Banning Smartphones Won’t Solve the Problem (But They Are Also Not the Solution) 

Peter Gray’s controversial new book, Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety, has me convinced: contrary to what we might wish, taking away kids’ smartphones will not solve the mental health decline of our nation’s children.  

I am not convinced, however, that smartphones, social media, and the internet at large are not still a big part of the problem. Or to put it another way: smartphones are a poor solution to children’s needs when compared to other sources of childhood independence and free play. 

As an evolutionary psychologist, Peter Gray has been studying childhood for a long time, and his research has often focused on topics linked to childhood freedom or autonomy, which is also a major theme in this new book. Gray is interested in autonomy and related concepts (such as self-directed learning) because they relate to psychologists’ definition of play and its role in healthy human development. This concept of play is not the same thing as what we might just call “fun”; it’s more specific than that. True play, Gray tells us, “is (1) chosen and directed by the players themselves; (2) intrinsically motivated; (3) structured by mental rules; and (4) always creative and often highly imaginative.” It is “the practice space for adulthood,” without which children become unhappy and anxious in the short term, and socially and personally underdeveloped in the long term.  

Among other things, this interest in play led Gray to join with Lenore Skenazy, Jonathan Haidt, and Daniel Shuchman about ten years ago to found Let Grow, a leading nonprofit that provides resources and encouragement in support of childhood independence and free play, as well as lobbying for reasonable childhood independence legislation. (Full disclosure: I have occasionally written for the Let Grow website.) Gray’s book, however, is making waves in part because it takes the work of his co-founder Jonathan Haidt to task. 

Restoring Childhood calls Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones are damaging children’s well-being, “a well-written book that appeals to a prejudice” and that has only “a flavor of science.” Gray spends considerable time contrasting the research used by Haidt and other prominent tech-cautious commentators, such as Jean Twenge, with what he sees as more responsible research. Gray’s conclusion: contra Haidt, smartphones, social media, and the internet are not the cause of the increase in child and teen depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation rates since Gray’s own childhood. Rather, they were the cause of the temporary improvements in those metrics at certain points in the past seventy-five years, especially between 1990 and 2010. They are not the problem; they are instead a major part of the solution. 

Gray believes this is because the internet, smartphones, video games, and social media are the only places left where many American kids can truly play. He cites many studies to demonstrate these technologies’ benefits to children’s well-being, including research finding that children—even tween girls!—benefit socially and emotionally from social media, and that gaming chat rooms and the internet are places where children find acceptance and support. Since children’s access to play has been increasingly restricted over the past seven decades, Gray concludes, to limit this type of play too would be destructive rather than beneficial for childhood mental health. In short, forbidding children to have smartphones would only make things worse. 

If smartphones and related technologies are just scapegoats, however, what are the actual causes of children’s suffering? Gray argues that schools are primarily to blame, and in particular the Common Core national standards, whose wide-ranging effects have stolen the fun from classrooms, diminished the quality of school cultures and climates, and severely restricted child and teacher autonomy. “Strictly controlled from above,” Gray writes, these changed schools are now “a major cause of the increased rate of [childhood] suffering.” Speaking of both schooling and factors such as adult-controlled youth sports, Gray declares pointedly that “if you and I were as confined and controlled as children today, we too might think about ending our lives.”  

This may seem hyperbolic, but Gray is serious. One of the book’s essential contributions is to require readers to consider that things may not actually be very rosy in our schools in the 2020s, even in the “good” schools that our own children may attend. My recent research into homeschooling suggests that the 2020 homeschool boom was caused by just this sort of parental realization: the difficulties and ineffectiveness of Zoom schooling and the harshness of school lockdowns and post-lockdown policies drove some parents to take drastic measures to remove their children from their school (or Zoom school) environments, often by switching to homeschooling. Homeschooling numbers more than doubled as a result of this exodus, and public schooling has still not recovered. 

Although readers may not agree with Gray’s assessment that children in today’s schools are akin to prisoners, it is demonstrably true that public schools, at least, are ineffective at teaching most American children to read and “figure” at grade level, and Gray’s research on the combination of recess restriction with inflexible curricular, pedagogical, and other top-down policies is very unnerving. I remember enjoying a long lunch and two other recesses in my six-hour school day when I was in first grade in 1989; today, kids are lucky to get thirty minutes for lunch. 

This last anecdote, from my own experience, supports Gray’s argument. Yet as I read Restoring Childhood, I struggled to prevent my own experiences from throwing objection after objection at the book’s tech-related claims. Personal experience may not be generalizable, so it’s important that we take our own experiences with a grain of salt, and Gray’s book is very good about distinguishing between anecdotal and research evidence. But it is also true that as with the historical parental moral panics among which Gray places smartphone hesitancy, my objections are not merely the result of refusing to get with the times; I have experienced and observed harm coming from these technologies, and some of that harm sits outside of Gray’s framework. My objections to childhood smartphone use are not merely based on prejudice or narrow experience. 

In other words, smartphones and similar technologies have their plusses, but they also have their minuses, and for many of us, the downsides will outweigh the benefits. Gray occasionally acknowledges that such problems exist, but because his study is focused on play deprivation, its conclusions are drawn from the application of childhood freedom-related principles to the questions at hand. That is appropriate for the limits of the study. But for parents and communities making choices for their own families and schools, experience, personal values, and observation should play a part in discernment no matter which “side” of the research is most compelling (and I presume the research debates will continue). There is children’s physical health to consider; questions of authentic friendship versus mere social interaction; particular children’s reactions; questions of influence; and much more.  

My family limits digital technologies for both adults and children because we experience them as needing strong limits, for example. We experience benefits from them, but they often make us feel bad, exercise an outsized pull on us, and limit our time and willingness to do other, better, essential things. We also homeschool our kids and prioritize non-digital free play for them because we see how beautifully they flourish and grow in these contexts. Or, for example, my husband and I allow our children to walk downtown to the arcade, where they can enjoy an hour of video game play while also benefitting from real-world childhood independence and in-person social interaction; but we don’t give them unfettered access to online gamer chat rooms and role-playing fantasies. We do this because of our personal experiences with these things and because of what we observe in our kids. When it comes to such important decisions, these things matter as much as research debates. 

In short, the fact remains that although children who only play online might suffer if their smartphones were taken from them, the internet is still not a place where I want to send my child to play. It may or may not be a place where true play can occur, but it is also a place where childhood freedom is restricted not by parents or local adults who know the child in question and are benevolent in their intentions, but by adults who are interested primarily in using children to make money. I doubt that children experience reasonable and beneficial play in these contexts to a degree that outweighs the negative influence of the true designers of that play space: adults who see the children who play there as dollar bills, not ensouled, embodied human beings.  

We are making a mistake, then, if we tell ourselves that removing smartphones would be enough to fix childhood mental suffering. We need school reforms—social and infrastructural changes—and family and neighborhood cultures that support play in order to make headway, and Gray offers readers many excellent suggestions for improvements in these areas in his final chapter. But we also should not mistake the juicy conflict between Gray’s book and Haidt’s for the site of another easy solution. Smartphones and schools are both part of the problem, and the changes needed in both areas are more complex than we’d prefer. Many parents rely on smartphones to pacify their children for hours on end, and long to believe that this is actively good for the kids; many parents also rely on schools for childcare, and equally long to believe that these schools are serving most American children well. 

At its best, Gray’s book reminds us that our discomfort and confusion are no excuse for ignoring the complex constellation of childhood unhappiness. Restoring Childhood will be an effective catalyst for those ready to step outside their comfort zones and get started on solutions. 

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