All the Conversations That Kids Are Missing

Alison Wood Brooks on the science of conversation and the art of being ourselves

Intro from Zach Rausch:

One of the subtler, but perhaps most profound, consequences of a screen-saturated life is what it can do to our ability to communicate with one another. At After Babel, we’ve explored the psychological and cognitive effects of a phone-based life, along with the ways it can morally degrade us. Today’s essay reveals how it is quietly eroding our capacity for conversation.

We’re excited to share an important essay from Alison Wood Brooks, who is a professor at Harvard Business School. She is the author of TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. In it, Alison explores how the constant, low-grade distraction of our devices is pulling us, and our children, away from life’s richest moments: face-to-face conversations.

— Zach

P.S., Alison recently spotted The Anxious Generation and TALK sitting side by side at Barnes & Noble—right where they belong.

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All the Conversations That Kids Are Missing

By Alison Wood Brooks

Source: Shutterstock

A friend recently told me that she wouldn’t let her son, Robbie, walk to a neighbor’s house. The idea of her 8-year-old walking a mile down their busy street alone and hanging out with older kids made her very nervous. She grew up in an era when photos of missing kids were printed on milk cartons and true-crime podcasts entered the mainstream. It makes sense that she and many other millennial parents feel like there are dangers lurking around every corner. So instead of hanging out with his neighborhood friends, Robbie stayed home. He watched YouTube and played video games while his mom worked in her home office.

A growing chorus of experts suggests that families have drifted into an equilibrium in which we overprotect our kids offline–for example, by not letting them walk down the street to their friend’s house–and underprotect them online–for example, by letting them watch YouTube and play video games with little oversight. In accumulation, these seemingly small choices are having a negative impact on kids’ mental and physical health, leading to troublingly high rates of anxiety, depression, digital addiction, and suicidality.

To understand the psychological experiences of our kids (and the new social world in which we find ourselves), it helps to zoom in on their conversations—the ones they are having, and the ones they aren’t. Not every digital experience is bad—in many ways, our phones and smartwatches can facilitate creativity, inspiration, and make our lives easier. But these obvious benefits bring with them serious hidden costs.

The bottom line is that every in-person conversation that is replaced or disrupted by a device is a missed opportunity for kids to feel more connected, loved, and alive in the short term; to foster meaningful relationships over time; and to become even passable communicators by the time they reach adulthood.

Tracking Conversations

While our devices enable us to be in touch with more people than ever before, they reduce the richness of and personal involvement in the conversations we overhear and participate in.

Think about the conversations Robbie observed and experienced that day: He watched highly-edited conversations on YouTube between people he’ll likely never meet (Mr. Beast and a few of his 20-something cronies); He overheard snippets of his mom talking to her colleagues (muffled through her office door and mediated through Zoom); And he watched text messages appear and disappear between anonymized players with usernames like “Dungeonxxx” and “SkibidiRizzz4U” on Roblox.

While he was observing those technology-mediated conversations, what did he miss?

He didn’t:

• Say hello to his neighbor while he walked to his friends’ house;

• See a young couple chit-chatting as they whizzed past him on their bikes;

• Interact with his friends’ parents when he arrived (his two friends were brothers);

• Watch his friends’ older sister talking on the phone with her grandma;

• Stutter awkwardly or laugh heartily or sit in companionable silence with his friends;

• Watch his friends interact with each other;

• Wonder whether he should intervene when the boys got into a scuffle;

• Watch their parents talk lovingly to each other in their kitchen;

• See his friends recover from their scuffle and then make inside jokes with their parents;

• Debrief with his own mom when he returned home (Robbie had been home all day online, so they had nothing to debrief).

In short, Robbie missed out on observing and participating in a rich set of conversations with a diverse range of people. He missed out on the richest rewards of the social world.

How Devices Replace and Subtly Disrupt Conversation

Missed opportunities for face-to-face conversation aren’t only suffered by kids who stay home. Devices shape, replace, and subtly disrupt most social interactions these days. A recent study randomly assigned groups of friends to either have their phones accessible or inaccessible while they were hanging out, then measured their enjoyment every five minutes. It turned out that having a device within reach harmed well-being in two ways: 1) through conversational replacement, because the participants spent less time looking at and talking to each other face to face, and 2) through conversational disruption, because the interactions they did have were less rewarding than the conversations the friends had in the no-phone condition.

Conversational replacement and disruption, especially when accumulated over time, are extremely damaging. Considerable evidence has emerged that access to mobile internet through devices is detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, social connection, and overall well-being. Luckily, preserving device-free pockets of time can help. For example, in a recent large-scale, month-long randomized controlled trial, a team of behavioral researchers found that removing access to the internet through smartphones and smartwatches vastly improved mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. In fact, a staggering 91% of their participants improved on at least one of those outcomes.

Critics of the phone-based childhood often focus on the ways that social media apps (like Reels and TikTok) and communication platforms (like text and Snapchat) harm kids’ mental and physical health through social exclusion and bullying, targeted advertisements, pervasive social comparison, addiction to scroll-induced dopamine hits, and a distorted sense of reality. These warnings are very important. But what about the information kids absorb on their devices that isn’t so obviously harmful? What about the stuff that is actually helpful?

Last week, a high school junior named Cassie pulled her phone out of her classroom’s “phone hotel” (a fabric shoe rack) at the end of her biology class. As she meandered through the hallway to the bathroom and study hall, she toggled through her phone quickly, catching up on a group text chain with some girls in her grade, a smaller group exchange with her tennis teammates, and a private back-and-forth with her mom. She scrolled through TikTok, checked the weather forecast for the next day, and checked in on her crush’s Instagram account to see if he’d posted anything new (he had!).

In Cassie’s case, she’d connected with her friends, touched base with her mom, daydreamed about her crush, and thought ahead about tomorrow’s weather. That’s all pretty great. I’ve witnessed many positive moments with my kids on devices, too, like the time my toddler asked his Amazon Alexa why the tooth fairy is nocturnal (adorable), the time my elementary schooler asked ChatGPT what his grandparents might want to talk about (great topic prep for their next conversation), or the time I heard my daughter giggling with her cousin on their Gizmo watches (a sweet experience that’s now part of their shared reality).

But here’s the problem: the costs of device use aren’t just about what kids experience and absorb. It’s also about what they miss. In those five minutes in Cassie’s life, she didn’t:

• Turn to her classmates to debrief about their biology class (so she didn’t realize how entropy and enthalpy are different);

• Hear younger students talking to each other in the hallway (so she didn’t learn that one of her older friends had hurt their feelings);

• Say hi to her math teacher when he passed by (which he took as a sign of a mild disinterest in their math work together);

• Wave to her friend (because she didn’t see him ahead of her down the hall);

• Make brief eye contact and then avert her eyes away from her crush (which she believed is something a cute girl might do to catch his attention);

• Offer to give a tampon to a quiet girl in the bathroom (because she didn’t notice the girl was looking for one).

While engrossed in her digital reality, Cassie missed out on the rewards of the in-person social world––from silly and fleeting to substantive and profound––that were available all around her.

The Richest Rewards

The rewards of the social world are vast and profound—incalculably so. Though you might not realize it, we all pursue a constellation of crucial rewards every time we talk with others—informational rewards like learning, brainstorming, exchanging advice, and making decisions as well as relational rewards like feeling connected, loved, and alive. While digitally-mediated activities (like Cassie’s) can be rewarding, in-person interactions with other humans, on average, are more important.

This is because face-to-face and other forms of conversation (like text messaging, Zoom, email, phone, video chat, DMs, etc) differ in important ways. They differ in terms of 1) the information they convey, and 2) how we perceive that information. We take in much more, and richer, information in person than anywhere else. Face-to-face conversations involve a rapidly-unfolding exchange of words, rich visual cues (from our shoes, clothes, and hairstyles to facial expressions, eye contact, and body language), and acoustic information (from vocal tone, pitch, and pace, to stutters, laughs, and sniffs). All other modes of communication limit these cues in some way. Even video chat—the richest mediated mode of communication, which remote workers, friends, and families have learned to rely on heavily—disrupts the flow of acoustic information and constrains visual cues to a small square within each speaker’s environment.

There are also important differences in how we perceive modes of communication—differences that have evolved over millions of years. Face-to-face is the mode that humans relied on to develop the capacity for dialogue. Our brains were built to interact in person. So perhaps it’s no wonder that people are 30 times more likely to laugh and 34 times more persuasive in person than over text-based modes of communication like text and email. Face-to-face conversations with strangers give rise to more pleasure and learning than we anticipate, and talking with a wider range of people in person—a diverse mix of strangers, acquaintances, friends, and loved ones—is associated with greater well-being overall. Reaping these rewards requires a tremendous amount of attention (because our minds naturally wander and conversation is effortful). In my own research, I’ve found that, on average, people’s minds wander 24% of the time during in-person conversation. This percentage would be difficult to calculate for the conversations we have on our devices. In fact, the better question for conversation conducted through our devices would be: what percentage of the time is anyone listening at all?

When I ask my students at Harvard to record a 20-minute sample of their conversational life—to create a transcript of every outgoing and incoming message as they toggle between texts and Zoom calls and Snapchats and in-person conversations—they often remark that, in retrospect, their face-to-face interactions were the only ones that felt real. While mediated conversations can be rewarding, too, even the presence of a scrollable device (face-down on the table in front of you, buzzing on your wrist, or slipped into a “phone hotel” at the front of a classroom) undermines the benefits we derive from interacting with the people right in front of us. A nearby device is a portal to another world, and that world takes up space in our minds. Kids devote lots of cognitive space to thinking about what might be happening on TikTok, who’s sending texts, and what they might be saying. Those thoughts decrease their ability to focus on the real world right in front of them.

Learning to Talk

One reason that replacing and disrupting conversations with devices is so damaging for kids is that doing so dramatically reduces the opportunities for face-to-face experimentation, feedback, and learning—crucial experiences kids need to figure out how to unlock the rewards of conversation. And figuring out how to unlock the rewards of conversation may be the most important project of childhood development overall. Like tackling any major project, kids require tons of practice to learn to converse—by talking with a wide variety of conversation partners, by observing loads of other people talking, and by reflecting and receiving feedback (direct and indirect) about how it’s all going. Anyone who has talked to a kid or teenager even once—anyone who has witnessed anxiety, confusion, rudeness, hostility, fumbling awkwardness, boredom, defensiveness, ennui, inattentiveness, impulsivity, self-centeredness, or disinterest—knows that dazzling conversation skills are not natural, even for the most gregarious or socially-gifted kids. They need to practice—they need to succeed and fail a million times, in a lot of different situations, with a lot of different people—to have a fighting chance to become even moderately good conversationalists by the time they are adults.

Conversation is a tricky coordination game, and even the best communicators have always, and will always, have room for improvement. But today’s kids have it worse. Devices aren’t the only barrier to mastering conversation, but they present clear hurdles and are increasingly omnipresent in kids’ lives. And while kids are constantly pulled away from mutually-attentive conversation by their devices, so is everyone else. The whole network of people they see, hear, and interact with––peers, teachers, coaches, parents, acquaintances, and strangers––is pulled to devices too.

The human mind wasn’t built for this. It was built to attend to other people—their eyes, gestures, sniffs, stutters, and tone of voice—in order to co-create a rewarding social world, one conversation at a time. Even the pupils of our eyes have evolved to dilate in sync, tracking the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation. With so many hallways, cafeterias, playgrounds, and kitchen tables that have fallen silent since smartphones arrived, what can we do?

Looking ahead

We can’t expect kids to prioritize face-to-face conversation when they’re holding a device, even if they know, in theory, that they should. As anyone who struggles with attentional challenges (like me and legions of others) will attest, knowing how you should direct your attention and actually doing it are very different things. This is why we must fight to preserve pockets of device-free time in kids’ lives—not just to avoid the potential harms of digital activities, but to help kids claim the rewards of mutually-attentive conversation. It’s why everyone needs to put their devices away during those precious pockets of device-free time. It’s why we must turn to meet the gaze of others—to laugh, learn, and listen. And it’s why we should all celebrate when hallways, cafeterias, and kitchen tables begin to buzz again with face-to-face conversation and shared laughter.

Like many parents, educators, and scholars these days, I’m fighting for a device-free school day in my kids’ schools, device-free time in my classroom at Harvard, and healthy device habits at home in my own family. This work includes contributing to a parent-led advocacy movement to educate our local school committee and administrators, developing new self-control systems at home, continually adapting and communicating our plans about devices with my kids, designing teaching methods that minimize device use in my classroom, staying up to date on emerging science, and simply talking about this issue with friends, especially those who are nervous.

When Robbie’s mom shared her fears with me, I told her that I thought her protective instincts made a lot of sense; it’s scary to think about our kids wandering out into the world alone, and some kids might not be ready. At the same time, it’s even scarier to imagine kids leaving the nest without rewarding relationships, without the ability to interact and connect with others, and without having learned how to raise good topics, ask questions, make jokes, negotiate for what they need, and try to help others achieve their goals, too.

Robbie’s mom listened. When the time was right, she let Robbie walk to his friends’ house down the street. He felt trusted. He had fun. He eavesdropped. He chit-chatted. He laughed. He learned new things. Most adorably, he was excited to tell his mom about his adventure when he got home. They talked about it for a whole five minutes–the longest debrief they’ve had in years.