What If It’s Not the Phones?

On last night’s Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon announced that France became the first European Union country to ban social media for kids under 15. Fallon’s crowd clapped, demonstrating approval.

The next news item Fallon shared was about “Jimothy,” the internet sensation raccoon currently captivating the social media world. Fallon’s crowd went crazy with clapping and hooting, far outdistancing the French news.

I found the whole sequence ironic. I guess most of the world can enjoy “Jimothy,” but not French kids under the age of 15.

It seems like the whole world is confused about what to do about social media, cellphones, and artificial intelligence, especially when it comes to schools and education. Right here at ABPTL, I’ve shared my debate involving my wife’s belief (and a lot of the worlds) that these three creations might be the beginning of the end. People like me, on the other hand, are optimistic that mankind will learn how to use all three to improve the world, and when it comes to schools and education, help kids become smarter and stronger learners.

So you can imagine my interest in an article published by The Atlantic titled “What if It’s Not the Phones?” Here are excerpts from that piece:

“When the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store in Minneapolis to buy cigarettes for his grandmother. When he was 11, he would sometimes stay home from school in Hill City, Minnesota, to operate a newspaper printing press owned by his mother and stepfather.”

“His parents were not arrested, and that’s because the childhood they permitted him to have was basically normal at the time, even if his family did have a newspaper printing press in the house. As a boy, Peter was obsessed with fishing and baseball; neighborhood friends taught him how to ride his bike and catch grasshoppers. Although Gray’s career as a scientist would begin with laboratory studies of rat hormones, he eventually found his way to writing about his childhood, in a fashion. Over the course of his 30 years in the psychology department at Boston College, his mixed principles of biology and anthropology to put together an evolutionary theory of play.”

“Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.”

“Gray’s theory, which he laid out in a 2013 book called Free to Learn, quickly found a welcome audience. The book was celebrated by advocates of free-range parenting and won endorsement from academic luminaries such as Steven Pinker. When Gray’s feel psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author Great Lukianoff published their 2018 best seller on the threat of safetyism, The Coddling of the American Mind, they used the title of Gray’s popular TEDx talk ‘The Decline of Play’ as a chapter header. Haidt…told me that Gray was ‘the star academic’ in the section of his book that deals with play. ‘I wish every school in America could hear a talk by Peter Gray,’ he said.”

“Only recently has Gray expanded his idea in a way that is not quite so crowd-pleasing. Children’s need for unstructured play and exploration (guided by some safety rules and common sense) applies not just to vacant lots and city parks and backyards in the suburbs, he says, but to other settings too. It now extends to the wild spaces of the internet. ‘To grow up well, children have to be able to play in the world that they’re growing up in,’ he told me when we spoke at his home in late winter. Kids should be free to play with their parents’ supervision, Gray insists, even when they go online.”

“…[I]n 2023, Haidt sent Gray a prepublication copy of his next book. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness opens with an extended metaphor comparing smartphone and tablet use to a spine-melting trip to Mars, and goes on to make the case that personal technology has caused a full-scale youth-mental-health crisis. Its argument seemed to fit the moment: Children were reporting that they didn’t like how much time they spent on social media and didn’t feel like they were in control of their habits; some were truly suffering. The Anxious Generation gave them – and their parents – language to describe what was happening.”

“Haidt’s book went on to spend more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list. It was translated into dozens of languages and excerpted in this magazine. And the policies that it suggests, to remove smartphones from schools and bar kids younger than 16 from social media, quickly came to seem like obvious solutions. (In the past few years, they’ve been taken up by legislators in the United States and abroad.)”

Peter Gray’s reaction to Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Gray’s theory about the mental-health crisis facing our kids Monday in Part 2 of “What If It’s Not the Phones?”  

Friday News Roundup tomorrow.