The tyranny of the screens

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 13th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: breaking free from screens.

Research is confirming what many parents already know: technology can chip away at family life. Attention spans shrink, moods sour, and family time fractures.

EICHER: Clare Morell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She’s spent years studying the harms of smartphones and social media on kids. Now she’s written a book: The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. It asks: in our screen-saturated world, can a family truly unplug?

Her answer is yes. It’s counter-cultural, it’s hard work, but she says it is possible to restore what screens have taken: presence, peace, and connection.

MORELL: Thanks so much for having me.

MAST: Clare, let’s start with the effects of screens on self-control. You talk at length about that in the book. It's something our listeners certainly value. So can you explain for them how screens work against the goal of developing self-control in kids?

MORELL: Yes. Studies have been done basically to show that kids who are handed a device, instead of being left to themselves when they're having a tantrum or a fit, they actually do not develop the kind of emotional regulation skills or self-control that they should. And so children who are kind of frequently handed devices end up having more what they call externalizing behaviors like tantrums and poor focus and kind of just very dysregulated emotions. And a lot of this kind of again comes down to the brain science that when a kid is handed a screen, it does calm them immediately in the short term, but cumulatively it puts their nervous system (a developing nervous system) into this fight or flight mode where the screen actually releases adrenaline and cortisol in their nervous system. They're very stimulated by the screens and there's no kind of outlet for that. But any time you hand them a screen, you're working against yourself because it may immediately calm them down but it's too overstimulating for their nervous system.

And there's been more and more studies coming out showing that kids who spend a lot of time on screens, particularly between the ages of zero to four, have a very underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. And so that ability then to even exercise self-control is being stunted because that part of the brain is not being activated by the screens.

MAST: You found that smart phones don’t just negatively impact the user… but they also work outward to affect other kids who may not be using that technology. Can you explain how that works?

MORELL: Yeah, it's called negative network effects. And what that means is that because of the nature of smartphones and social media, the problems that come from them are not only individual level, but they actually create harmful group dynamics and a harmful social environment for other kids even who aren't on the smartphones or social media apps. And that's because now the social relationships are all being mediated through the apps and the phones. And so a kid who isn't on the smartphone could actually still experience some of the loneliness and anxiety that the kids on social media are also experiencing just because they're not on the apps. And so there are collective aspects to this problem, which is part of the reason I emphasize so much in the book that if you do the tech exit, find other families to do this with you to kind of create your own collective solutions that your child is not the only one not on the social media apps or without a smartphone. But then I also explain why schools and policymakers play a really important role in trying to back parents up because the school has a lot of power over this culture that is set at the school. And then similarly, policymakers can consider solutions on an even higher level, trying to help empower parents by either age-restricting social media out of childhood or something like that. But I do encourage parents, you don't have to wait on those policy solutions. Even just banding together as a group of parents, you can help mitigate those negative group-level harms.

MAST: In the book, you compare the issue of screens to the issue of drunk driving in the 1980s. So tell me a little bit about that.

MORELL: One of the reasons I talk about drunk driving is because I think the Mothers Against Drunk Driving that was started in the 80s was in response to their kids being harmed by drunk driving accidents and that it actually wasn't enough for parents to teach their own children not to drink and drive. But if there were other drivers on the road who were driving and drinking and driving, they were a threat to everyone, not just to their children, but other families and parents and members of the community as well. And that's why I try to explain like similarly with social media and smartphones, like the effects are not just individual and that you can kind of teach your own children why they're not going to have smartphones and social media, but if their peers have these devices and this is how all the social relationships and social environment is being mediated, it's really toxic to everybody. The effects of those spill over to the community as a whole. And so I kind of say similarly, we need just a movement of parents to rise up and say, like, we're not doing this for our kids. And both kind of at the community level through the schools, parents can have tremendous influence on the schools to say, hey, we want to ban smartphones at our school from bell to bell and create a school academic and social environment free of these devices. But then parents raising their voice to their state legislators, to their Congress members is also really powerful as those legislative bodies are considering, you know, solutions at a higher level to hear from parents that we want this support, like we want help to keep all kids off of social media. And so that's kind of why I use that analogy in the book.

MAST: So let's talk a little bit about detox. So much of this is just, I think, it is still so counter-cultural. You know, there are school programs, sports teams, even churches who require the use of certain apps. How does that work for a family looking to opt out, wondering,

‘How is this possible because of the way the system is set up?’

MORELL: Yeah, so I recommend starting with a 30-day digital detox. I think there's actually a science to why 30 days is so helpful that it actually really takes that long for a kid's nervous system to re-regulate.

Once they go without that and their brain actually returns to baseline, it returns to normal and they will be more calm and able to self calm and emotionally regulate themselves. Now, parents don't necessarily have to give up their smartphones, but putting some serious distance between ourselves and our phones and just saying, here's all these screen-free activities we're gonna fill our time with.

And we're just going to try to establish better habits without the devices. So I would say, start with 30 days. I give some examples of screen detox plans in the book that you can kind of follow, and try to find another family to do it with you if you can. And to your point about the app, I think that parents and the parents I interviewed said that we just have to get more comfortable pushing back as parents to say, my kid is not gonna have this app to be on this sports team or part of this youth group. And for every parent that kind of stands up to that tyranny of the smartphone, it makes it easier on the next parent.

MAST: This was part of a longer conversation we had with Clare Morell about what she found in talking to families and her ideas for policy change. We’ll air a longer version of that this weekend on The World and Everything in It feed, wherever you get this podcast.

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