#63. More on Moral Panics and Thoughts About When to Ban Smartphones

Here I address some of the thoughts and questions raised by readers of Letter #62.

Dear friends,

My Letter #62, on the history of moral panics about kids’ uses of media, generated 40 comments (to date). Some of the comments expressed agreement with ideas in my letter, some expressed disagreement, but essentially all were thoughtful and thought provoking. To those who commented, thank you!

I am not going to respond to comments one by one, or even to all the themes raised, in this letter. For the sake of brevity, I’ll restrict myself here to just the three themes that I’ve bulleted and bold-faced below. In a future letter I’ll discuss some of the other themes raised in comments to Letter #62, especially the issue of “addiction” to media and to the large issue of parental and societal responsibilities for kids’ wellbeing in our age of ever-changing technology. You may discover that I’m not as laissez faire as some might think.

• In what ways is the current panic about smart phones and social media different from and like the panics I described in Letter #62?

Several commenters pointed out that social media is not like the media that generated previous panics I discussed in Letter #62. Of course it isn’t. It is indeed the novelty of the media, for each panic I described, that provided a legitimate basis for concerns, which led to fear and moral panic when the concerns become exaggerated beyond reason.

The penny dreadfuls and dime novels of the Victorian era were new. For the first time cheap reading material was available that attracted most kids, including working class kids. In this era before compulsory schooling, kids who previously couldn’t read were teaching themselves to read, and instead of reading what adults might want them to read they were reading thrilling, highly engaging (one might say “addicting”) serialized stories about violence, crime, and romance. This was new and scary to many adults. Prior to that time working class kids were much less likely to read, so their minds were not being corrupted and possibly directed toward crime by written words.

In the 1930s, talking movies came into theaters with very inexpensive tickets. Kids were spending lots of time passively watching movies, entranced by a glamorous world entirely different from the dreary world outside the theater during the Great Depression. The themes might be the same as those in cheap novels—violence, crime, and romance—but the means of engaging with them was entirely different. Reading is active. You must read with an active mind to get the story. But watching movies is passive. You are doing nothing but absorbing what’s on the screen. That can’t be good for kids, the story went.

In the 1990s into the beginning of the 21^st century, kids glommed increasingly onto video games. This was very different from either reading novels or watching movies. This was interactive in a way that previous media were not. This was truly immersive play (see here), and, as play, it absorbed kids’ attention even more fully than did reading novels or watching movies. With violent games, instead of just watching pretend violence as kids did with movies or television, they were actively engaging in pretend violence. Crusaders claimed that this must be causing an increase in real-world violence. They claimed this despite evidence that rates of violent crime by youth were declining sharply over the same years that sales of violent games were increasing sharply and that repeated studies showed that kids who played such games were no more likely to be violent in the real world than those who didn’t play them (see my post here). One common characteristic of moral panics is that people ignore data that don’t fit their “intuitions” and exaggerate data that do fit.

So, when I discuss similarities between the current panic and previous ones, what I mean is that the adult reactions follow a familiar script. First there is reasonable concern about possible dangers the media might pose. But then, as adults and the adult media focus on the dangers and ignore the benefits, the dangers become exaggerated and overgeneralized in the public mind. And then crusaders step up, with voices of authority, which exaggerate the dangers even further, present hypotheses about those dangers as if they were facts and distort the actual research findings in their proclamations.

The moral here is not that there are no dangers, no downsides, to the media de jour that attracts our kids, but that we should also ask ourselves—or better yet, ask our kids--about what they get out of their involvement with those media. We should be skeptical about the claims of the loudest crusaders and ask, “What really is the evidence behind those claims, and what evidence might refute or modulate those claims?” For more on this, see my Letter #45, other letters I link to there, and my follow-up to that letter.

• Will restricting social media or other uses of technology reverse the current mental health crisis among kids?

I am convinced that the answer is no. I have written about this before. The mental health crisis preceded smartphones and social media. It even preceded public access to the Internet. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teens increased continuously and dramatically between 1950 and 1990. In previous writings (e.g. here and here) I have described some of the societal changes that gradually restricted children’s freedom to play and explore independently and thereby deprived them of their greatest sources of joy and the kinds of activities that provide the opportunity to acquire a sense of agency and build the skills that underlie emotional resilience (see here).

Then, from 1990 to about 2010, the mental health of kids in the US improved. Rates of anxiety, depression and suicide declined about a third of the way back toward 1950s levels. Why? We don’t know for sure, but I have presented—with evidence (e.g. here)—the hypothesis that computers, computer games, and the Internet itself became a saving grace. Already by 1990 we had taken away most of kids’ opportunities to play, explore, and communicate with one another independently of adult control in the real world, but now they could do those things in the virtual world. They regained some of the sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness to peers that psychologists have long known are essential for mental wellbeing.

Beginning around 2011 rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among teens began to increase again, reaching by 2019 a peak about the same as that in 1990 before leveling off again after 2019. What happened? Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, wants us to believe that the crucial social change was availability of smartphones and social media platforms, but most social scientists who have long been immersed in testing that theory disagree. Again, see my critique of Haidt’s book here and the previous posts I link to in that critique. I elaborated (here) on another theory about what changed around 2011 to increase kids’ anxiety, depression, and suicide, which is far better supported by evidence than the smartphone/social media theory, but relatively few people are willing to consider it. It’s easier to blame media companies than to blame what was viewed as “reform” of our public school system.

In case you are in doubt, I know that social media companies are no angels, and they need some regulation, but they are not a major cause of the sharp recent decline in kids’ mental health. The data don’t support that theory.

• When, where, how, and for whom should smartphones be banned?

Haidt and many of his followers would like to see a blanket ban on smartphones for anyone under some specific age. I’ve heard from parents who, in response to Haidt’s book, have pledged that they will not allow their kids a smartphone until age 16. This has become something of a social movement.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a digital technical age. Right now, the smartphone is the most powerful educational tool that has ever existed in the history of humanity. Yes, I know, you can do most of the same things on a desktop or laptop computer, but you can’t carry that with you and use it in such a flexible fashion. People who want to deprive kids of this tool seem to be unaware of, or in denial about, the many positive ways that kids use this tool. I don’t have space to dwell on that here, so I’ll save it for a future letter.

Yet, I agree that there are times and places where smartphones should be set aside, made unavailable for a period, regardless of the person’s age. Here are some of them that come quickly to mind.

• At night when you go to bed. No smartphones in the bedroom. Kids and adults alike are losing sleep because of difficult-to-resist urges to pick up the phone every time there is a ding.

• At the dinner table. Dinner should be a relaxed time for family togetherness. No phones should be nearby, and that goes for the adults as well as kids.

• Whenever you are face-to-face in a real-world conversation with another human being. It’s rude, regardless of your age, to let that phone distract you when we are trying to have a conversation. If you want to be on your phone rather than talk with me, go away.

• At outdoor summer camps. Camps, except for those specifically about technology, are great places to experience nature and real-world interaction with other kids. I have spoken at several conferences of camp directors. They would love to ban cellphones, but they tell me it is the parents, not the kids, who object to such a ban. The cell phone has become an infinitely long umbilical cord connecting parents to their kids. Breaking that cord would be good for everyone, but parents resist.

• In school classrooms where the lessons (sadly) make no use of cellphones. In this case the phones would be nothing but distractions. Yet, in saying this, I blame our outmoded school system for failing to adapt reasonably to how kids naturally learn and how technology can help. As regular readers of my work know, I’m not a fan of conventional schooling, but even within such schools. smart use of smartphones could liven things up.

Imagine, for example, a teacher of English literature who says: “OK, get out your phones and, as quickly as you can, tell me the names of famous female novelists of 19^th century England.” Within seconds, someone shouts “Jane Austen.” “OK, any others?” More names shouted out. Then, maybe, “Quick, who can tell me the titles of some of Jane Austen’s novels?” “OK, Pride and Prejudice. What was it about?” A bit longer delay, but then some answers. Then, maybe, “What have critics said, positively or negatively, about Austen’s writings?” After a few minutes, some critics’ views are read out.

ChatGPT image, badly rendered

This is so much more fun and interesting than hearing the teacher drone on about Austen. Such an exercise might even generate an interest among some in reading one or more of Austen’s novels, with an eye to testing some of the theories about her writing that came out of that Internet exploration. It’s hard for me to imagine a course that could not make truly good use of smartphones and kids’ skills in using them. It just takes a little imagination and willingness to have fun, and it would be empowering to the students.

Final Thoughts

I haven’t touched here on all the ideas raised by readers’ comments on Letter #62, but I will touch on more in future latters. I want in particular to discuss what I believe are parents’ responsibilities in dealing with kids’ problematic technology use when there truly is a problem, and I want to put that into the context of good, respectful parent-child relationships in general.

I also want to draw a parallel between the panic about kids exploring the Internet and the panic that began decades ago about kids exploring the real world outdoors. In the 1980s the moral panic about outdoor dangers led to the belief that being anywhere outdoors without an adult guard nearby is dangerous and only bad parents would allow that to happen. That was the beginning of the end of childhood outdoor freedom. We have a kind of knee-jerk tendency to believe that if some activity is a problem for some kids sometimes, then we need to take away all kids’ freedom to engage in that activity. We are now doing the same thing with kids’ freedom in the digital world that we began decades ago in the physical world. A much better approach is to teach safety rules, regardless of which world we are talking about.

As always, I invite you to add to the value of this letter in the comments section, with your own further thoughts and questions. This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. You will notice that readers and I treat all thoughtful ideas with respect, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter