How (not) to ruin the next generation

“I got a phone as an early Christmas present!”

That’s what a neighborhood girl, 2nd grade, told me, beaming, when I walked up to the park with my kids. There were two groups of kids under the age of 10 at the park: the ones searching for bugs in the bushes and the ones sitting in a circle looking at their phones.

My heart sank for her.

I don’t know the particulars of her family situation, but I have read Jonathan Haidt’s research. In his recent article at The Free Press, “The Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation,” I noticed two core things hit home as I consider my own parenting. First, intentionally withhold tech exposure and, second, raise them as religious conservatives.

Bill Bright, founder of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), famously came up with the “four spiritual laws” for personal evangelism:

1. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
2. Our sin has separated us from God.
3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for sin.
4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

Perhaps millions of people have come to saving faith in Jesus through those four simple principles. Haidt has his own “four spiritual laws.” They won’t save you from hell, but they do promise to save you from hell on earth: the inability to focus, make meaningful relational connections, and live a meaningful life. Haidt sees a distressing trend in which, since 2013, there has been skyrocketing “spiritual devastation” as a direct result of having a “phone based” childhood. Here are his “four norms,” which he first proposed in The Anxious Generation:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools, bell to bell, from K to 12
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

To implement this in our households, churches, and schools will require spine, and it will mean resisting the inertia of “progress” through digitization. This will likely prove as difficult as swimming upstream in the Mississippi River. Silicon Valley wants to colonize the minds of our children. Will we let them?

A new insight in Haidt’s recent article had to do with the scientific benefits of raising your kids as religious conservatives. Since the 1990s, we have data on what percent of U.S. 12th graders agree with the statement “Life often feels meaningless” sorted by political stance and religiosity. In 1999, those who identified as “liberal, religion not important” identified with the statement 12.91% of the time while those who identified as “conservative, religion important” identified with it at a rate of 8.69%. There’s a gap, but it isn’t huge.

In 2023, however, we see a chasm has opened, as 9.27% of 12th graders who are religious conservatives said that “life often feels meaningless” whereas 33.07% of 12th graders who identify as “liberal, religion not important” acknowledged they felt that way. Meaninglessness is 350% higher among the irreligious liberals! What about the “liberal, religion important” cohort? Not much better, coming in at 23.49%.

Why? Haidt argues:

A child who constructs an adult identity while drawing from a stable and time-tested set of values, beliefs, and stories, given to her by trusted adults within a religious or philosophical tradition, will fare far better than a child who attempts to construct an adult identity by herself while drawing from a billion pieces of short and ephemeral content, produced mostly by young people and bots, which cannot be assembled into a coherent worldview.

Digital, liberal, and irreligious children suffer from a fragmentation of their identities that produces aimlessness and purposelessness.

Haidt is not writing as a believer, but as a sociologist he sees the utilitarian function of religious beliefs. As a Christian, I appreciate the observation, but I don’t believe things are true simply because they work. I know they work because they’re true.

When we receive our identities as gifts from God imparted on us by the True Story of the whole world given to us in the Scriptures and correspondingly lived and worked out in the context of households, it’s no surprise that even in the midst of great social upheaval in the last decade that flourishing is possible.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape is mentoring a younger demon named Wormwood. What are the two primary goals he sets out for Wormwood? “Undermining faith and preventing the formation of virtues.” Smartphones and social media erode the formation of basic virtues in children and secularism undermines their ability to enter into the world as God created it. Parents, pastors, and grandparents who desire a next generation to have a childhood that promotes focus, connection, and meaning, would be wise to heed the observation of Haidt: Resist digitization and political liberalism.

Honestly, Christians should know this already. Will Christian parents act on that knowledge?