eyes and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation put together called the Children’s Device Protection Bill: endsexualexploitation.org/​device-protection-bill.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Melissa McKay, quoted in Hanna Seariac, “Bill Requiring Filters on Children’s Devices Moves Forward,” Deseret News, January 31, 2024, deseret.com/​2024/​1/31/​24057482/​device-filter-bill-utah-pornography-law.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

“Department of Justice’s Review of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996,” U.S. Department of Justice, justice.gov/​archives/​ag/​department-justice-s-review-section-230-communications-decency-act-1996.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

“John Does v. Twitter Lawsuit Heard on Appeal in the 9th Circuit,” National Center on Sexual Exploitation, April 20, 2023, endsexualexploitation.org/​articles/​john-does-v-twitter-lawsuit-heard-on-appeal.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Clare Morell, “Social Media Platforms Must Be Held Accountable for Illicit Content,” Newsweek, January 26, 2021, newsweek.com/​social-media-platforms-must-held-accountable-illicit-content-opinion-1564237.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Jeff Elder, “A Minor Is Suing Twitter, Claiming It Took 9 Days and Intervention from Homeland Security for It to Take Down a Sexually Explicit Video of Him at 13 Posted by a Predator,” Business Insider, January 20, 2021, businessinsider.com/​minor-lawsuit-twitter-explicit-video-court-2021-1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

EARN IT Act of 2023, S. 1207, 118th Cong. (2023), congress.gov/​bill/​118th-congress/​senate-bill/​1207.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Angela Yang, “Judge Dismisses Suit Alleging TikTok ‘Blackout Challenge’ Caused Girl’s Death,” NBC News, October 26, 2022, nbcnews.com/​news/​judge-dismisses-suit-alleging-tiktok-blackout-challenge-caused-girls-d-rcna54208.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Statement of Clarence Thomas, Malwarebytes v. Enigma Software, 592 U.S. 1 (2020), supremecourt.gov/​opinions/​20pdf/​19-1284_869d.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Jeffrey Goodman, quoted in Yang, “Judge Dismisses Suit.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Judge Paul Matey quoted in Ed Whelan, “Interesting Third Circuit Opinions on Section 230 Immunity,” National Review, August 29, 2024, nationalreview.com/​bench-memos/​interesting-third-circuit-opinions-on-section-230-immunity/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Lauren Feiner, “Meta Sued by 42 Attorneys General Alleging Facebook, Instagram Features Are Addictive and Target Kids,” CNBC, October 24, 2023, cnbc.com/​2023/​10/​24/​bipartisan-group-of-ags-sue-meta-for-addictive-features.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Feiner, “Meta Sued.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

State of Arizona et al. v. Meta Platforms et al., No. 4:23-CV-05448 (N.D. Calif. 2023), oag.ca.gov/​system/​files/​attachments/​press-docs/​Less-redacted%20complaint%20-%20released.pdf; “Attorney General Bonta: Unredacted Federal Lawsuit Against Meta ‘Damning,’ ” Office of the Attorney General, State of California Department of Justice, November 27, 2023, oag.ca.gov/​news/​press-releases/​attorney-general-bonta-unredacted-federal-lawsuit-against-meta-%E2%80%9Cdamning%E2%80%9D.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

KT&G Corp. v. Attorney General of Oklahoma, 535 F.3d 1114, 1118–19 (10th Cir. 2008).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

“Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, January 31, 2024, judiciary.senate.gov/​committee-activity/​hearings/​big-tech-and-the-online-child-sexual-exploitation-crisis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

California: The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, A.B. 2273 (September 15, 2022), leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/​faces/​billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273; Maryland: Maryland Kids Code, H.B. 603 (May 9, 2024), mgaleg.maryland.gov/​mgawebsite/​Legislation/​Details/​HB0603?ys=2024rs; New York: SAFE for Kids Act, S. 7694A (June 20, 2024), nysenate.gov/​legislation/​bills/​2023/​S7694. (In August 2024, the Ninth Circuit upheld in part and vacated in part the district court’s preliminary injunction against California’s code. The portion that was vacated now goes back to the district court to assess it in more detail. It is unclear whether the California Attorney General will seek to enforce the upheld portions before the district court further evaluates the law.)

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Kids Online Safety Act, S. 1409, 118th Cong. (2023), congress.gov/​bill/​118th-congress/​senate-bill/​1409.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Thomas Barrabi, “Meta, Google Leading Nearly $1M Lobbying Fight to Kill NY Online Child Safety Bills,” New York Post, May 20, 2024, nypost.com/​2024/​05/​20/​business/​meta-google-leading-nearly-1m-lobbying-fight-to-kill-ny-online-child-safety-bills.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Julie Scelfo, “How to Prevent Suicide Among Tweens,” HuffPost, October 3, 2020, huffpost.com/​entry/​suicide-prevention-teens-tweens_n_5f764841c5b6374c558b68ca.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Conclusion

Hazel Skelsey Guest, “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—the Sixth Level,” The British Psychological Society, December 17, 2014, bps.org.uk/​psychologist/​maslows-hierarchy-needs-sixth-level.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Abraham Maslow, quoted in Anthony J. Sutich, “The Emergence of the Transpersonal Orientation: A Personal Account,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 8, no. 1 (1976): 11, atpweb.org/​jtparchive/​trps-08-76-01-005.pdf.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Abraham H. Maslow, “Various Meanings of Transcendence,” in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 1971), 279.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 123; see Terrie Moffitt, Richie Poulton, and Avshalom Caspi, “Lifelong Impact of Early Self-Control,” American Scientist 101, no. 5 (2013): 352–59, doi.org/​10.1511/​2013.104.352.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Appendix

Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2017), 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

About the Author

Clare Morell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and director of its Technology and Human Flourishing Project. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Post, Newsweek, National Review, The Hill, The Dispatch, National Affairs, The Federalist, The American Conservative, Public Discourse, American Affairs, The Washington Times, and The Daily Signal. Morell consults legislators on technology policy and has helped draft legislation to protect children online. She and her family live out their Tech Exit life together in Washington, D.C.

claremorell.substack.com

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