Escaping the Matrix
In her new book, Clare Morell takes a strong stand for a screen-free childhood
Well…that escalated quickly. If it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters.
Should Childhood Be Screen-Free?: Outlining the road to a Tech Exit
Examining Pro-Family Policy: A Trilogy of Pro-Family Reporting
It’s Me, Hi: COMPACT, Family Studies, PolicySphere
Parting Shots
Should Childhood Be Screen-Free?
During a week in which rival billionaires each used their own social media network to lob insults towards the other as a political bromance turned sour, it hardly feels necessarily to recapitulate warnings about the power of tech-intermediated reality to warp our thinking and interpersonal relationships.
But as
(“The Anxious Generation”), (the forthcoming “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World”), and (“Be the Parent, Please”) have been reminding us, technological changes — and perhaps more precisely, the way that omnipresent smartphones have crowded out traditional forms of socializing and communicating — have perhaps had their biggest impact on those who don’t remember life before the iPhone.This week, a new author joined their ranks: My EPPC colleague
, who writes the Substack . Her new book, a thoughtful, timely and passionate result of years of research and interviews, may be the sternest entreaty yet for parents to think critically about the technology they are allowing their kids to interact with. “The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones,” currently #1 in Amazon’s “Internet and Telecommunications” subcategory, asks parents to consider the merits of pursuing a “screen-free childhood.”
Clare’s work in D.C. and state capitals tends to focus on policy tools to give parents more power to keep their kids safe online, or rein in Big Tech companies. For this book, she took a more micro-level approach to kids online, talking to parents across the country, unearthing under-covered research papers, and thinking beyond just policy change. Her message is clearly resonating, including with Utah Gov.
, who proclaimed that next Monday would commence Family Connection Week in his state, “a dedicated time to unplug from devices and reconnect through meaningful, screen-free activities.”1 (For more engagement with her book, I point you to reviews by for the American Mind, Ben Christenson for The Federalist, Brad East for Christianity Today, and for the American Conservative.)Clare effectively skewers the myth that screen time limits and content filters are enough to help parents feel comfortable setting their kids free online. And she deliberately tries to push the envelope in what advice parents are hearing about screens and childhood. In her review of most of the resources for families currently out there, she finds,
“all accepted the premise that screen-based technologies are an inevitable part of childhood, so the best they could offer parents was harm reduction. But harm reduction is always and fundamentally the acceptance of some harm.”
Her critique of the harm-reduction approach to parenting means she ends up coming down in a more uncompromising place than I would: “When parents hand a child a screen, even for a limited amount of time each day, they are working against their own goals for their child’s development, eroding their progress toward self- control,” she argues. Her prescription? “[T]he Tech Exit: no smartphones, social media, tablets, or video games during childhood.”
It is exceptionally valuable to have someone with Clare’s attention to detail and compassion making the strong case for a screen-free childhood. And she finds plenty of examples of parents who have proactively sought to eschew tech in their family’s lives and find it a healthier and saner way to raise their kids. “What if, instead of fighting these battles [over screen time], parents just go ahead and kick the screens out of the house? Or better yet, don’t let them in in the first place? It may not be as impossible as it seems.”
There are assuredly some whose reaction might be something like “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” And solely from the standpoint of pro-natal and -family messaging, I do worry about the bar too high for parents (or would-be parents). Of course, I couldn’t possibly comment about which parents, who will go unnamed, might have discovered the blessed few minutes of peace that turning on Paw Patrol or Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy can bring to a day filled with the boisterousness of little budding humans. Allowing an twelve-year-old to play some Madden football on an iPad, or the gamified “learning” of some time on Duolingo, seems different, both in degree and in kind, than logging on to TikTok, Snapchat, or even group texts. Not all screens, I would suggest, are created equal.2
But if a screen-free childhood seems a bridge too far for many parents, I hope that a social media-free childhood becomes something closer to a realistic expectation. This is equal parts wishcasting and prediction, but I hope that wanting what’s best for your kids development will soon — thanks to the efforts of Clare, Haidt, Twenge, and the rest — be seen as necessitating restrictions on tech use overall, and, God willing, a social norm that resets the age of entry to social media at something closer to 17.
Which brings us to an uncomfortable truth — or at least, an uncomfortable prediction. The audience that is most receptive to tech-skeptical pitches are likely the households whose children already have the most advantages — the well-to-do, the college-educated, those who attend church regularly, buy organic food, or sign up for intensive math tutoring.
Without collective action — such as starting with the phone-free schools initiatives that have started to take root in both red and blue states, but going beyond it — I fear that children on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder will be left to their own devices. Parents whose lives are already stretched thin may feel they have little emotional bandwidth for an argument about screen time limits, or feel that a smartphone is necessary for them to keep tabs on their children while they’re pulling a double-shift. Perhaps the ethic and norms of the more upper-end sectors of society will end up trickling down to change the broader culture. But what I suspect - and fear - is that we’ll be stuck with something close to what Michael Brendan Dougherty lamented for National Review last month:
“What you can’t give your child is a summer before screens. The normal kind of summer you had, with long languid stretches of boredom that had to be filled by your imagination, is no longer the default. The closest thing to it today amounts to a highly constructed, organized, and counter-cultural choice, usually made by parents with serious resources to spare on the formation of their children. Feeling like you are protecting the mental health and bodily development of a child makes you seem half-Amish (or half-upper class).”
This is perhaps the most important message of Clare’s book — that individual screen time limits, or even conscientious opting-out, aren’t going to be enough to combat the network effects of childhood lived online. Creating new norms around what is an expected part of being a pre-teen or teen — including the fact that just 15 minutes on Snapchat is enough to send teenage self-image spiraling — require some kind of collective action, both at the community and policy level.
Social media 1.0 brought the analog world into the digital space — three-way calls and comments on MySpace pages and painstakingly typed-out T9 messages. Social media 2.0 flattened the spaces between us; group chats and Snapchats, with the endorphins of its false intimacies and the peer pressure that can come from semi-anonymity (just ask the staff of the New York Times what their Slack conversations looked like in 2020.) “Social” media today is even more attenuated, where algorithmic feeds aren’t even connecting you with your classmates, but with “content creators” around the globe, trying to monopolize and monetize your eyeballs without you having to even interact beyond the “like” button. Before long, AI will chase even those disembodied creators out of the picture as well, allowing the rhythms and scripts of childhood to be dictated by large language models engineered for engagement.
If that sounds like a dystopic way to go through high school, the signs to the Tech Exit are well-marked.
Examining Pro-Family Policy
It is de rigeur for conservatives to complain about the lack of right-leaning outlets interested in doing original reporting, and for pro-family voices to lament the traditional lack of coverage in family policy relative to other policy areas (though that is changing!) So it would be exceptionally churlish to not give a big ol’ tip of the hat to the Washington Examiner, which recently published a trilogy of reported pieces on what might be called the conservative pro-family beat:
Trump wants more babies and marriage. Can the government deliver?
“Social conservatives are energized by the efforts of the White House to raise the birth rate, but more work could be done, they said. “Trump campaigned with promises of big, bold moves to help American families. But so far, we have seen just modest moves to help families from the Republicans in Congress and the White House,” said [U-Va’s] Brad Wilcox.” (by Mabinty Quarshie; link)
How immigration, housing, and red tape hurt America’s fertility rate
“Layers of local, state, and federal policies have contributed to raising the cost of having children for American families, who are increasingly delaying having their first baby and subsequently having fewer of them. It’s a problem Trump administration officials have said the government should help solve…But how exactly lawmakers can help raise fertility rates is complicated. Experts attribute the drop in babymaking to a range of factors, from higher costs of living to shifting cultural expectations. None are easily solved by a piece of legislation, such as a $5,000-per-baby cash subsidy floated by the White House.” (by Sarah Bedford; link)
Trump IVF push alienates key members of pro-family coalition
However, while Trump has touted IVF as a pro-family measure, many anti-abortion advocates disagree. They have attempted to sway Trump away from his campaign promise of an Obamacare coverage mandate for IVF and other artificial reproductive technologies, citing the destruction of embryos created in the process as tantamount to abortion. In general, they are proponents of other pro-family measures. Multiple anti-abortion groups told the Washington Examiner they strongly support Trump’s efforts to boost the child tax credit and promote intensive education programs on menstrual cycles and ovulation windows to encourage natural conception. However, they part ways with Trump when it comes to IVF. (by Gabrielle M. Etzel; link)
The stories are all paywalled, though I am told that if you search the title through Bing (!) you will be able to find the full text very easily. Congrats to the Examiner for devoting the resources to some of the most important conversations taking place on the right, and looking forward to reading more.
It’s Me, Hi
For COMPACT, I wrote about how the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” was constructed in such a way that upper-income households will benefit most, while low-income households will lose benefits — an odd fit for a working-class agenda:
“[T]oo much of the bill reflects the political attitudes of the Tea Party era rather than a recognition that working-class voters, including those who benefit from Medicaid and SNAP, have shifted towards supporting the President.”
For Family Studies, I look at a new Yahoo/YouGov poll that suggests the American public doesn’t realize the demographic handwriting on the wall and is somewhat skeptical towards policies aimed at addressing it — though young adults favor them more than old:
“As this survey suggests, pro-natal policies may be received best if they are seen as supporting parents rather than trying to induce people to have children. This survey is just the latest to hint that Americans need to be educated about the social and economic consequences of a low fertility future, and that some pro-family policies have the ability to capture some eyeballs—and maybe even sway some votes.”
This piece was featured by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in his (mostly-)daily policy newsletter, PolicySphere.
I was quoted in the aforementioned piece by Mabinty Quarshie for the Washington Examiner:
Brown, the fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, previously lobbied for the Trump administration to hold a White House summit bringing together relevant stakeholders to discuss family and fertility.
“If they want to shine the light on family policy, they should really do a summit at the White House,” he said. “Invite a bunch of people in and talk about low birth rates, talk about low marriage rates, and what we can do from the federal and state level to make it easier to start a family.”
I was also mentioned, in a rather inaccurate way, by ITIF’s Robert Atkinson. I understand the general tendency for supply-siders to want to lower tax rates without carveouts for specific groups (like, er, families,) but it is simply untrue that I believe we “must abandon the notion that economic growth aligns with the ‘goal of stable and thriving families’.” What I actually said in the piece Atkinson links to is that “the goals of reducing the size of government or boosting economic growth will not always necessarily align with the goal of stable and thriving families.” Which seems inarguable, to me!
Parting Shots
Rachel Cohen writes about what it would take to have an economic and cultural conversation that took biological clocks seriously, rather than treating men and women as interchangeable (Vox)
Michal Leibowitz’s essay on why the “therapy generation” is more averse to the thought of having kids was well-written and interesting, though didn’t particularly grapple with the reality that the sharpest decline in fertility is happening among unmarried and non-college educated women (New York Times)
Couple of interesting profiles of conservatives on Ivy League campuses: The Associated Press’ Luis Andres Henao on the Catholic ministry at Princeton, and the New York Times’ Kate Selig and Simon J. Levien on the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard.
A judge in the Western District of Louisiana struck down the EEOC's decision to include abortion among pregnancy-related conditions in regulations on how to implement the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (CBS News)
Anna Claire Vollers reports that red states embrace continue to embrace paid parental leave for teachers and other state employees (States Newsroom)
The North Carolina legislature passed legislation that would allow employees to qualify as lead teachers if they have five years of teaching experience, as an alternative to an official state credential, along with other tweaks (NC Newsline)
Illinois lawmakers passed a budget that increases taxes on sports betting and tobacco, while expanding spending on the state's child care assistance program (NBC Chicago)
Attorneys General from four blue states asked the Trump administration to lift all remaining restrictions on mifeprestone, while Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary promised “to review the latest data” on the drug’s safety.
Japan hit a new low in the country’s annual number of births, with 686,061 born last year (that’s half the total number that were born in the year 2000). (CNN)
Nucleus Genomics, a new tech start-up, purports to give parents the ability to create dozens of embryos and choose the one whose genetic profile best matches their preferred eye color, IQ, underlying health conditions, height, and other characteristics we usually call “accidents of birth.” The founder calls it “preventive medicine,” but
calls it for what it is at National Review: “Mail-Order Eugenics.”EPPC is hiring a full-time development assistant; the ideal candidate is a young professional interested in working in D.C. and with an interest in strengthening our mission by supporting our fundraising efforts. Apply here.
At
, has an ominous warning for those who are unable or unwilling to see the worrisome tendencies sucking too many young, right-leaning men towards prejudice or worse.
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Cox also signed a bill influenced by Morell’s work, the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which sought to impose age restrictions on social media in the state; last September, a state judge enjoined the law from taking effect, for now
Clare does exempt family movie nights from her recommendation of a “Digital Detox.”