In a recent New Yorker review of Matt Richtel’s new book, How We Grow Up, Molly Fischer effectively summarizes the current debate about the impact phones and social media are having on teens. Fischer focuses, in particular, on Jon Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which has, to date, spent 66 weeks on the Times bestseller list.
“Haidt points to a selection of statistics across Anglophone and Nordic countries to suggest that rising rates of teen unhappiness are an international trend requiring an international explanation,” Fischer writes. “But it’s possible to choose other data points that complicate Haidt’s picture—among South Korean teens, for example, rates of depression fell between 2006 and 2018.”
Fischer also notes that American suicide rates are up among many demographics, not just teens, and that some critics attribute depression increases in adolescent girls to better screening (though Haidt has addressed this latter point by noting that hospitalizations for self-harm among this group rose alongside rates of mental health diagnoses).
The style of critique that Fischer summarizes is familiar to me as someone who frequently writes and speaks about these issues. Some of this pushback, of course, is the result of posturing and status-seeking, but most of it seems well-intentioned; the gears of science, powered by somewhat ambiguous data, grinding through claims and counterclaims, wearing down rough edges and ultimately producing something closer and closer to a polished truth.
And yet, something about this whole conversation has increasingly rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I came across Ezra Klein’s interview with Haidt, released last April (hat tip: Kate McKay).
It wasn’t the interview so much that caught my attention as it was something that Klein said in his introduction:
“I always found the conversation over [The Anxious Generation] to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.”
This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.”
I think Klein does a good job of articulating the frustration I’d been feeling. In highly educated elite circles, like those in which I operate, we have become so conditioned by technical discourse that we’ve begun outsourcing our moral intuition to statistical analyses.
We hesitate to take a strong stance because we fear the data might reveal we were wrong, rendering us guilty of a humiliating sin in technocratic totalitarianism, letting the messiness of individual human emotion derail us from the optimal operating procedure. We’re desperate to do the right – read: most acceptable to our social/tribal community – thing, and need a chattering class of experts to assure us that we are. (See Neil Postman’s underrated book Technopoly for a much smarter gloss on this cultural trend.)
When it comes to children, however, we cannot and should not abdicate our moral intuition.
If you’re uncomfortable with the potential impact these devices may have on your kids, you don’t have to wait for the scientific community to reach a conclusion about depression rates in South Korea before you take action.
Data can be informative, but a lot of parenting comes from the gut. I don’t feel right, for example, offering my pre-adolescent son unrestricted access to pornography, hateful tirades, mind-numbing video games, and optimally addictive content on a device he can carry everywhere in his pocket. I know this is a bad idea for him, even if there’s lingering debate among social psychologists about statistical effect sizes when phone harms are studied under different regression models.
Our job is to help our kids “flourish” as human beings (to use Klein’s terminology), and this is as much about our lived experience as it is about studies. When it comes to phones and kids, our moral intuition matters. We should trust it.
Thank you for the article Cal. As a young parent, trying to do the best I can for my kid, I am always trying to find data and research in general to see what is what. But we do forget that at the end of the day is logic and common sense. If we can’t control ourselves with our phones how do we expect kid to do it? However we need to acknowledge that is getting harder to set these boundaries/limits for your kids if all the other kids have non.
This is exactly how I have felt for so long. I know very deeply what these things do to me, and I know my own children and how they respond to tech.
And yet, it has only been very recently that I didn’t feel a huge amount of societal pushback against our decisions not to be a tech-heavy family, and it’s always been a challenge to talk about our stance without seeming to criticise other people’s practices.
I’ve been circling something similar, the issue isn’t just that we’ve outsourced moral intuition to data. It’s that we’ve designed for that outsourcing. Most digital experiences don’t just erode presence; they dissolve judgement, slowly.
Take endless scroll: it removes the moment of decision. The design replaces discernment with inertia. You’re not choosing anymore, you’re just still there.
You can’t metabolise instinct in a UX optimised to bypass reflection.
I’m writing about this too, especially through the lens of parenting. The real anxiety isn’t what our kids are doing online, it’s the creeping sense that we’ve lost the ability (or the permission) to know what’s good for them without a citation.
Your Klein quote lands hard. But it’s not just technocracy flattening our instincts. It’s design. It’s culture. It’s a collective loss of tempo.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s. We lived 5 miles out of town on a good sized lake. My father was a Pharmacist and ran the Family drug store. After school I ran errands and helped aroud the store. My younger(1 year) brother and I often hit the woods after school just for something to do. We often grabbed something out of the freezer to cook and eat on our trips to the woods. My mother “encouraged” us to play outside. Summers, the lake provided the entertainment. One summer, I ddiscovered an Allied Radio catalog, saved my money and built a kit radio.(The beginnings of an Engineer?). We learned on our own. No cellphones or media. When I started college, I missed the “lake” terribly. I couldn’t wait to get home.
When my 2 boys were that age, visiting friends in the next subdivision was accompanied by pre and post phone calls, assuring safe arrivals. I have always regretted not being able to provide my kids the same experiences I took for granted. My mother knew how to get our minds engaged. No cellphone or tablet can replace that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, actually. I can’t count the number of times in my lifetime that I felt uncomfortable about something, intuited that something wasn’t right, but because the ‘consensus’ was either inconclusive, or approved of said thing, we’ve been expected to go along with it. Phone use in youth is an obvious case where we all KNOW it’s damaging, but we’re not supposed to act on that observation until someone with a monocle tells us to.
Cal, thank you for this. It’s a very important issue.
I feel you’re correct in honing in on trusting and using our own agency, through our intuition. In my experience I feel parents these days, have a lot of guilt around their kids, in some ways due to spending all the hours at work and not feeling they give their kids enough time. It is then difficult, with this guilt on board, to locate any inner intuition, because it’s so veiled with guilt, we allow them do things and avoid being hard on them.
The guilt needs to be dealt with first (in my case I used self forgiveness) before a clear intuition signal can be located.
This is SUCH a good point! It’s hard to trust or even identify your own intuition when it’s so clouded by guilt, along with stress, fatigue, and a million other things.
This is an essay worth mulling over, thanks Cal.
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that we should be wary of moral intuitions if it might be based on unfounded prejudice against people – for instance, my upbringing in a small ethnostate with very little immigration gave me unfounded xenophobic moral intuitions that I had to unlearn when I moved to the states.
On the other hand, intuition against smartphones is not a prejudice against people. It’s a prejudice about technology. Smartphone use is not an immutable trait of a human being; smartphones are designed by humans, and so can be changed by humans to suit our needs. As such, it is completely morally fine to reject technology that worsens our lives; technological regression happens all the time.
I appreciate this unique point-of-view. I’m so used to being told 24/7 to “trust my gut” — and nine times out of ten it’s great advice. Like many other millennials (and humans!), I’m an over-thinker prone to second-guessing myself. So, I’ve put in a lot of “work” to train myself to trust my gut when it comes to other people and situations.
However, you make an amazing point. What about the parts of my “gut” that contain internalized misogyny? Or white privilege? At that point, I don’t think it necessary for there to be scientific data in order to validate one’s opinions, but certainly pausing for reflection before trusting your instinctual response is not a bad idea.
Internalized misogyny and white privilege are not real
I agree. And yes, scientific data isn’t always necessary to back up everything, but it can give a tired parent a bit of peace of mind.
The far left is obsessed with the “cite your sources” argument as a response to any point anyone who’s not far left makes, regardless of whether any studies exist about the topic or whether they were carried out properly.
They seem to be unable to follow a logical chain of thought, much less trust a gut intuition. It’s unfortunate that both logic and intuition have been outsourced to random “studies” done by “experts” who likely have conflicts of interest on the topic or just make stuff up as many academic scandals have found.
Ever notice how most studies only confirm what we already knew to be the case based on common sense?
This!!!! 100%.
“In highly educated elite circles, like those in which I operate, we have become so conditioned by technical discourse that we’ve begun outsourcing our moral intuition to statistical analyses.”
Herein lies the reason that the “elites” and “experts” have become so mistrusted. There is something to be said for moral intuition, ancient wisdom, and good ol’ common sense.