Why smart phones are a form of child abuse: An author's tips on how to stop YOUR teen becoming addicted to screens

Daddy,’ said Jonathan Haidt’s six-year-old daughter one day, ‘Can you take the iPad away? I’m trying to take my eyes off it but I can’t.’

When even our children realise that modern technology is causing them problems, you know it’s something we need to address.

Haidt, an American academic, is worried that smart phones have fundamentally changed the nature of childhood, making our kids depressed and reducing their ability to function in the real world.

He thinks action is required. Even if you don’t agree with all his conclusions, I would be amazed if large parts of this book don’t ring painfully true.

The trouble, he argues, is two-fold. Firstly, we have over-protected our offspring in the physical world, ending ‘play-based childhood’. And secondly, we have under-protected them in the online world, giving rise to ‘phone-based childhood’.

Adults have warned their children about getting ‘square eyes’, first from televisions and then computers. But Jonathan Haidt thinks things changed in the early 2010s, when the screen at which you stared became a smart phone you could carry around with you

All mammals learn through play. Kittens toy with wool as it’s a substitute for the tail of a mouse. The rough and tumble of the playground is ‘an inoculation that prepares children to face larger challenges later’. 

Just as a young tree that’s exposed to strong winds will grow to be stronger, ‘children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend’.

But with the rise of 24/7 news, parents have become afraid — more afraid than they should be. Children have never been safer and yet parents insist on molly-coddling them. Haidt tells of the British woman who drove for hours behind the bus taking her son on a school trip, just to check he arrived safely. He reports the sign at a Californian school: ‘Football can only be played if an adult is supervising.’

We need to make playgrounds as safe as necessary, says Haidt, not as safe as possible. One fact he cites is that there has been a reduction in the number of children attending hospital with injuries sustained while riding bikes or climbing trees.

And it isn’t just physical safety —there’s the ‘psychological immune system’, too. Children need to learn how to ‘handle, process and get past frustrations . . . without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil’.

What, then, of the ‘phone-based childhood’? For decades now, adults have warned their kids about getting ‘square eyes’, first from televisions and then from computers. But Haidt thinks that things changed in the early 2010s, when the screen at which you stared became a smart phone you could carry around with you.

Haidt, an American academic, is worried that smart phones have changed the nature of childhood, making our kids depressed and reducing their ability to function in the real world

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt explores the way smart phones have poisoned children's brains and is an urgent warning about the toll of ‘phone-based childhoods’

Since 2010, the number of children in the U.S. who have suffered a major depressive episode rose by 150 per cent. Between 2010 and 2019, the suicide rate rose by almost 50 per cent in those aged ten to 19. Haidt says the pattern is the same in other countries, including the UK.

As recently as 2007, mobile phones were just that — phones. You could text on them, but it was cumbersome: to type an ‘s’ you had to press the ‘7’ key four times.

Then Apple introduced the iPhone. In 2009, Facebook introduced the ‘like’ facility, and Twitter the ‘retweet’ function, allowing you to engage with the content.

In 2010 came the front-facing camera for selfies. Now your phone was infinitely more tempting to use — a ‘portal in your pocket’ that ‘calls you away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe’.

This is no accident. Tech firms engineered their products to maximise their addictiveness. Sean Parker, one of the early leaders of Facebook, admitted in 2017 that the site used the concept of ‘variable reward’ — if you got a like every time you checked, it wouldn’t give you as much satisfaction as being rewarded once every (say) ten times. That’s what keeps you checking.

Parker and his colleagues ‘understood this consciously. And we did it anyway... God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains’.

Social media is about quantity, not quality. This is its ‘great irony... the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become’. It’s particularly true of girls. One in five, a survey found, had experienced cyber-bullying, against just one in ten boys.

And even when a girl isn’t bullied directly, she’s prey to self-doubt about her appearance, and how it compares with the Instagram photos which have countless filters applied to them. The reflection the girl sees in the mirror will look ‘less and less attractive’.

Boys tend to suffer at the hands of gaming addictions, which trap them in their bedrooms for days at a time. Chris, a young researcher who helped on the book, cites his own experience, saying missing out on social experiences means he now ‘often feels like a hollow operating system’.

Of course, it isn’t just children. Many adults are similarly addicted, frequently checking their phones during conversations. Whole families sit at home staring at screens, spending time ‘alone together’. But adults can look out for themselves. As a parent, you have to look out for your child. What can be done?

Haidt doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he suggests such tactics as making kids wait until 14 before getting a smart phone. ‘But all their friends have one!’ comes your reply. Then maybe copy U.S. schools where parents sign a pledge not to issue smart phones until a certain age. Schools can also play a part by forcing pupils to keep phones in their bags.

Whatever we do, it’s time to recognise that there’s been a massive shift in human behaviour. As Haidt puts it: ‘We are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions and head movements as communication channels... Gen Z is learning to pick emojis, instead.’