Teens and Their Phones
I have a question for you today. Make that more than one question:
Are you seeing the average of nine hours per day on the phone?
What are the symptoms you are seeing?
What are the rules/policies for your children?
What are your rules/policies for yourself?
Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash
From GenZ-er Rikki Shlott on Jonathan Haidt’s Substack
People often ask me to explain their kids to them. They are baffled by the children that they raised and yet somehow do not know.
It sounds impossible and yet makes sense—considering that the hours their kids spent under the same roof were also spent in a maze of digital crevices. Parents always expected that their sons and daughters would soon return from the dark side of the dreaded adolescent years, but more and more seem afraid that their children will never come back from wherever it is they’re going.
These are strangers in their own home.
Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?
If you’re a parent wondering the same, I hope I can be an intermediary for you. I understand the desperation that leads parents to ask me — an older Zoomer whose iPhone has been an appendage since age 10 — to help them understand. I am on the leading edge of a tidal wave of digital natives entering adulthood with harrowing stories to share. So I’ll take my best shot at explaining the malaise of my generation.
Gen Z has inherited a post-hope world, stripped of what matters. Instead, we have been offered a smorgasbord of easy and unsatisfying substitutes.
All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.”
The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop — desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for… 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.
Is it any wonder that kids today are strangers to the people who raised them?
That’s how I explain kids to their parents.
I am thankful that, as a parent of two Generations Zers, the fullness of the author's doom filled description of this generation's phone fed woes has not been our experience. While I do see clear hints of these issues with my teens and their peers, the data suggests that for most Gen. Zers, it is quite a desperate situation in need of desperate measures. This would seem a place where the church in America could lead our culture, but too often there is little difference in the church or out. I am thankful for people like Andy Crouch who is writing insightfully about these issues. Just finished his book, The Techwise Family, and would recommend it to any parent as a clear -eyed vision for a different kind of life and future with our children.
The parents abandoned their kids as infants! Babies and children learn from those older. If you ignore them, they will ignore you. People don't like their kids! Or being a parent. So what's the confusion? Give up the greed and "jobs" if you want relationships.
Read Allan Schore, Dan Siegel and Bruce Perry.