Parent Power Versus Big Tech
Social media and smartphones have changed everything about being a kid. The Tech Exit explains how to reverse course.
The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones,
By Clare Morell, Forum Books,
pp. 256, $27.00
At this point in history, screen time for children can be considered “Lindy”—it has been done for a long time and seems to have staying power. The baby boomers tuned into Captain Kangaroo on weekday mornings. Gen Xers munched on cereal while watching The Electric Company. Millennials even learned a little bit of Spanish from Dora the Explorer. But somewhere along the way, screens—and our relationships with them—changed. It’s this change that inspired Clare Morell to write her debut book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.
Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, hasn’t always been a denizen of the ivory tower. Before joining EPPC, she worked at the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. Before that, she worked in Guatemala, trying to improve the justice system for children who were victims of the worst crimes imaginable. She’s seen the dark side of the internet, and she doesn’t want her fellow parents to be fooled by ineffective online pornography blockers or Instagram’s supposedly safe teen accounts.
But The Tech Exit goes beyond the moral panic that pedophiles lurk around every digital corner. Through countless interviews with families from across the United States, Morell shows that smartphones and social media don’t just put kids in physical danger. They’ve changed everything about how children learn and socialize, and the negative effects on tweens’ and teens’ mental health have been enormous. When every school desk comes with a laptop and every friend group comes with a group chat, families can’t opt out of screens—or can they?
“Phones have reoriented kids’ greatest aspirations from a higher purpose to a cul-de-sac of self-involvement. Technology is habituating our children to lives of endless consumption,” Morell writes. “As parents, our job is to consider what is forming our children and to manage what they are being formed into. Every time we hand our children a screen, technology answers that question for us.”
Fortunately, per Morell, parents have more power than they think. She educates parents about online dangers they may not be aware of, from sextortion to cyberbullying, but she doesn’t just leave them with a list of “thou shalt nots.” Using the acronym FEAST, Morell shares a positive plan for families to exit tech (FEAST stands for Find Other Families; Explain, Educate, and Exemplify; Adopt Alternatives; Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules; Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits). It turns out that The Benedict Option for childhood technology use is the only option—Morell compares giving kids limited social media access to the harm reduction model of drug use. Even 15 minutes a day is too much, according to her research.
Morell is aware that her plan will strike many parents as impossible—after all, she takes an even stricter stance than author of The Anxious Generation Jonathan Haidt, to whose work she responds. That’s why she humbly and non-judgmentally lays out the stakes. Today’s children are more likely than ever before to be exposed to disturbing, violent, and/or sexual material. Haidt’s thesis, which has attracted much criticism, is that smartphones are making children more depressed, anxious, and lonely. Morell largely assumes that her reader has already bought into this thesis (she is much less concerned with showing graphs of kids’ porn use and sleep deprivation than Haidt). Knowing that a parent who has picked up The Tech Exit is a parent who is already concerned about these issues, she doesn’t waste time trying to convince the reader that the kids are not all right. She details the deaths of Nylah Anderson, a 10-year-old who accidentally killed herself after watching a TikTok video about the dangerous “blackout challenge,” and Walker Montgomery, a 16-year-old who committed suicide after being sextorted by an account posing as a teenage girl. The accounts are hard to read. Also hard to read are the firsthand accounts from parents of feeling like they “lost” their child to social media and video game addictions. But the families Morell talks to always get a happy ending—parents push through the tantrums from their children as they put them through screen detoxes. The children eventually get used to the new normal and are able to thrive.
Morell isn’t numb to the concerns of children and teens who will be “different” if they don’t have access to the same technology as their peers. “Your kid can’t be the only one,” Morell writes. “Children need friends who also aren’t on screens. And parents need to help their kids find those friends. When parents start coordinating with other parents to resist phones, the kids without phones naturally gravitate toward one another because they talk about in-person things.” Not having a smartphone is probably hardest for high-schoolers, who are often expected to log in to apps for homework and sports practice updates, but this isn’t a reason to cave, according to the parents whom Morell interviews. “If a ‘friend’ is so shallow that because you are not on the group text or social media chat, then you are dead to them and they won’t reach out separately to make sure you know about the social event, then that’s not a true friend,” one father says in the book. It’s the kind of lesson we all have to learn sooner or later.
The high-schoolers in the families Morell interviews aren’t totally tech-free. They shop for clothes online. They text with friends using so-called dumbphones. (Morell shares a list of non-smartphone alternatives in the appendix.) They watch movies with family and friends. Most importantly, they do buy into their parents’ ideas about protecting them from the internet (the “E” in FEAST). Sometimes the kids bellyache about the various hardships that come with being low-tech. But some of them even eschew smartphones as college students when they’re no longer bound by their families’ rules.
It’s almost incomprehensible how much of an advantage these Tech Exit kids will have in college and beyond. Their attention spans haven’t been ruined by TikTok. They’re entrepreneurial and well read. They have social skills and are comfortable interacting with adults. It’s a huge contrast from the innumerable headlines about the sorry state of college students today (many of whom can’t read entire books or complete a homework assignment without the help of artificial intelligence). It’s almost as if these Tech Exit kids will have bigger, better brains just by virtue of the fact they lived like the kids of the 1970s, not the 2010s. Is the issue really that simple? Could Morell’s thesis be the missing piece to raising happy, healthy kids?
Tech Exit families will still face hardships. Teen angst will arrive, whether a child has access to Snapchat or not. Children disobey, lie, and whine. Parents get things wrong. But eliminating tech eliminates such a web of horrors from a child’s life that it’s clearly worth it. Saying no to smartphones is saying yes to creativity, self-control, real-world experience—to “human flourishing,” as Morell writes. The alternative is grim. In the hit television series The White Lotus, one of season one’s main characters is a screen-addicted, friendless teen named Quinn. He’s staying at a gorgeous luxury resort in Hawaii—but when his iPhone and tablet are ruined by the ocean, so is his stay. He skulks around and convinces his dad to give him his phone so he’s not disconnected from his digital dopamine delivery system. Despite the beauty of the nature around him and the amazing activities available at the resort, Quinn is laser-focused on his devices. His character is presented as a weirdo in the show, but that’s the thing—Quinn doesn’t represent an outlier among American kids. Yet it’s never too late for any kid, even Quinn. Eventually, he realizes he’s ready to leave the screens behind and join the real world.
The so-called real world, that is. Internet reporters like writer Katherine Dee are right to point out that the lines between digital and corporeal are blurring, and that for whatever we’re losing, we’re gaining something too. The internet has enabled parents to earn a living without leaving their living rooms. It’s created marriages, friendships, and mom groups. Even so, some adults, including parents, are choosing to deactivate their social media accounts and get rid of their smartphones. (“How quitting social media saved my motherhood” and “This Brick Gave Me My Life Back (From My Phone)” are both posts written by parents in the burgeoning I-quit-tech-for-good-but-still-write-email-newsletters genre of Substack.) Using a dumbphone is not something Morell says Tech Exit parents have to do, but it’s the path she’s chosen for herself. She encourages as little screen use as possible for parents as well as children, giving examples of moms and dads who always opt for analog options (calculators, notepads, alarm clocks) and don’t have social media on their phones. But for the many parents who need to stay constantly connected for work via Slack, Teams, and a plethora of other apps, Morell does have a hopeful message:
Far and above everything else a parent does when it comes to their own tech use, though, is simply putting their phone down and giving their children time and attention. Remember, they are watching us all the time. We are their models for everything, including tech use. Our children will value what we value. Let’s show them we value people more than phones.
Parents are only one piece of the puzzle—lawmakers need to step up and protect children too, Morell writes. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 has failed, so she advocates for raising the age of “internet adulthood” (right now it’s 13) and giving age restriction policies real teeth, including for adult websites. Morell wants every state to have laws like Utah’s 2024 legislation requiring all devices belonging to minors automatically turn on adult content filters (“a phone user already has to enter their birth date to create an Apple or Google Account,” she explains). She wants to amend Section 230 so that social media companies actually take the removal of child sexual abuse material seriously.
Of course, Big Tech has an army of lobbyists who will fight to block all of these measures. None of these reforms will happen without parents pushing for them. Morell highlights moms like Julie Scelfo of Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA), Melanie Hempe of ScreenStrong, and the UK politico Miriam Cates. “Parents, we have to make noise for policymakers to hear us. Don’t take no for an answer. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth. It doesn’t need to be polished, and honestly, it’s best when it’s not,” Morell writes in a section titled “Just Be the Awkward Mom.” Mothers are banding together to make our nation’s food supply healthier and safer. Why not the internet? The dangers of the infinite scroll are harder to trace than those of glyphosate and Red 40, yet they’re just as real and much, much more contagious.
“Social media use by even a few children in a school or organization creates a ‘network effect,’ so even those who do not use social media are affected by how it changes the entire social environment,” Morell wrote in The American Conservative in 2023. Some school boards have recognized this network effect and banned phones altogether—students can’t use their phones in classrooms, at their lockers, or in the lunchroom. If students break the rules, teachers confiscate their devices until the end of the school day. “Marc Wasko, the principal of Timber Creek High School in Orange County, which has 3,600 students, finds the policy has made a night-and-day difference. They saw a lot of bullying before… [S]tudents now look him in the eye and respond when he greets them. Teachers have remarked how students are more engaged during class time,” Morell writes.
But public schools with such policies are rare. If there’s any way that The Tech Exit falls short, it’s by understating just how countercultural it is to give your kids a low-tech childhood. Unless a family has access to a rare public school system that bans phones, their best options are homeschooling or private school, both of which are costly. Morell points out in that same 2023 article that there is a “screen-time disparity” between lower income families and high-income families. Children from lower-income families spend about two hours more a day on screens than children from high-income families, according to one survey. This divide is only going to grow as more people learn more about the negative effects of screen time not only for children but for everyone. As X user @coldhealing put it, “In [less than] 10 years we’ll see screen time the same way we do food now. It will be a status symbol of the elite to consume less, and of a higher quality, while the poor gorge themselves on cheetos and AI-generated short-form vertical video.”
Parents and policymakers who read The Tech Exit can consider themselves warned. It’s for good reason that Morell compares taming tech to battling a hydra. But she always brings her point back to the goal of exiting tech: creating a happy, healthy family life. The importance of that goal will never change, no matter how much our technology does.
The post Parent Power Versus Big Tech appeared first on The American Conservative.
