Four Lessons for Raising Resilient Children in the Digital Age

What secular families can learn from faith-based communities

Introduction from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

The Anxious Generation unfolds as a tragedy in three acts. Act 1, the loss of community, begins in the 1960s, as described by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. For a variety of reasons, close-knit local communities and organizations started to weaken. Some of these changes were driven by technology: as air conditioning, television, and automobiles became more common, people spent more time indoors and in their cars, reducing interactions with neighbors. By the 1990s, Act 2 begins: the decline of the play-based childhood. With social capital eroding and trust between neighbors fading, adults no longer felt confident that others would look out for their children. Parents became increasingly fearful, in part because of new media-driven scare stories, leading to children being kept inside and placed in structured, adult-supervised activities. This loss of independence set the stage for Act 3: the rise of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s, when children's social lives shifted decisively onto smartphones and social media.

Today’s post continues our series on Act 1 (more on Act 1 here, here, and here), the loss of community and its broad implications. It is co-authored by After Babel contributors Seth Kaplan and Caroline Bryk. They are long-time advocates for strong local communities, and this essay draws on religious Jewish traditions to offer practical recommendations for secular families looking to build stronger local communities and mitigate the harms of a phone-based life—such as introducing a “digital sabbath” or making the local library “independent kid” friendly.¹

— Zach and Jon

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Kids growing up in strong religious communities appear to be among the least affected by the screen-saturation of American childhood, as documented by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch. They are more likely to spend time in person with friends or trusted community members and neighbors, and they are less likely to spend time on screens. Religious communities are built in ways that constantly remind those within them that life is not just about satisfying one’s own needs, but about tending to the larger collective and learning to play important roles there. All this serves as a strong antidote to helplessness and uselessness. As a result, kids in these communities are generally happier, less likely to be affected by mental health issues, and less vulnerable to screen addiction, drug addiction, and loneliness. Of course, like all groups of people, these communities have their own unique challenges, but they serve as potential models for what strong communities can offer to combat our growing isolationism.

What makes these communities different? How exactly do they confer these myriad benefits? Are there practical, transferable lessons others can learn from them? 

In this post, we explore these questions from a Jewish perspective, with an eye towards identifying social practices that can be leveraged by any place-based group seeking to build a stronger community where kids can flourish. Other religious traditions, especially those with a strong communitarian bent, provide similar benefits. While the traditions differ, the lessons have a lot of overlap with Judaism. Seth, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, is a leading expert on fragile states, societies, and communities. Caroline is the Executive Director of Tikvah’s Jewish Parents Forum. We are each a member of an orthodox Jewish community, and are thus sharing lessons from what we see day in and day out in our communities as well as the broader orthodox Jewish world.

Image. Jewish communal traditions; family celebrating Passover Seder reading the Passover Haggadah. Source: Inna Reznik.

Community (see definition in footnote²) does not just happen in today’s world. Whereas in the past, geography constrained us in ways that nurtured relationships, today technology “liberates” us in ways that actually isolate us from one another. We have far more access to knowledge, to people in faraway places, and distant horizons … but we are far less likely to know our neighbors and local possibilities. Our resulting social poverty presents acute challenges for children: without neighbors they trust, parents are less likely to allow kids to play with each other, especially outside and unmonitored. This prevents kids from developing the independence and resilience necessary to thrive.

In this context, we need to be much more intentional about building communities and relationships that crisscross and reinforce each other. Only neighborhoods with strong social bonds are likely to engender the sense of togetherness necessary for neighbors to support each other and their kids day in and day out. This is true for every resident—whether a parent, a businessperson, or a police officer. Each one of us can play an important role.

Lessons From Jewish Communities

Judaism not only places a strong emphasis on community; it organizes around it. The daily requirements of our faith embed us in an abundance of place-based relationships and institutions that literally structure our lives into real-world communities. 

While religious and ethnic identities can be great spurs towards the building of such communities, what matters most, as Jane Jacobs writes, is a “continuity of people who have forged neighborhood networks.” These require a diversified set of institutions and activities offering many opportunities to interact, collaborate, and contribute in a variety of ways. As she noted, even in places known for their homogeneity (such as the “Jewish” Lower East Side), many of the most active leaders were from other groups.

Here are four ways our faith builds community in ways that benefit youth. Each provides an entry point and set of ideas that we hope you can use in your neighborhood.

1. Reclaim place and embodied experience on a weekly basis. 

The Sabbath, also known as Shabbat, is arguably the most well-known Jewish social practice. It does more to bond and interweave the community than anything else.  By collectively embracing the positive rituals and constraints associated with Shabbat, including banning driving, television, and smartphones, our communities create a 25-hour oasis that especially benefits kids due to the large number of children-centric activities that result: younger kids congregate in neighborhood parks, teenagers lead dynamic youth groups of smaller children, and backyards and streets fill up with mixed-aged gatherings. Meals with neighbors and events in synagogues allow kids to interact and develop ties in a playful, joyful manner that schools hyperfocused on academic achievement and highly structured, organized activities cannot. 

Shabbat forces our community members to live within walking distance of each other and of the synagogue, nurturing social ties that are stronger, more trusting, and more interdependent. This gives parents the confidence to allow their children more autonomy and unmonitored time away from home, all week long.

Let’s bring this concept to life: Earlier this summer, Caroline and her husband both assumed the other was bringing their 7-year-old son home from synagogue and accidentally left him there, almost a mile away from home, with no way to contact him (as we do not use phones on Shabbat).This said, they did not panic. On the contrary, she and her husband remained quite calm—surely, in a neighborhood filled with hundreds of families walking home from the same synagogue, a fellow community member would notice their son alone and bring him home. Sure enough, that is precisely what happened—a fellow community member took responsibility for their son without prompting. 

Key Lessons:

• Identify a group of parents with children in your neighborhood. Agree upon a time of the week when they will all go phone-free and be allowed to free range together around the area or at least within the boundaries established by the homes. Since the first time may be nerve-wracking, identify a couple of parents to keep a close eye on the streets. Also consider sharing this plan with local shopkeepers who can commit to keeping an eye out.

• Work with other parents in your neighborhood to organize community-building events such as block parties, neighborhood gatherings, and holiday celebrations. Make these events kid-friendly so that youth bond and form a set of rooted, real-world relationships that can better compete with online distractions.

2. Build an abundance of community institutions. 

Jewish communities are strong because we establish a wide network of institutions wherever we go—synagogues, schools, mikvot (ritual baths), cemeteries, gemachim (free-loan funds), professional support networks, and so on. These various social institutions—some formally established, many operating ad hoc or on the margins in smaller communities—play crucial roles not only in helping people when in need but also in bonding them together in a way that builds social cohesion, identity, and resilience. Synagogues, for instance, have a full slate of opportunities for adults and children to learn on a daily basis as well as weekly opportunities to congregate informally over food. (Always a good idea!)

Many of the institutions are specifically designed for children or have a large kids’ component—the gemachim, for example, offer community members a large selection of toys as well as clothes for toddlers and youth—and most of the myriad informal support groups are geared towards families (e.g., babysitting groups, carpool groups, meal trains for new mothers, and mother’s and father’s groups). 

Neighborhood schools mean kids have their own networks within easy walking distance. Nearby kosher restaurants and markets mean kids have places to go on their own—and owners have an incentive to make a specific effort to serve them. Seth’s 12-year old daughter, for example, loves to use her allowance to meet friends for pizza or soup at one of the local places and knows that when the family is in need of groceries, she may be asked to make the trip to the market on her own. 

Key Lessons: 

• Redirect your free time from distant causes online to building a local institution—social, civic, religious, or even political—that can build closer ties with neighbors. Encourage these to provide opportunities for kids to participate in some form—as a volunteer, as a part of a kids group, or even in a leadership role. 

• Reach out to local institutions that can serve, host, or offer a space for youth—including restaurants, coffee shops, civic associations, nonprofits, libraries, and small retailers—to ask them to become more open to kids coming in alone.

3. Establish a culture that offers a clear progression of roles from childhood to adulthood. 

From a young age, kids play important roles as members of the community, with opportunities to take responsibility for others, play leadership roles, and even act as adults well before they are. There are, for example, ample roles for children woven into the rituals and community activities–kids as young as five can open the ark (where our scriptures are held), or lead singing during services. Youngsters of all ages play special roles during the Passover seder and on other holidays. Teenagers lead prayer groups, run backyard camps, act as counselors, and organize play groups for younger kids. 

Of course, when boys become 13 and girls 12, they celebrate becoming a bar or bat mitzvah. This establishes them as adults within the community, with all the responsibilities that this entails. Such rites of passage, which help transition children into competent, flourishing adults, used to be common across many cultures, but many have largely been abandoned by secular societies. Combined with the decline of local institutions, which once offered kids myriad ways to act as young adults, this means fewer and fewer opportunities for kids to act independently and develop maturity while still young. At the same time, in the digital world, they see adult content without safeguards. As a result, children are exposed to an adult sphere online while being infantilized in real life. 

Key Lessons:

• Ask your house of worship, kids’ youth club, or school to orient around and prioritize milestone events that mark the transition from adolescence to adulthood. These milestones should offer rising sets of responsibilities and opportunities and be celebrated by everyone in the institution.

• Empower youth to take leadership roles as early as possible in your neighborhood, school, camp, or club. For example, they could lead fundraising efforts, as sometimes happens in bands, choirs, and sports teams, or mentor younger members. Give them the chance to manage activities, organize younger kids, supervise an event, or just act on their own with their peers to do something for the area. Where these roles are lacking, work with parents to create them.

4. Reclaim prestige and mentorship for in-person roles strengthening local community. 

In The Anxious Generation, Jon argues that one of the leading strategies young people employ to learn culture is through “prestige bias”—detecting who is most respected and copying whatever they are doing. While historically, prestige has been conferred to those who achieved real excellence in a valued domain, today the currency of prestige is often the likes, retweets and follows in the digital world, privileging outrageous content, distant “influencers,” and zero-sum competition that undermines healthy relationships. 

In place-based Jewish communities, in contrast, the link between excellence and prestige is not severed. Instead, the community continues to elevate individuals who merit respect for their service to the community (through awards, celebrations, and special honors). This elevation extends to youth, who are celebrated in schools, synagogues, and community dinners for the service they do. Strong ties across generations and with educators and rabbis, as well as a deeply engrained culture of mentorship and community support for those in need, A strong emphasis on learning from elders and historical figures with real wisdom mean that there is continuous guidance on how to behave and a broad slate of people to turn to when looking for advice. 

Key Lessons:

• Create opportunities for youth to emerge and be honored as heroes for their in-person behavior towards others in your neighborhood, school, activity, or community. For example, offer youth the chance to contribute to a neighborhood activity (block party, cleanup, nonprofit volunteering, visit to special needs center) and then celebrate those who model the best behavior. 

• Engage your children in activities to honor and celebrate local heroes or historical figures who supported their communities in an exceptional manner (e.g. drawing pictures for the fire station, writing letters of thanks to school leaders, etc.) early and often. When discussing historical figures, point out, as it does in the Torah, that these people were imperfect in many ways, yet still achieved great things for their communities.

Building Community: A Prerequisite to the Reclamation of Childhood 

Jon recently noted that while he originally conceived of The Anxious Generation as a tragedy in two acts—first, the loss of the play-and-independence-based childhood (1990-2010), and then the introduction of the phone-based childhood (2010-2015), he and Zach now see it as a tragedy in three acts, with the decline of local community being the first act that set the stage for all that followed. 

When place-based community is lost, parental fears abound and we witness what British sociologist Frank Furedi calls, “the breakdown of adult solidarity.” The result is less trust, interaction, and mutual support. Kids’ lives are constrained from the risk aversion that results. In contrast, when place-based community thrives, we see a strengthening of social cohesion and trust, and increased childhood autonomy. 

If technology erodes social connectivity and trust by atomizing us on a mass scale, place-based community achieves the opposite: it cultivates social ties, communal cohesion and trust. It facilitates collective action, because it strengthens the collective.

We understand the generational challenge today’s parents face: how do we raise children in an age of ubiquitous, immersive, and addictive technology – not to mention inflated fears about unsupervised kids? While we do not have the panacea, we recognize that rooting children in tight-knit, real-world communities offers tremendous protection by decreasing the likelihood that children burrow into the virtual world. While we are not calling for everyone to move to the types of communities we discuss, we hope readers will feel charged to become more intentional about community-building in their local neighborhoods—after all, in order to reclaim childhood, we must restore community. 

1. While we've mostly focused on Orthodox Jewish communities so far, we plan to examine how communities are built, are maintained, and how they manage new technological innovations across diverse religious and cultural traditions.

2. As Seth writes in an earlier piece, the term “community” is often used, but its meaning is rarely articulated. It is sometimes conflated with a “sense of community,” which can be produced by working with a dedicated group of volunteers or in a close-knit organization. But, an actual community is more permanent and is much harder to create. A prototypical community consists of most or all of the following:

• A web of overlapping, affect-laden associations and relationships that crisscross and reinforce each other;

• A set of shared values, norms, and goals—a common culture that unifies and constrains;

• A common identity, ideally based on a common history and narrative and recognition of mutual interdependence;

• Shared rituals that celebrate the group, its past, and future;

• High levels of trust;

• High levels of commitment, with limited options for (or high costs to) exit;

• Recognition of and respect for common authority figures who guide the group’s decision-making;

• Keystone actors and institutions that bridge and bond different members together;

• A diverse range of skills and personalities that can contribute complementary things of value (e.g., money, time, expertise) to the group;

• Role models who exhibit the cultural behaviors that the group should ideally replicate or at least aspire to;

• Exhibiting a high degree of inclusiveness by actively seeking to encompass every member who shares the same identity or location;

• Capacity to strongly encourage through moral suasion certain norms of conduct and, if necessary, sanction misconduct.

As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom. This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices. This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.