When The Anxious Generation came out, I set up a challenge to all my grandchildren that I would set up a $1,000 investment account in their name at age 13 if they agree to not get a smartphone until age 18. So far all 3 of my grandkids that are old enough have done it. Their parents are very happy too.
I’m sorry Don but the issue is that by not getting smart phones you may be dooming these kids to social isolation. That’s the choice that parents have - isolation or bad socialising. Most of us opt for bad socialising and try to control it. As much as I hate social media I think we made the right choice. Remember this Substack is social media. A lot of the bad traits of social media are right here. Herd behaviour, grasping for new takes and recycling of boring old takes ad infinitum, popularity obsession, time suck for little reward, etc You’re on social media yourself.
Teens can interact social with others, in a more human, realistic, and beneficial way without smartphones. I find it very revealing that high end K-12 schools that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year often have a teaching platform that does not rely on tech products. Thanks for sharing your point of view.
No shit Don. I hate social media. But the problem is at normal schools they’re all on social media. So if your kids aren’t then they get excluded. You’re too old to understand this stuff.
I like it where parents are taking steps to eliminate cell phones in schools. More and more school districts, cities and even states are banning them from school entirely. Everybody wins. My kids all have school age kids and they proactively keep them off social media. Getting excluded from toxic material is a good thing. Family culture can supersede school culture. Look how well many Asian families do as an example. Doing what is best is not what is easiest or popular.
Excluding phones from schools is good. Things are changing. But What really needs is to happen is that all the parents need to get together and agree that they will ban their kids from phones full stop. That will never happen in normal communities. This is the usual problem of inability to coordinate It needs to be solved by government. The Australian social media ban is a start.
This piece names something important: the guilt is by design.
But the guilt isn't just emotional. It's somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into the same defensive states that trauma produces. Parents are trying to regulate their children while their own systems are dysregulated by the same forces.
And the generational divide matters. For those of us who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. We had a before. For children born into the extraction apparatus, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
Children raised by chronically distracted adults inherit dysregulation before they inherit language. Then we hand them screens as stand-ins for the presence we ourselves struggle to sustain. It's not parental failure. It's depletion meeting design.
I wrote recently on this mechanism: "The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender."
I felt guilty until I packed up all my sons’ personal devices for good. We’ve enjoyed an entire year with no phones, switches, or PCs. They are 10 and 12. They know they are different for it, and they are proud of themselves. I have peace in my life now that I don’t have to worry about limits, controls, sneaking, hacking, etc. I am so relieved. I love watching them play and develop interests and skills. It’s what I always imagined parenting would be like.
“ At first, the family had a strict rule: no phones until age 16. But when Talita’s oldest started high school, the rule proved impossible to maintain — all of her daughter’s peers had smartphones, so she reluctantly agreed to let her have one as well.”
This doesn’t explain why the rule was ‘impossible to maintain.’ It sounds as though the mother just gave in to peer pressure and emotional pleading from her daughter.
The crucial difference here isn’t phones: it’s parents that feel so soft and uncertain that they are unwilling to actually be parents. I’m a middle school teacher. I talk to them every day. They ALL understand that this is risky, harmful. They’re so weak and indulgent in their own lives that they feel unable to be firm with their kids. It’s a much bigger problem than smartphone use…
As is so often mentioned on this blog, our schools are part of the problem. I live in the Philadelphia suburbs and literally every day there is a non-academic use of phones in the schools that while not exactly mandated is pretty darn close. Want to go to a football game on Friday night? Buy your ticket through the student ticket app and scan a QR code. Same for Homecoming...all tickets were virtual. I don't feel guilt over this, I feel anger because the decision on how tech is managed in my home is being co-opted by external forces.
Yes, so true. My friend tried to avoid giving her daughter a smart phone until high school. But in middle school, because teachers are incentivized to use technology (It's part of their evaluation criteria), the teachers began incorporating the use of smart phones in their lessons and routines -- You had to check in on google classroom, look up and submit your assignments online, read schedules and due dates only online, and it goes on. Not having a smart phone during the school day became a liability, and the student needed to take extra steps (ie, get her teachers' or friends' help) to do what she needed to do.
I have worked extensively with parents world-wide for 30 years---see RealLoveParents.com---and I can tell you with great professional assurance that parents do not actually feel guilty. No, what they feel is frustration that the results of their choices are not more pleasant. They choose to pacify their children instead of loving and teaching them. They choose to give their children comfort rather than confidence. Parents choose to allow absolutely anyone online---corporations, peers, predators, and more---to teach their children about life, and then the parents are frustrated that their children become detached, angry, uncooperative, addicted, and otherwise unhappy. It's not about guilt. It's about parents not taking responsibility for their own choices. Period.
I don't understand the guilt. I think the guilty moms are the ones that are themselves a bit insecure and scroll social media (maybe too much) and falsely believe their daughters will be "left out" without phones. Their biggest fear is having a daughter that is not well liked, not popular, not pretty, not cool etc etc...
My biggest fear would be to have a daughter that has been brainwashed by social media and having their whole sense of worth wrapped up into their online profile.
I only have a 12 yo son who doesn't have his own phone or tablet or smart watch. But if I did have a daughter, I would be the same. Perhaps even more strict on phones. I would want her to grow up with a strong stable sense of self and not compare her self to all the filtered fake images of other girls spewing nonsense.
"Parents should demand products and media content which are designed to help and support."
It always amazes me how little public conversation there is around screen time product releases from Google and Apple, would love to see this publication or others regularly auditing the shortcomings of them or talking to experts about features that can be demanded.
Guilt is no stranger to us parents. We often walk day in, day out with this nagging sense of guilt that we are somehow destroying our child's chances of future happiness because of our own bungling behaviours. Screens add fuel to the parent-guilt fire by their very presence. But guilt can be the motivator that moves us to make the changes for the better. It's shame that we need to be careful of. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicidal ideation and eating disorders. Guilt, by contrast, is inversely correlated with these things, meaning it leads people away from these sorts of behaviours, not towards them. Let's avoid the shame-spiral but also: let's embrace our parent guilt and make the world a better place by getting on getting those devices out of our children's hands.
"In short, the parental controls that do exist place a heavy burden on parents." I have felt this. It's a great thing if you can just throw them away. But how can families use these devices instead of being used by them? It takes a lot of thought and intentionality that busy parents just don't have time for. Been there! All I wanted was to see what my kids are doing online so we can have the conversations and set the guardrails as needed. There was nothing that would do this on iPhone / iPad, so I built LivingRoom for iOS. It doesn't solve all the problems with the internet & social media, but it does put you on the same team so you can learn to navigate it together. In every other sphere of life, parents watch their kids and sometimes step in for guidance. Why should the online world be any different?
I do have tons of guilt around this, but primarily I have anger. My son is 14 and has been exposed to pornography countless times since age 12, even though he doesn't have a phone and we do our best with parental controls on the iPad and Steam Deck (game console). But the parental controls are a joke. Even though I managed to get the iPad restricted, apparently that doesn't affect Audible, which will play "books" with such pornographic titles that if I were to type them here you'd probably delete my comment. And this is even with the euphemistically named "erotica filter" on. I called Audible customer service to report this, talked to someone who couldn't understand what I was saying, and never heard back. Steam Deck is even worse. The default setting allows kids to access the most graphic and horrifying pornographic games. The parental control instructions we found did not work. Again, customer service did not get back to us. In addition to these sources of porn, he also sees it on his friends' phones, which I have no control over. People who deliberately channel pornography to minors should face criminal charges, but instead they are some of the richest people in the world. I am furious and heartbroken. And guilty, yes.
Reading this, I can’t help but shake my head a little. I grew up in a world where “screen time” meant watching a little TV after dinner, maybe borrowing a library book, and calling friends on a landline. There was no dopamine loop designed to hijack your attention, and there certainly weren’t billion-dollar companies banking on our kids’ every scroll and click.
I see Talita’s guilt and I recognize it, I lived through the parenting anxieties of my own generation, and this is something new entirely. Today’s parents aren’t just trying to raise good kids; they’re trying to raise good kids in a digital minefield built by people whose only goal is to profit off those children. That guilt she feels isn’t failure, it’s awareness. It’s the same instinct I had when I worried about the influences around my kids, amplified by a factor of a thousand.
Tech companies should not get to sit back and let parents do the heavy lifting alone. We didn’t have to navigate dopamine algorithms and endless notifications. Maybe the real solution here isn’t about more rules for kids, but about demanding that the digital world be less predatory, so parents aren’t carrying this guilt by design.
And for all the Talitas out there please give yourself some grace. Wanting better for your children doesn’t make you imperfect; it makes you human.
Everything is so much harder now that teens have private AI "friends" that no parent can realistically monitor. These LLMs are designed to agree with everything a teenager says, providing a constant emotional high that real relationships struggle to realistically match. We have to stop shaming parents and start asking why we're allowing companies to build yes-men for lonely teenagers.
Important post. If I may, however, I want challenge the use of the word guilt for what parents are experiencing. No crime was committed, no intentional harm is being done, hence guilt isn’t the right term, in my view. Frustration and anger-yes, guilt no. I reserve guilt for the makers of these devices and the apps they invent that intentionally hijack childhood for profit.
When The Anxious Generation came out, I set up a challenge to all my grandchildren that I would set up a $1,000 investment account in their name at age 13 if they agree to not get a smartphone until age 18. So far all 3 of my grandkids that are old enough have done it. Their parents are very happy too.
Amazing, Don!! What a way to support the next generation (and their parents!).
I’m sorry Don but the issue is that by not getting smart phones you may be dooming these kids to social isolation. That’s the choice that parents have - isolation or bad socialising. Most of us opt for bad socialising and try to control it. As much as I hate social media I think we made the right choice. Remember this Substack is social media. A lot of the bad traits of social media are right here. Herd behaviour, grasping for new takes and recycling of boring old takes ad infinitum, popularity obsession, time suck for little reward, etc You’re on social media yourself.
Teens can interact social with others, in a more human, realistic, and beneficial way without smartphones. I find it very revealing that high end K-12 schools that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year often have a teaching platform that does not rely on tech products. Thanks for sharing your point of view.
No shit Don. I hate social media. But the problem is at normal schools they’re all on social media. So if your kids aren’t then they get excluded. You’re too old to understand this stuff.
I like it where parents are taking steps to eliminate cell phones in schools. More and more school districts, cities and even states are banning them from school entirely. Everybody wins. My kids all have school age kids and they proactively keep them off social media. Getting excluded from toxic material is a good thing. Family culture can supersede school culture. Look how well many Asian families do as an example. Doing what is best is not what is easiest or popular.
Excluding phones from schools is good. Things are changing. But What really needs is to happen is that all the parents need to get together and agree that they will ban their kids from phones full stop. That will never happen in normal communities. This is the usual problem of inability to coordinate It needs to be solved by government. The Australian social media ban is a start.
This piece names something important: the guilt is by design.
But the guilt isn't just emotional. It's somatic. The attention economy trains the nervous system into the same defensive states that trauma produces. Parents are trying to regulate their children while their own systems are dysregulated by the same forces.
And the generational divide matters. For those of us who formed before the smartphone, this is deterioration. We had a before. For children born into the extraction apparatus, there is no before. Their baseline is a nervous system that never learned what settling feels like.
Children raised by chronically distracted adults inherit dysregulation before they inherit language. Then we hand them screens as stand-ins for the presence we ourselves struggle to sustain. It's not parental failure. It's depletion meeting design.
I wrote recently on this mechanism: "The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender."
https://yauguru.substack.com/p/the-attention-wound?r=217mr3
Fantastic article! Thank you!
Thank you JB!
“The attention economy leaves us physically alone and digitally bound.” Over and out.
I felt guilty until I packed up all my sons’ personal devices for good. We’ve enjoyed an entire year with no phones, switches, or PCs. They are 10 and 12. They know they are different for it, and they are proud of themselves. I have peace in my life now that I don’t have to worry about limits, controls, sneaking, hacking, etc. I am so relieved. I love watching them play and develop interests and skills. It’s what I always imagined parenting would be like.
Amazing! Good for you!
“ At first, the family had a strict rule: no phones until age 16. But when Talita’s oldest started high school, the rule proved impossible to maintain — all of her daughter’s peers had smartphones, so she reluctantly agreed to let her have one as well.”
This doesn’t explain why the rule was ‘impossible to maintain.’ It sounds as though the mother just gave in to peer pressure and emotional pleading from her daughter.
The crucial difference here isn’t phones: it’s parents that feel so soft and uncertain that they are unwilling to actually be parents. I’m a middle school teacher. I talk to them every day. They ALL understand that this is risky, harmful. They’re so weak and indulgent in their own lives that they feel unable to be firm with their kids. It’s a much bigger problem than smartphone use…
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/people-suck
Some fair points here. You are a middle school teacher, but are you a parent?
As is so often mentioned on this blog, our schools are part of the problem. I live in the Philadelphia suburbs and literally every day there is a non-academic use of phones in the schools that while not exactly mandated is pretty darn close. Want to go to a football game on Friday night? Buy your ticket through the student ticket app and scan a QR code. Same for Homecoming...all tickets were virtual. I don't feel guilt over this, I feel anger because the decision on how tech is managed in my home is being co-opted by external forces.
Yes, so true. My friend tried to avoid giving her daughter a smart phone until high school. But in middle school, because teachers are incentivized to use technology (It's part of their evaluation criteria), the teachers began incorporating the use of smart phones in their lessons and routines -- You had to check in on google classroom, look up and submit your assignments online, read schedules and due dates only online, and it goes on. Not having a smart phone during the school day became a liability, and the student needed to take extra steps (ie, get her teachers' or friends' help) to do what she needed to do.
The phrase "advertising aimed at children" should not exist in a sane society.
I have worked extensively with parents world-wide for 30 years---see RealLoveParents.com---and I can tell you with great professional assurance that parents do not actually feel guilty. No, what they feel is frustration that the results of their choices are not more pleasant. They choose to pacify their children instead of loving and teaching them. They choose to give their children comfort rather than confidence. Parents choose to allow absolutely anyone online---corporations, peers, predators, and more---to teach their children about life, and then the parents are frustrated that their children become detached, angry, uncooperative, addicted, and otherwise unhappy. It's not about guilt. It's about parents not taking responsibility for their own choices. Period.
I don't understand the guilt. I think the guilty moms are the ones that are themselves a bit insecure and scroll social media (maybe too much) and falsely believe their daughters will be "left out" without phones. Their biggest fear is having a daughter that is not well liked, not popular, not pretty, not cool etc etc...
My biggest fear would be to have a daughter that has been brainwashed by social media and having their whole sense of worth wrapped up into their online profile.
I only have a 12 yo son who doesn't have his own phone or tablet or smart watch. But if I did have a daughter, I would be the same. Perhaps even more strict on phones. I would want her to grow up with a strong stable sense of self and not compare her self to all the filtered fake images of other girls spewing nonsense.
"Parents should demand products and media content which are designed to help and support."
It always amazes me how little public conversation there is around screen time product releases from Google and Apple, would love to see this publication or others regularly auditing the shortcomings of them or talking to experts about features that can be demanded.
Good idea! I wrote about that just the other day. https://open.substack.com/pub/chriswoolfe/p/your-childs-iphone-literally-thinks
Guilt is no stranger to us parents. We often walk day in, day out with this nagging sense of guilt that we are somehow destroying our child's chances of future happiness because of our own bungling behaviours. Screens add fuel to the parent-guilt fire by their very presence. But guilt can be the motivator that moves us to make the changes for the better. It's shame that we need to be careful of. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicidal ideation and eating disorders. Guilt, by contrast, is inversely correlated with these things, meaning it leads people away from these sorts of behaviours, not towards them. Let's avoid the shame-spiral but also: let's embrace our parent guilt and make the world a better place by getting on getting those devices out of our children's hands.
"In short, the parental controls that do exist place a heavy burden on parents." I have felt this. It's a great thing if you can just throw them away. But how can families use these devices instead of being used by them? It takes a lot of thought and intentionality that busy parents just don't have time for. Been there! All I wanted was to see what my kids are doing online so we can have the conversations and set the guardrails as needed. There was nothing that would do this on iPhone / iPad, so I built LivingRoom for iOS. It doesn't solve all the problems with the internet & social media, but it does put you on the same team so you can learn to navigate it together. In every other sphere of life, parents watch their kids and sometimes step in for guidance. Why should the online world be any different?
Great points. Children are currently being used as pawns for the digital ID trojan horse, as Australia rolls out a "band aid" solution for the guilt many parents face having submitted their children to the screen: https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/australia-bans-social-media-is-this
I do have tons of guilt around this, but primarily I have anger. My son is 14 and has been exposed to pornography countless times since age 12, even though he doesn't have a phone and we do our best with parental controls on the iPad and Steam Deck (game console). But the parental controls are a joke. Even though I managed to get the iPad restricted, apparently that doesn't affect Audible, which will play "books" with such pornographic titles that if I were to type them here you'd probably delete my comment. And this is even with the euphemistically named "erotica filter" on. I called Audible customer service to report this, talked to someone who couldn't understand what I was saying, and never heard back. Steam Deck is even worse. The default setting allows kids to access the most graphic and horrifying pornographic games. The parental control instructions we found did not work. Again, customer service did not get back to us. In addition to these sources of porn, he also sees it on his friends' phones, which I have no control over. People who deliberately channel pornography to minors should face criminal charges, but instead they are some of the richest people in the world. I am furious and heartbroken. And guilty, yes.
Reading this, I can’t help but shake my head a little. I grew up in a world where “screen time” meant watching a little TV after dinner, maybe borrowing a library book, and calling friends on a landline. There was no dopamine loop designed to hijack your attention, and there certainly weren’t billion-dollar companies banking on our kids’ every scroll and click.
I see Talita’s guilt and I recognize it, I lived through the parenting anxieties of my own generation, and this is something new entirely. Today’s parents aren’t just trying to raise good kids; they’re trying to raise good kids in a digital minefield built by people whose only goal is to profit off those children. That guilt she feels isn’t failure, it’s awareness. It’s the same instinct I had when I worried about the influences around my kids, amplified by a factor of a thousand.
Tech companies should not get to sit back and let parents do the heavy lifting alone. We didn’t have to navigate dopamine algorithms and endless notifications. Maybe the real solution here isn’t about more rules for kids, but about demanding that the digital world be less predatory, so parents aren’t carrying this guilt by design.
And for all the Talitas out there please give yourself some grace. Wanting better for your children doesn’t make you imperfect; it makes you human.
Everything is so much harder now that teens have private AI "friends" that no parent can realistically monitor. These LLMs are designed to agree with everything a teenager says, providing a constant emotional high that real relationships struggle to realistically match. We have to stop shaming parents and start asking why we're allowing companies to build yes-men for lonely teenagers.
Important post. If I may, however, I want challenge the use of the word guilt for what parents are experiencing. No crime was committed, no intentional harm is being done, hence guilt isn’t the right term, in my view. Frustration and anger-yes, guilt no. I reserve guilt for the makers of these devices and the apps they invent that intentionally hijack childhood for profit.