The “smartphone-free childhood” debate has reached fever pitch in recent months, partly thanks to Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, which talks about how childhood changed dramatically in the early 2010s when kids began getting smartphones. Haidt asserts that we’ve overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online. He calls for no smartphones before high school, no social media until age 16 and phone-free schools.
Haidt’s last two recommendations make sense, but for many parents, the smartphone bans before high school aren’t as clear cut.
Parental pacts are easy to sign when little Alex is eight years old and the peer pressure to have a smartphone may not be very high. In many families, at eight or nine, the logistical need for a phone is also small. But for parents with older children, the issue becomes more nuanced. What if your child is commuting across a city by public transit on their own? And how might your child feel when they are the only child in class without a smartphone? Does the assumed social isolation counteract the benefits?
As a parent and a founder of a venture capital firm, I’ve been following the smartphone-free childhood debate closely. But I wondered, is all this hub-bub about the smartphone-free childhood a conversation about ideals or reality? And are we focusing on the right things?
Curious about how tech leaders think — and how they take action in their own families — I interviewed a handful of operators, founders and venture capitalists.
Many tech execs advocate delaying and limiting screen use
The tech leaders I spoke with acknowledged that screens are a part of modern life. However, the message I heard loud and clear about smartphones and social media was “Delay, delay, delay.”
This is especially true for preteen girls. Holly Neiweem, Founder and Managing Partner at Apprentis Ventures, told me, “There is a lot of research that the ages 10 to 14 are crucially important years, especially for girls. The impact of social media and phone use in this range has been devastating in terms of self-harm, depression, anxiety, etc.”
This perspective can be backed up by countless studies. Earlier this year, The Atlantic published an article called End the Phone-Based Childhood Now reporting that the US suicide rate rose 48% for kids ages 10-19 between 2010 and 2019 (and note, those were pre-pandemic years). For girls 10-14, it rose much, much higher: 131%!
If you choose a smartphone, lock it down
The general advice I heard was: Be thoughtful about the device you choose and lock it down as much as you can.
A lot of us have allowed some degree of screen use since our children were small. Perhaps we monitored the TV shows they watched or set limits on screen time early on. A lot of the leaders I spoke with told me about their particular family rules around screens. Jeremy Utley, Adjunct Professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, told me, “Our older three children (ages 12, 10, 7) have Amazon Fire tablets with internet, social and messaging disabled. They can only use them for movies and audiobooks.”
Neiweem said, “My oldest daughter received a smartphone at 13. The phone came with a lot of restrictions on social media and nighttime use. Prior to that, at age 12, she was given a smartwatch so that she could text with her friends.”
There’s not necessarily a hard and fast rule when it comes to “which devices, when,” but one of the biggest takeaways I took from these conversations is that the right device at the right time can actually be a tool for empowerment for preteens and teenagers. The right technology, with boundaries, can actually help them be more independent and build confidence.
Smartphones should be banned at school
Most tech leaders are in agreement that smartphone bans make sense at school so kids can have a distraction-free day. Schools are doing this through a variety of mechanisms: phones handed in, put in secure pouches, or a “never used, seen or heard” policy (which requires vigorous enforcement).
Timothy Shey, who was previously Head of Studios and Original Content at DuoLingo and Head of Scripted Original Programming at YouTube, told me, “I’m supportive of any school that wants to restrict phone use to give kids the opportunity to focus on learning with less distraction and disruption.”
Laura Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at Instacart, agreed, “Phones should not be allowed in schools during school hours. Recent research shows that allowing phones in schools negatively impacts school performance and mental health, especially for girls.”
The real evil in this debate is social media, and tech execs are keeping their children off it at all costs
Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya told an audience at Stanford he has “tremendous guilt” about helping to build the social network and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”
If the people who built the tech won’t let their kids touch it, where does that leave the rest of us?
While smartphones, watches, tablets and other devices can be a positive choice for kids of a certain age, a lot of folks agree on one specific tenet: social media use should be delayed as long as possible. Neiweem told me, “As a mom of three, and as someone who has lost her brother to suicide, I’m deeply concerned by the lasting damage social media and smartphones are causing. It’s one of the largest uncontrolled experiments performed on an entire generation, with disastrous consequences.”
Social media bans are a start, but tech savvy children will get around restrictions
While delaying social media is a good first step, at some point your child will be on these addictive and potentially toxic platforms, whether you know about it or not.
Be realistic that a tech savvy child will be able to get around social media safeguards if they want to. If you put restrictions on one social media profile, they’ll create a new one and hide it within a folder, or simply go “incognito” on a browser.
Petra Griffith, Founder and Managing Director of Wedbush Ventures, says, “I lock my 13-year-old twins’ and 15-year-old’s phones down, but that just drives them to watch YouTube on their school computers. My kids find some ‘educational game’ that falls through the Apple screen-time filters. I believe that we ultimately need to teach our kids how to use devices and the internet responsibly.”
She’s not wrong. One of the things Griffith proposes is that we share screen-time data with our kids and talk to them about how their screen usage makes them feel. Their brains might not be ready for TikTok videos, and you might be surprised that, if prompted, they’ll agree with you on this. Kids can be surprisingly open to guidance, under the right circumstances.
The long term solution is teaching them – and modeling – healthy technology use
Too many restrictions on screen use can backfire. Kids resent them and rebel. Anna Garcia, Founder and Managing Partner of Altari Ventures, told me “From personal experience, the only thing that worked long-term with my teens was to talk to them about why they should put away the phone, getting it to be their idea. Exhausting! But it can be done, and it’s definitely better for trust and the relationship.”
The more nuanced and longer-term solution to the many fraught issues smartphones and social media platforms create is to build trust and open communication with your children early on, teaching them responsible tech use, and — the most difficult part for many of us — modeling it yourself. Strategies tech leaders mentioned were phone-free meal times, no phones in bedrooms and even a box to put phones in as they come in the front door — rules that apply to the entire family.
This solution was echoed and amplified across many of my conversations.“One thing I am trying to do differently is to be more conscious about my own use of technology around [my children],” Jones told me. “If I’m constantly on my phone, struggling to be present even when we’re together, then I’m not modeling healthy behavior.”
Shey said, “One thing that’s worked for us is having open conversations about rules for using phones and other devices. Tools like Screen Time are just to give reminders of the rules we’ve both agreed on. Those tools often don’t work perfectly or at all, so it’s helped to set expectations with our kid to be personally responsible about phone use, and to understand why we think it’s important.”
As Eric Bahn, Co-Founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, put it, “We no doubt conditioned our children to love using these products too much. Now, we are trying to work back toward restricting time on the devices, and that means stepping up to engage more as parents with other activities we can do together — namely sports and just playing.”
After all my conversations, it seems clear: Delaying device ownership use as long as possible is ideal. Schools play a big role here in setting clear policies and enforcing a phone-free day. But we need to separate social media out of the smartphone debate, and focus on creating a social-media-free childhood. And ultimately, as parents, we need to do the really hard job: lead by example and teach our children about healthy use of technology with balance and boundaries.
