The Tech Exit

The Tech Exit

Chapter 1

Screen-Time Limits Aren’t Working Out

The screen-time limit is the digital version of a seatbelt. It’s the industry-standard harm reduction measure and the most prominent form of parental control. Tech companies have held out a promise to parents that any negative side effects from their products can be avoided with time limits—a suggestion predicated on the idea that any undesirable outcomes seen in children are the result of how much time they are spending on screens and that if you limit the time, you eliminate the negative impact.

The idea that limiting screen time limits the amount of harm sounds reasonable enough. I decided to ask an expert about it. Conveniently, I was invited to the American Academy of Sciences and Letters award ceremony, and so was the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

I spotted him across the great atrium inside the Library of Congress during the cocktail hour. As he sipped his cocktail and I my Sanpellegrino (I was eight months pregnant at the time), we discussed his not-yet-released book The Anxious Generation. I shared about my work on protecting kids from the dangers of digital technologies and raised the issue of screen-time limits.

Dr. Haidt’s now-released book compellingly lays out the evidence of how social media is causing the mental health crisis. He does so by showing studies where teens’ depressive symptoms improved when they reduced their use of social media platforms1 and other studies indicating that the more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed. Social media is clearly a cause, not just a correlate, of the increase in depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among teens. Dr. Haidt’s research would seem to suggest that time limits, then, can save us from the crisis. But this isn’t the whole story.

Dr. Haidt also found that social media and smartphones have pernicious network effects that time limits do nothing to mitigate. What I’ve learned in my own work confirms this, and I’ve found that the risks of digital technology extend far beyond teen mental health.

Negative Network Effects

The teen mental health crisis today is due not only to negative effects of digital technologies for individuals but also to the group social dynamics that smartphones and social media have created. Dr. Haidt explains that smartphones with their social media apps harm all teens’ social lives. This is what happened to Emma as her peers started getting smartphones. The unfortunate reality is that social media creates negative network effects where, even if a few teens use it in a school or organization, it affects the entire cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media at all.

Time limits have no bearing on a child’s social environment and the nature of children’s friendships. Teen relationships are now largely mediated through what’s happening in the online world of social media. Friendships are built around likes, reshares, and memes, not shared experiences, adventures, or baring their hearts to one another. The result is teens aren’t spending as much time in person anymore.

Individual families imposing screen-time limits fail to address this dynamic. One might imagine that limiting screen time would force kids to socialize in person, but that assumes (1) that all parents are enforcing limits and (2) that the kids are limited at the same times of day. The reality is that time limits only create a temporary hurdle to a child’s social life that is otherwise still mediated through digital technology. And even when they aren’t interacting on the apps, they are thinking about them and what they may be missing out on.

Teens crave social acceptance and peer approval. This is a normal part of adolescent development that helps children bond with their peers. Social media takes this natural process and hijacks it with an environment built on teens holding themselves out to the world for review and judgment, for instant feedback and gratification, with metrics for constant comparison with others—the perfect recipe for teens to become anxiously addicted to checking their phones.

The result: Kids are constantly connected yet lonelier and more anxious than ever. Limits can even exacerbate loneliness as teens constantly fear what they are missing out on. FOMO is very real, and the feeling of missing experiences can cause anxiety and depression.

But abandoning the screen-time limit altogether only ushers in other undesirable effects the limit was meant to keep at bay. And giving a child more time to connect with peers online is clearly not the answer. As Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains, we need the hormone oxytocin to bond with one another. It’s a happiness hormone that we can get only from eye contact and physical touch during in-person interaction with other human beings. We can’t get oxytocin through a screen. Friendships built on dopamine instead of oxytocin are shallow. So kids feel lonely. That loneliness is compounded by feelings of isolation and being left out.

When children conduct their relationships through social media, screen-time limits can do nothing to affect the nature of teens’ social environment. In other words, while studies show that reducing the time spent on social media does reduce mental health symptoms, limits on time can’t eliminate the negative social dynamics from screens, which undermine real friendship, induce loneliness and anxiety, and can lead to depression.

Beyond the social dynamics, time limits also do nothing to address the inherent addictive nature of these technologies.

Mentally Consuming and Compulsion Inducing

We have a metaphor problem when it comes to digital technology. This problem is apparent in the way we talk about adolescent social media consumption, that it’s a question of whether teens are on their phones too much and whether time limits can help. When someone admits that digital technologies can be detrimental to kids and then suggests that time limits can mitigate the negative side effects, they are implying that smartphones and social media apps are harmful in the same way that other good things can be harmful if consumed immoderately. In a word, they suggest that screens are like sugar—basically unavoidable, a treat to be enjoyed with abandon sometimes and consumed in moderation in an otherwise-balanced diet.

But the metaphor doesn’t work.

When we examine smartphones and social media apps, it’s clear they are designed to undermine any impulse control or effort to use them in moderation. In fact, the effect they produce in the brain resembles the most addictive drugs, like cocaine.

Let’s get the metaphor right: Digital technologies are not like sugar. For the developing brains of children and teens, they are more like fentanyl.

Even a small amount of time on screens creates a strong craving for more. Digital tech generates this craving by stimulating the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in the brain’s reward system. But dopamine doesn’t create satisfaction or lasting pleasure; it only produces “wanting” so that we will repeat that action. When we get a new like on social media, we get a hit of dopamine—a little burst of pleasure that makes us crave the experience again. Scientists use dopamine “to measure the addictive potential of any behavior or drug,” writes Dr. Anna Lembke, the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, in her book Dopamine Nation. Dr. Lembke explains, “The more dopamine released in the brain’s reward pathway and the faster it releases dopamine, the more addictive” that thing is.

Dopamine, therefore, works to reinforce in us the behaviors that it rewards. But when getting the dopamine becomes a powerful need by itself (rather than rewarding us for genuinely healthy choices), it can make us addicts. Digital technology was designed to keep us trapped on this hamster wheel of craving dopamine without ever reaching satisfaction.

Former Big Tech employees like Tristan Harris have spoken out about the addictive design of tech products. According to Mr. Harris, the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.” Social media engineers are tasked with designing features that hijack our human vulnerabilities so that we can’t resist: things like constant notifications, daily streaks, immersive environments, and sensationalized feeds customized by algorithms that learn what you like and continue to give you more of the same content to keep you hooked.

Developing brains are especially vulnerable. The regions of the brain associated with social rewards, like visibility, attention, and approval from peers, undergo significant development during adolescence. The brain’s dopamine receptors multiply between the ages of ten and twelve. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex, which enables self-control, isn’t fully developed until age twenty-five. In other words, children’s brains are “all gas pedal with no brakes” when it comes to craving the social feedback that tech readily and constantly serves up to kids.