A small child, no older than six years of age, stares like a zombie into a mobile phone. The mother leans over and says, “Mummy just needs to use her phone for a moment.” The child doesn’t respond, remaining absorbed in the flashing screen. She tries again: “Can Mummy have her phone back, just for a moment, to send a quick message? I’ll give it straight back to you.” Still the child remains unresponsive, staring down at the phone on his lap. The mother puts her hand on the phone; “I’m just taking it for a moment.” At this point, the child begins to squeal like a snared animal. As the mother takes the phone, the child explodes with horrid noises, shaking uncontrollably in the throes of a tremendous spasm of emotion. He screams, casts himself upon the floor, and as he reaches a crescendo of frustration that can only be expressed in convulsions and repeated kicks, the smartphone is given back to him. As the child receives the phone, he immediately returns to the tranquil silence he enjoyed but thirty seconds prior.
The spectacle I describe above is the one I witnessed just two days ago at Heathrow Airport. Neither parent seemed to think that the child’s behaviour was unusual or embarrassing. Almost everyone around seemed unpuzzled by this exhibition of prepubescent mania. And that is because, as a people, we have all grown accustomed to such scenes. Our children are completely addicted to electronic devices, and accordingly, we are in a situation that can only be described with a word that begins with ‘f’ and ends with ‘ucked.’
It is well known that dopamine is the hormone which chiefly influences both the driving and reinforcing of habits. According to Dr. Marisa Azaret, who has spent considerable time investigating the effects of screen addiction on children, “the stimuli produced by screens can activate the dopamine reward system in the brain, creating a dopamine feedback loop similar to those found in the brains of nicotine or cocaine users.” Screentime, she says, “floods a person’s brain” with strong but fleeting doses of dopamine, on which he consequently becomes utterly dependent. The upshot is that our progeny will have highly diminished impulse control in comparison to their antecedents. A generation of animals is on its way.
“Almost immediately,” Dr. Azaret continues, “the brain longs for another dose of the ‘drug,’ leaving the user with weakened impulse control and a longing for another reward, like, or notification.” Of course, leading developers in technology companies are well aware of the dopamine loops that lead to dopamine-reliance, and they deliberately make their products more addictive to maximise engagement. Screen addiction, Dr. Azaret claims, frequently causes insomnia, vision problems, headaches, anxiety, depression, dishonesty, feelings of guilt, loneliness, and “long-term effects of screen addiction can be as severe as brain damage.”
When you are walking down a street, or at a bus stop, or waiting for a train, it is not unusual that all children present are glued to mobile phones or tablets. When teenagers spend time together, they frequently sit in silence staring at their phones. And any interaction with one another is near impossible without some dependence on the mediating activity of their devices.
If you go to a restaurant, you will notice that the parents (if they are not themselves staring at their phones) will talk to each other while their children sit silently gawping at screens. I have observed children in restaurants who cannot eat their dinner—that is to say, they literally do not know how to sit in a chair, chew their food and swallow it—unless there is a tablet or smartphone propped up on the table in front of them.
Recently, I was walking down the street of my local town, and I saw a man in his early thirties pushing a pram along the pavement on the opposite side. That morning, his wife had probably asked him to take the baby out for a couple of hours and let her have a break. I’ve been there many times. What dismayed me was that the pram had attached to it a phone holder, and a few inches from the baby’s face was a mobile phone playing ghastly computer-generated pop music, flashing images of multicoloured rabbits into the eyes of the spellbound newborn (who I’m certain could not have been older than four months).
As I say, I’ve been there many times, wandering around the streets for a couple of hours pushing a pram in the hope that my wife might enjoy some much-needed rest. And when the baby begins to cry, I know from experience what you do, and that you do it completely instinctively: you lean over the pram, you look into your baby’s eyes, you raise your eyebrows and smile, and in a calming voice you say, “It’s okay my darling, it’s okay.” The reason every parent instinctively does this is because it calms the baby, it draws his attention to the fact that his parent is there, that he’s a person and you’re a person, and because you’re both persons, neither of you is alone.
I say every parent does this, but in fact every parent did do this until now. As that young father demonstrated to me as he strolled down the pavement, that very basic interpersonal interaction which has been essential for infant development since the beginning of our species has now been subcontracted to an impersonal object. This is a very, very serious problem. Since Professor Peter Hobson conducted groundbreaking work on ‘joint attention’ in child development a couple of decades ago, there has been a lot of experimental child psychology literature revealing that interpersonal I-to-you relatedness is the primary stimulus for infant neurodevelopment. The point is that that man’s baby is probably now broken, and may remain broken for the rest of his or her life.
One may argue that what I describe is not a new phenomenon. Famously, in the 18th and 19th centuries, women whose economic situation required them to work long hours in mills and factories would sometimes use opiates to silence their babies. That way, they could work undisturbed and not incur severe looks, or worse, from their employers due to being caught attending to their infants. Even up to the early 20th century we find accounts of mothers giving their babies small doses of distilled spirits to make them sleep a little longer. All such practices were socially acceptable, or at least tolerated, at the time. We look back at such behaviours with horror, and yet here we find ourselves doing something very similar, though there’s evidence to suggest that what we’re doing might in some ways be worse.
I recently took a bus journey, during which I spoke with a lady sitting across from me. Her child, probably aged five or six, sat there in a buggy next to her. For the whole journey he gawked at a phone in his hands as it made appalling noises and flashed in bright colours before his seemingly dead eyes. As the little boy stared at the device, he crammed handfuls of sweets into his mouth. The mother openly described to me her challenges with her son: “He’s got ADHD, they tell me,” she said, “and autism too; he has to be on all sorts of medications.”
Now, maybe that boy does have the problems the professionals say he has. I couldn’t help but think, though, that if I gave up on using my legs, glared into hyper-stimulating flashing images all day accompanied by blaring synthetic music, whilst ramming my gut with sugar and E-numbers, I’d probably appear to have ADHD and autism too.
As a people, we seem to be unaware that we are in the grips of a massive, unplanned social experiment: Can we use novel technology to replace normal childhood activities, and conjoin that to novel diets and novel education programmes, and end up with normal human beings? That is the experiment.
Increasingly, as it’s becoming manifestly clear that the result is a population of freaks rather than normal human beings, we’re medicalising the outcome. We’re telling these tragic creatures that the problem inheres in them rather than in the bad parenting and societal neglect that characterises our age and its naïve belief in the harmlessness of new technologies. Consequently, we keep the technologies and simply seek to mitigate their adverse effects by drugging children with prescribed sedatives. (We have, it seems, no right whatsoever to stand in judgement over the factory worker mothers of the 18th century, nor the society that permitted the abuse of their children.)
Please take note of the fact that I am not even touching upon the myriad dangers that such technologies can introduce to the child as he quickly learns to navigate his way through their countless paths. In the UK—and I’m sure it’s not dissimilar in other countries—70% of young people say they’ve seen hardcore pornography before reaching the age of eighteen, with 27% saying they had viewed such pornography online by the age of eleven. That’s obviously horrendous. Down any given sequence of online clicks could be a porn film, or hyper-violent footage, or a chatroom where weirdos convince children that they’re ‘trans’ or ‘queer.’ That’s all bad, for sure. But it also misses the point. The first and foremost problem with the role of technology in our children’s lives is not that it might be a portal to something wicked, but that the tech itself ensnares the developing minds of our children and makes them dependent upon it, and helplessly so. As a result, we are seeing evermore unhinged behaviours among the young—including the very, very young—and rather than reacting wisely to the rise of such behaviours, we’re choosing to call them normal. And, as noted, when the behaviours are so abnormal that they can’t be called normal, they’re judged a medical issue rather than a societal one.
We should be mindful of the fact that those developing the tech—from Mark Zuckerberg to Sundar Pichai—are anxious to limit the amount their children are exposed to screens and smart technology. They famously chose low-tech schools to which to send their children. But their companies are less careful with other people’s children. In a 2018 lawsuit against the company, an internal whistleblower claimed that Meta (previously Facebook) deliberately creates products that are both addictive and harmful to children, intentionally targeting children under the age of 18. That there is a large number of underage social media users is an “open secret” within the company, according to this whistleblower, who also revealed that Meta has received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but has only disabled a fraction of those accounts.
Especially during the COVID years of 2020-21, many educational institutions moved to a model of subcontracting vast amounts of teaching to software programmes that could deliver the content rather than the teachers. In turn, children wake up and stare at screens, then they stare at screens in the car or on the bus to school, then they stare at screens all day at school, then they stare at screens at home when they return, and then they go to sleep, often with a phone or tablet in their hands, having fallen asleep while staring at their screens.
A friend of mine has a daughter who teaches in an inner-city school, and she is trying to minimise the degree to which her students are reliant on their smartphones. On a recent school trip to a museum, she asked her class to hand in all their phones to her for the duration of the trip. They were to be without their phones for around four hours. She described to me how her students, all fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, were screaming and shouting, with some breaking down in tears, at the thought of not being able to access social media for an afternoon. “You may think this problem is serious,” she said to me, “but it is far more serious than you think it is; the very thought of being separated from their phones for even an hour causes their anxiety to rocket.” Moreover, with the emergence of AI, ever more people—both young and adult—are unable to make even basic decisions without consulting an AI chatbot, and they experience extreme anxiety when unable for any reason to access an AI programme. Thus, it may not be an exaggeration to say that we are facing a new kind of slavery.
What I am describing is a civilisational catastrophe. The West is already in the grips of a very grave demographic crisis. We have extremely low birth rates, with some nations like the Italians and Spanish on course to go extinct by the middle of the next century. Of course, European nations will likely continue to cover up the seriousness of their demographic declines by way of immigration, but in so doing, they will also cease to be European nations. In any case, there is nothing to indicate that new arrivals are immune to the dangers of tech that I have been describing.
While we continue to contracept and abort ourselves off the face of the planet, those lucky few who get past the antinatalist net will have their elementary neurodevelopment quashed by the kind of abysmal parenting and educating that leaves children in the constant stupor induced by the tech-opioids of their screens. That the results of such an upbringing will one day enter the workforce and even the political organs of our nations is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I suppose the question we’re left with is: are there any solutions to the problem I have presented? Those who see the problem must themselves become low-tech. You can keep your computer in a room of the house where it is used only for work purposes. You can ban outright the use of screens or phones by your children in the home. You can be mindful of the way screens are encroaching on family life and family time. You can question your local school about the use of screens and try to find a school in your area that limits screen time in the delivery of their curriculum, or, if you can, home-educate them with a curriculum that doesn’t require screens.
Those are all negative suggestions. So, here are some positive ones: You can spend a lot of time with your children outside; teach them bushcraft, and to hunt and fish; teach them the names of plants and animals and how to identify birds by their song … without apps. Read books to your children. Teach old songs to your children. Talk to your children. Build something, like a treehouse or a den, with them. One of the best tips I’ve heard, especially for families with older children, is that of having a ‘phone bowl’: a wooden bowl by the front door where all phones have to go when entering the house—you can check your phone, but you have to do so by the phone bowl, after which it goes back in the bowl.
Knowing what we know, it is time to see these technologies—which most of us cannot live without due to work and for other reasons—as the moral dangers that they are. Hence, we have to develop tech discipline, tech-related virtues to diminish the degree to which we are endangered by them. The alternative is our undoing.
Screens and Children: We’re Losing the Next Generation
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A small child, no older than six years of age, stares like a zombie into a mobile phone. The mother leans over and says, “Mummy just needs to use her phone for a moment.” The child doesn’t respond, remaining absorbed in the flashing screen. She tries again: “Can Mummy have her phone back, just for a moment, to send a quick message? I’ll give it straight back to you.” Still the child remains unresponsive, staring down at the phone on his lap. The mother puts her hand on the phone; “I’m just taking it for a moment.” At this point, the child begins to squeal like a snared animal. As the mother takes the phone, the child explodes with horrid noises, shaking uncontrollably in the throes of a tremendous spasm of emotion. He screams, casts himself upon the floor, and as he reaches a crescendo of frustration that can only be expressed in convulsions and repeated kicks, the smartphone is given back to him. As the child receives the phone, he immediately returns to the tranquil silence he enjoyed but thirty seconds prior.
The spectacle I describe above is the one I witnessed just two days ago at Heathrow Airport. Neither parent seemed to think that the child’s behaviour was unusual or embarrassing. Almost everyone around seemed unpuzzled by this exhibition of prepubescent mania. And that is because, as a people, we have all grown accustomed to such scenes. Our children are completely addicted to electronic devices, and accordingly, we are in a situation that can only be described with a word that begins with ‘f’ and ends with ‘ucked.’
It is well known that dopamine is the hormone which chiefly influences both the driving and reinforcing of habits. According to Dr. Marisa Azaret, who has spent considerable time investigating the effects of screen addiction on children, “the stimuli produced by screens can activate the dopamine reward system in the brain, creating a dopamine feedback loop similar to those found in the brains of nicotine or cocaine users.” Screentime, she says, “floods a person’s brain” with strong but fleeting doses of dopamine, on which he consequently becomes utterly dependent. The upshot is that our progeny will have highly diminished impulse control in comparison to their antecedents. A generation of animals is on its way.
“Almost immediately,” Dr. Azaret continues, “the brain longs for another dose of the ‘drug,’ leaving the user with weakened impulse control and a longing for another reward, like, or notification.” Of course, leading developers in technology companies are well aware of the dopamine loops that lead to dopamine-reliance, and they deliberately make their products more addictive to maximise engagement. Screen addiction, Dr. Azaret claims, frequently causes insomnia, vision problems, headaches, anxiety, depression, dishonesty, feelings of guilt, loneliness, and “long-term effects of screen addiction can be as severe as brain damage.”
When you are walking down a street, or at a bus stop, or waiting for a train, it is not unusual that all children present are glued to mobile phones or tablets. When teenagers spend time together, they frequently sit in silence staring at their phones. And any interaction with one another is near impossible without some dependence on the mediating activity of their devices.
If you go to a restaurant, you will notice that the parents (if they are not themselves staring at their phones) will talk to each other while their children sit silently gawping at screens. I have observed children in restaurants who cannot eat their dinner—that is to say, they literally do not know how to sit in a chair, chew their food and swallow it—unless there is a tablet or smartphone propped up on the table in front of them.
Recently, I was walking down the street of my local town, and I saw a man in his early thirties pushing a pram along the pavement on the opposite side. That morning, his wife had probably asked him to take the baby out for a couple of hours and let her have a break. I’ve been there many times. What dismayed me was that the pram had attached to it a phone holder, and a few inches from the baby’s face was a mobile phone playing ghastly computer-generated pop music, flashing images of multicoloured rabbits into the eyes of the spellbound newborn (who I’m certain could not have been older than four months).
As I say, I’ve been there many times, wandering around the streets for a couple of hours pushing a pram in the hope that my wife might enjoy some much-needed rest. And when the baby begins to cry, I know from experience what you do, and that you do it completely instinctively: you lean over the pram, you look into your baby’s eyes, you raise your eyebrows and smile, and in a calming voice you say, “It’s okay my darling, it’s okay.” The reason every parent instinctively does this is because it calms the baby, it draws his attention to the fact that his parent is there, that he’s a person and you’re a person, and because you’re both persons, neither of you is alone.
I say every parent does this, but in fact every parent did do this until now. As that young father demonstrated to me as he strolled down the pavement, that very basic interpersonal interaction which has been essential for infant development since the beginning of our species has now been subcontracted to an impersonal object. This is a very, very serious problem. Since Professor Peter Hobson conducted groundbreaking work on ‘joint attention’ in child development a couple of decades ago, there has been a lot of experimental child psychology literature revealing that interpersonal I-to-you relatedness is the primary stimulus for infant neurodevelopment. The point is that that man’s baby is probably now broken, and may remain broken for the rest of his or her life.
One may argue that what I describe is not a new phenomenon. Famously, in the 18th and 19th centuries, women whose economic situation required them to work long hours in mills and factories would sometimes use opiates to silence their babies. That way, they could work undisturbed and not incur severe looks, or worse, from their employers due to being caught attending to their infants. Even up to the early 20th century we find accounts of mothers giving their babies small doses of distilled spirits to make them sleep a little longer. All such practices were socially acceptable, or at least tolerated, at the time. We look back at such behaviours with horror, and yet here we find ourselves doing something very similar, though there’s evidence to suggest that what we’re doing might in some ways be worse.
I recently took a bus journey, during which I spoke with a lady sitting across from me. Her child, probably aged five or six, sat there in a buggy next to her. For the whole journey he gawked at a phone in his hands as it made appalling noises and flashed in bright colours before his seemingly dead eyes. As the little boy stared at the device, he crammed handfuls of sweets into his mouth. The mother openly described to me her challenges with her son: “He’s got ADHD, they tell me,” she said, “and autism too; he has to be on all sorts of medications.”
Now, maybe that boy does have the problems the professionals say he has. I couldn’t help but think, though, that if I gave up on using my legs, glared into hyper-stimulating flashing images all day accompanied by blaring synthetic music, whilst ramming my gut with sugar and E-numbers, I’d probably appear to have ADHD and autism too.
As a people, we seem to be unaware that we are in the grips of a massive, unplanned social experiment: Can we use novel technology to replace normal childhood activities, and conjoin that to novel diets and novel education programmes, and end up with normal human beings? That is the experiment.
Increasingly, as it’s becoming manifestly clear that the result is a population of freaks rather than normal human beings, we’re medicalising the outcome. We’re telling these tragic creatures that the problem inheres in them rather than in the bad parenting and societal neglect that characterises our age and its naïve belief in the harmlessness of new technologies. Consequently, we keep the technologies and simply seek to mitigate their adverse effects by drugging children with prescribed sedatives. (We have, it seems, no right whatsoever to stand in judgement over the factory worker mothers of the 18th century, nor the society that permitted the abuse of their children.)
Please take note of the fact that I am not even touching upon the myriad dangers that such technologies can introduce to the child as he quickly learns to navigate his way through their countless paths. In the UK—and I’m sure it’s not dissimilar in other countries—70% of young people say they’ve seen hardcore pornography before reaching the age of eighteen, with 27% saying they had viewed such pornography online by the age of eleven. That’s obviously horrendous. Down any given sequence of online clicks could be a porn film, or hyper-violent footage, or a chatroom where weirdos convince children that they’re ‘trans’ or ‘queer.’ That’s all bad, for sure. But it also misses the point. The first and foremost problem with the role of technology in our children’s lives is not that it might be a portal to something wicked, but that the tech itself ensnares the developing minds of our children and makes them dependent upon it, and helplessly so. As a result, we are seeing evermore unhinged behaviours among the young—including the very, very young—and rather than reacting wisely to the rise of such behaviours, we’re choosing to call them normal. And, as noted, when the behaviours are so abnormal that they can’t be called normal, they’re judged a medical issue rather than a societal one.
We should be mindful of the fact that those developing the tech—from Mark Zuckerberg to Sundar Pichai—are anxious to limit the amount their children are exposed to screens and smart technology. They famously chose low-tech schools to which to send their children. But their companies are less careful with other people’s children. In a 2018 lawsuit against the company, an internal whistleblower claimed that Meta (previously Facebook) deliberately creates products that are both addictive and harmful to children, intentionally targeting children under the age of 18. That there is a large number of underage social media users is an “open secret” within the company, according to this whistleblower, who also revealed that Meta has received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but has only disabled a fraction of those accounts.
Especially during the COVID years of 2020-21, many educational institutions moved to a model of subcontracting vast amounts of teaching to software programmes that could deliver the content rather than the teachers. In turn, children wake up and stare at screens, then they stare at screens in the car or on the bus to school, then they stare at screens all day at school, then they stare at screens at home when they return, and then they go to sleep, often with a phone or tablet in their hands, having fallen asleep while staring at their screens.
A friend of mine has a daughter who teaches in an inner-city school, and she is trying to minimise the degree to which her students are reliant on their smartphones. On a recent school trip to a museum, she asked her class to hand in all their phones to her for the duration of the trip. They were to be without their phones for around four hours. She described to me how her students, all fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, were screaming and shouting, with some breaking down in tears, at the thought of not being able to access social media for an afternoon. “You may think this problem is serious,” she said to me, “but it is far more serious than you think it is; the very thought of being separated from their phones for even an hour causes their anxiety to rocket.” Moreover, with the emergence of AI, ever more people—both young and adult—are unable to make even basic decisions without consulting an AI chatbot, and they experience extreme anxiety when unable for any reason to access an AI programme. Thus, it may not be an exaggeration to say that we are facing a new kind of slavery.
What I am describing is a civilisational catastrophe. The West is already in the grips of a very grave demographic crisis. We have extremely low birth rates, with some nations like the Italians and Spanish on course to go extinct by the middle of the next century. Of course, European nations will likely continue to cover up the seriousness of their demographic declines by way of immigration, but in so doing, they will also cease to be European nations. In any case, there is nothing to indicate that new arrivals are immune to the dangers of tech that I have been describing.
While we continue to contracept and abort ourselves off the face of the planet, those lucky few who get past the antinatalist net will have their elementary neurodevelopment quashed by the kind of abysmal parenting and educating that leaves children in the constant stupor induced by the tech-opioids of their screens. That the results of such an upbringing will one day enter the workforce and even the political organs of our nations is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I suppose the question we’re left with is: are there any solutions to the problem I have presented? Those who see the problem must themselves become low-tech. You can keep your computer in a room of the house where it is used only for work purposes. You can ban outright the use of screens or phones by your children in the home. You can be mindful of the way screens are encroaching on family life and family time. You can question your local school about the use of screens and try to find a school in your area that limits screen time in the delivery of their curriculum, or, if you can, home-educate them with a curriculum that doesn’t require screens.
Those are all negative suggestions. So, here are some positive ones: You can spend a lot of time with your children outside; teach them bushcraft, and to hunt and fish; teach them the names of plants and animals and how to identify birds by their song … without apps. Read books to your children. Teach old songs to your children. Talk to your children. Build something, like a treehouse or a den, with them. One of the best tips I’ve heard, especially for families with older children, is that of having a ‘phone bowl’: a wooden bowl by the front door where all phones have to go when entering the house—you can check your phone, but you have to do so by the phone bowl, after which it goes back in the bowl.
Knowing what we know, it is time to see these technologies—which most of us cannot live without due to work and for other reasons—as the moral dangers that they are. Hence, we have to develop tech discipline, tech-related virtues to diminish the degree to which we are endangered by them. The alternative is our undoing.
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