Raise Against the Machine #2: 5 Real Reasons Not To Give Your Kids Smartphones

It's about much more than poor mental health

“Esbjorn doing his homework” by Carl Larsson

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I generally make 1 in every 4 posts free for all to read. My last post, which kicked off my ongoing “Raise Against the Machine” series is free to read. Today, we are back to subscriber only material.

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By now, it has become almost self-evident to many that there is a clear link between the current mental-health crisis among young people and the rise of smartphones. 

Smartphones became ubiquitous around 2012, the same point at which we began to see a huge uptick in mental health issues. The narrative has written itself from here, particularly among social conservatives. For that reason, Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Age: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is set to be one of 2024’s bestsellers. Haidt seems to deliver a coup de grace for smartphone sceptics, vindicating what they’ve been saying for years and finally giving them a concrete resource by a respectable public figure which they can give to unconvinced friends and relatives as a Christmas stocking filler to prove their point. Haidt is a widely respected social psychologist, whose previous two books The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind (both published in 2018) have hugely influenced how people see our current political and cultural divisions. For him to weigh in on the smartphone issue so forcefully is, to put it bluntly, a big deal.

Yet some are pushing back against Haidt, essentially saying that he’s made the age old mistake of assuming that correlation implies causation. A critical review in the Nature journal, for instance says:

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.

Later in the review:

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

One last part:

In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.

Haidt has responded at length to the review, if you’re interested. If you’d prefer a quick summary of the back and forth, read Glynn Harrisons summary in The Spectator this week (Harrison is an evangelical psychiatrist and academic, probably known to many readers for his book A Better Story: God, Sex, and Human Flourishing). 

Harrison ultimately comes down on Haidt’s side—rightly, in my view. Even if I both admit that I am predisposed to agree uncritically with Haidt because he confirms what I already think, and that there will surely be holes to pick in his argument (if only because he is writing about phenomena that are still fairly recent), the objections of the Nature review simply fly in the face of what anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time around actual teenagers in recent years could tell you. The review misses the wood for the trees. 

For instance, the review posits “school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence” as one alternative cause of mental health problems. But how do most school shooters get radicalised, and where are most teenagers exposed to unrest around race and sex (most of which is entirely artificial and manufactured by left-wing identity politics)? On their phones and on social media. Saying “it’s not smartphones that are harmful, it’s sexism and racism and violence” is rather like saying “it’s not cigarettes that are harmful, it’s the carcinogens!”

Yet all that said, I think the pushback Haidt has received raises an important question: why do we want our kids off smartphones anyway?

Or, let me ask this: if we could wave a magic wand and make it so that smartphones didn’t contribute majorly to our mental-health epidemic, would we still have any reason to keep our kids (and ourselves) off of them?

I think a fully rounded Christian answer has to be “yes”.

The mental health epidemic is so severe right now that it is easy for discussion about smartphones to become dominated by it. But even if we could solve that problem without getting rid of smartphones, there would still be major issues. 

Taking steps to avoid destroying your child’s mental health is a necessary condition of good parenting—but it’s not a sufficient one. There is more to it than that. I noted in my first “Raise Against the Machine” post that parents need a positive vision to strive towards—an ideal of what you want your home and children to be like.

The goal for our kids cannot simply be “not ravaged by anxiety and depression”. This is a low bar. We need something richer—a God-given sense of what a human being is meant to be, a vision of what my friend Colin Redemer, riffing on the seventeenth Protestant Christian mystic Thomas Traherne, calls “the shining human creature.” 

Even if we could somehow eliminate the mental health damage caused by smartphones, there would still be plenty of other things that got in the way of us raising little shining human creatures. 

Thinking on this this week, I quickly sketched out five positive aims for my children which I think smartphones would still make impossible, even if we could remove their deleterious effect on mental health.