Gray has two theories about why such bans don’t seem to be producing bigger shifts. First, he suggests that the negative effects of smartphone use are overestimated; in fact, he goes further, arguing that phones and social media have upsides for many kids, those who find them rewarding and fun and enjoy them without having their brains “rewired.” His over-all reading of the research on phones and kids is that the devices “can have both positive and negative effects on kids’ emotions, and these can vary greatly from person to person,” such that “neither reliably trumps the other for the population of teens as a whole.” Ultimately, he sees phone use as not fundamentally dissimilar from internet use in the pre-phone era. When kids first got online, parents were bewildered and alarmed, but kids, who tend to gravitate to new technology, found freedom in a space that was basically ungoverned. Similarly, kids today use phones mainly to communicate with their friends about the incomprehensible stuff they find interesting. They gossip, fight, explore, flirt, nerd out, bully each other, and forge friendships—just like they would in person, if their parents would ever let them hang out unsupervised.
One might object, reasonably, that today’s phones, with their habit-forming social platforms and red-pilled or body-shaming influencers, are portals to a novel hellscape. But Gray’s second theory, broadly, is that of course we’d think that—we’ve lost all sense of the gulf that ought to exist between parents and children, and now take it for granted that our kids’ lives should be almost totally transparent to us, so that we can better insure that all of their activities satisfy our adult senses of propriety, safety, and usefulness. Yet independence, Gray writes, must be authentic if it’s to be learned, and risk must be actual. (He notes that kindergarteners, when presented with images of kids having fun and asked to identify “play,” tend to choose pictures with no adult in the picture.) In the old days, when parents shooed their children out of the house and let them roam around, they knew their kids might get up to no good—and that they might not find out about it. But this seemed an acceptable trade-off for a childhood in which kids quickly learned to act independently. The adults of the past, in other words, understood that kids needed to be kids, and that they could succeed in this only when adults weren’t there.
Taking this idea seriously requires believing in a now vanished world. Over the course of a chapter titled “Tightening the Leash,” Gray charts the “many intertwined changes” that have eroded “children’s freedom to play and move about independent of adult control.” There was television, which, starting in the nineteen-fifties, kept kids indoors; also, houses got a lot bigger, and families smaller, so that most kids suddenly had the option of retreating to their own bedrooms. Outside the home, adults took control of kids’ sports, replacing sandlot games with Little League and other organized, competitive, coach-centered endeavors. Housing developments increasingly omitted sidewalks, favoring drivers over walkers, and the country grew more litigious, making planners wary of playgrounds, which could attract lawsuits when kids got hurt. (“The number of lawyers in the United States per thousand citizens increased from 1.46 in 1950 to 3.9 in 2023,” Gray notes.) In the nineteen-eighties, parents grew terrified of “stranger danger,” even though most missing kids are runaways. And social norms changed: it became less common for teens to hold jobs and make their own money. (Today’s kids “are anxious about their future partly because they have reduced opportunity to experience the work world,” Gray suggests.)
