Mean Mom Loves “The Anxious Generation”
I didn’t want to turn off too many readers when I first started this blog, but I think it’s finally time to come clean: when I’m not dispensing advice about how to save money by shopping at Aldi and doing your own home repairs, I engage in my real passion, being the meanest mom in the world. And my method of choice is depriving my kids of screen time.
I just finished reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. While I try to read lots of books that challenge my opinions and force me to confront the weaknesses in my thinking, this book did almost the opposite; I came away feeling a bit smug, because apparently I’ve been right all along.
The Anxious Generation discusses the effects of constant exposure to screens on our kids, particularly through middle school and early high school. Kids these days experience much higher levels of anxiety and depression– could that be related to the fact that many of them spend hours each day scrolling on screens? According to Haidt, we’re talking “[a]round 40 hours a week for preteens… For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per weeks” (pgs 118-119, with references in the notes at the end). The issue goes beyond the enormous time suck. Haidt points out four foundational problems with kids spending the equivalent of a full time job– or more– looking at phone screens. Social deprivation seems like the biggest one. “Children need face-to-face, synchronous, embodied, physical play,” says Haidt, pretty darn reasonably in my opinion. And then he reminds the reader of all the other issues at play– sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Those all seem like things I’d like to avoid, both for myself and my kids.
Haidt scored some extra points with me when he talked about teaming up with my favorite parenting guru, Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids. (She’s also been called “The World’s Worst Mom,” and I feel a deep kinship with her, as the meanest of moms myself). Skenazy is a proponent of letting kids do things like walk to school without adult supervision, cook food on a hot stove and then cut it up with sharp knives, and other crazy stuff like that. According to the website, Free Range Kids is all about “Fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”
Strict online limits for kids and giving them significantly more independence in the real world go hand in hand. While social media is a breeding ground for adolescent mental illness, real world experience is a powerful antidote. Haidt describes kids as being naturally “antifragile,” meaning they are strengthened by sustaining (literal and figurative) bumps and bruises. Kids need to develop their “psychological immune system[s]-- the ability… to handle, process, and get past frustrations, minor accidents, teasing, exclusion, perceived injustices, and normal conflicts without falling prey to hours or days of inner turmoil” (pg 73).
This is a secular book, so it doesn’t even get into the phenomenal possibilities for kids who learn to be independent and resilient while also being guided by Christian parents towards a fulfilling relationship with Jesus. Some of those kids will be unstoppable.
My husband and I aren’t parenting experts, and our parenting journey began when a fourteen year old Kid Sense moved into our home, already in possession of several social media accounts. We had no idea what we were getting into, and we made some mistakes along the way. But we learned a lot, and I want to share a few things that seemed to really work.
First, here are the actual hard rules in our home for anyone who isn’t paying the bills: no screens in bedrooms, no social media until after high school graduation, parents are allowed to access all devices at any time, only parents can install apps, and the internet shuts off at 10 pm. When we had two teenagers living in the house, we had a subscription to the Bark parental control app, which monitored the kids’ devices and sent us a text when questionable stuff popped up on the screens. We’re not sneaky about this– we want our kids to know that there’s no expectation of privacy online.
When Kid Sense first moved in, we got her a phone because we saw all the other kids had phones. (This is not a good way to make parenting choices.) We thought we were being smart by limiting her to only a couple social media platforms. Predictably, chaos ensued. After months of struggling, we took the phone away. For a whole year. And it turns out that this was actually possible, though sometimes inconvenient. Kid Sense still had friends, and she could coordinate hanging out with them using our curly corded vintage house phone. We’ve had a couple other foster kids in middle school and we kept devices to a minimum– no phones or ipads with internet access, plus limited laptop time. These days, our eight year old kiddo’s screen time at home consists of about one family movie night a month. One of my proudest moments as a parent came a couple months ago when I overheard another kid ask him who his favorite youtuber was, and Little Sense replied that he didn’t know any youtubers. On the other hand, he does know how to walk down to church by himself, how to bike to various friends’ houses in the neighborhood, and how to mow the lawn. We feel confident in his ability to survive without always being in our sights, and we got him a set of walkie-talkies so he can alert us if problems come up that require an adult. So far, this has happened only once, when he needed me to run outside with a pair of scissors to cut his pants out of his bike chain.
Before I sat down to write this, I asked Kid Sense, now a college student, about how she views screens these days. I’m not exactly shocked that she hasn’t followed my advice that she set limits for herself on social media. I imagine I’d be horrified by her screen time tracker. As long as she’s holding up her end of the deal by getting good grades in college and I’m not hearing anything from the school administration or the police, I think she’s old enough to make her own choices online now and face whatever consequences follow. Kid Sense estimated that most high school girls she knew spent 6-7 hours on their phones each day, including about 5 hours on social media– a somewhat lower estimate than The Anxious Generation presented, but not wildly different. She said that social media negatively impacts mental health for teenagers, but also said she’s never heard another kid talk about wanting to limit his or her own screen usage– that’s a message that always comes from adults. I asked her what the “right” age is for kids to get access to social media, and she said 14, because that’s when they “know themselves”- cue incredulousness from the meanest mom in the world.
I’m hopeful that Kid Sense’s generation will start getting suspicious about the bad trade they’ve gotten– losing real world freedom and valuable time in exchange for infinite scrolling and the associated mental health ills. Right now, most kids still seem enthralled with the traps set up all over the internet. Video game companies, social media giants, pornography producers and all sorts of other unholy actors have committed huge resources to finding ways to keep eyeballs on screens. But I’m convinced that fighting back is one of my biggest responsibilities as a parent. Get your kids to church, teach them to do their own laundry, and block Instagram.
