In a recent column, Justin Coulson writes about how he has noticed that parents have become increasingly addicted to their smartphones, to the point that they are ignoring their children while endlessly scrolling during their kids’ soccer games, football practices, or other similar activities — times when children want to know their parents care about them and their lives.
Yet when he took a poll at a parent workshop asking them if their phones were more important than their kids, no one raised a hand.
Sadly, I have also observed this over the years — parents who are more addicted to the small screen in their hands than their relationships with their children. And it goes both ways. Children bury their heads in their smartphones provided by their parents and barely respond to them.
For instance, over the past several years, we have seen incident after incident showing that the “kids are not alright,” particularly among teenagers, whose rates of depression, self-harm, substance abuse, and suicide continue to rise at alarming rates.
The problem has become so bad that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin just signed an executive order banning smartphones in the commonwealth’s K-12 schools. Other states are also discussing taking similar action.
Why has this happened? Values are “caught, not taught,” and children are often some of the greatest observers in the world. If they see their parents buried in their smartphones and ignoring their relationships, they are likely to do the same — creating a canyon of isolation and loneliness that
