Smartphones are so bad for kids that even far-left Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom just called for them to be banned from schools.
This follows the emergence of cell phone use as a big issue of our time, with the promotion of kids’ mental health tied to the subtraction of the smartphone. The consequences of ubiquitous smartphone use in childhood are vast and unfolding. Yet, given new research and data, we know definitively that our youth are more anxious and depressed than ever, and this is tied to the rise of smartphone use during their years of formation and growth.
Many leaders are sounding the alarm on the deficiencies of American children in their interactions with the world. New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has rightly called this phenomenon “the great rewiring of childhood.” For most kids today, childhood is less about running, playing, and feeling the stuff of the Earth; it is now more about information transmission and faux socialization through an inadequate medium, the smartphone.
Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, reveals how children are introduced to reality through their phones. In doing so, they miss out on developing contact with the real world through touch, taste, smell, and sometimes even sound. The fifth sense, sight, is only given a 2-D plane and is therefore stripped from within of its fullness too. Hence, everything through a smartphone presented to the senses is deficient in representing real things. This harms children’s ability to grow and develop as embodied,
