Ban the Phones, Says Governor Sanders

High school students sit at a table holding multiple digital devices such as phones and tablets during a class lesson. LBeddoe/Shutterstock

Commentary

“America’s kids are facing a mental health crisis.”

That’s the opening line of a statement that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent this month to governors of all the 50 states and to legislators in her own state of Arkansas.

She included in each delivery a copy of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” which compiles persuasive evidence of the effect the smartphone has had on the emotional condition of teens. (For discussions of Mr. Haidt’s book, see Politico’s “‘It’s Causing Them to Drop Out of Life’: How Phones Warped Gen Z,” Time magazine’s “Jonathan Haidt: Putting down the screen,” and the American Enterprise Institute’s April 8 American Dream Lecture Series.)

Ms. Sanders endorses Mr. Haidt’s policy recommendations. They are:

• No smartphones before high school.
• No social media before age 16.
• Phone-free schools.
• More outdoor play and childhood independence.

These are blunt and sweeping descriptions, and each one should be implemented immediately. Mr. Haidt and Ms. Sanders are absolutely right. When social media came about 20 years ago, younger Americans were the first ones to pick them up. Commentators of the time dubbed those users “digital natives” and “early adopters,” and they meant those terms positively.

They cheered the advent, speaking as if handheld devices wielded by energetic, innovative youths, that is, by individuals whose minds hadn’t been grooved and hardened by the “linear” cognitive acts of print reading during childhood years (as was the case for baby boomers and Gen Xers, we were told), would open up fresh pathways of knowledge and insight and creativity. The smartphone would bring the universe of known things to the eyes and ears of 14-year-olds, who would proceed to become the most informed and worldly generation in U.S. history. A kid in 2011 well-equipped with the latest tools would deserve the epochal label millennial.

Of course, it hasn’t turned out that way, and it was never going to turn out that way. The smartphone didn’t impress adolescents as a window into history, art, politics, religion, science, and foreign affairs. It was naïve, in fact, ever to assume that it would, a specimen of pro-youth sentimentality that a certain strain of liberal has adopted since the 1960s.

In this case, the phone did something else: It connected teens to other teens, kids their own age who brought all the traits of peer pressure, group dynamics, sexual curiosity, and emotional instability into the system. With the smartphone, youths could be more social than ever before with and to one another—a grievously unhealthy situation.

It is a situation that tech companies pursued with all the money and science at their disposal. Their intentions must be pointed out. As Ms. Sanders puts it, “Big Tech companies got American kids addicted to their products by preying on adolescent insecurities and basic human psychology.”

The designers, programmers, and titans wanted to grab kids’ attention and keep it for as long as they could. The more kids felt that they needed to go online and stay there throughout the day and night, to monitor their networks and build their contacts, the more money poured into Silicon Valley. The mental health data that Mr. Haidt has gathered, along with disturbing trends in educational achievement, demonstrate what their machinations have done to Gen Z.

People who don’t like that conclusion and assert that correlation is not causation can find no other element in the lives of young Americans that can account for the downward shift. The smartphone is the most impactful change in the lives of average teens from 1980 to 2024.

Conservatives don’t like it when the state intervenes in private behavior. Let people choose to do what they want to do, say those on the right with a libertarian bent. The actions of Ms. Sanders and a few other Republican leaders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed a bill in March to prohibit kids under 14 from joining social media, show that the libertarian argument is weakening, at least when it comes to children.

The severity of the mental health crisis forces schools to set new rules. We should have no doubt that teachers and administrators will cheer the ban, knowing how often social media have proven to be the mechanisms by which small tensions among students develop into open conflict. Parents, too, will welcome the rule, because of their own struggles to keep phone time down at home, during meals, and after lights out. This is a political winner, too, a concern for people on the right and the left. As I said, the only ones objecting to such restrictions are libertarians, and their political influence is waning.

What Ms. Sanders and Mr. DeSantis are doing in their states should be copied in every other state in the country. A cellphone in the hands of a teen is a curse to its owner, a lure whose costs far outweigh its benefits. Silicon Valley no longer has the cachet of 2006. Tech gurus and entrepreneurs seem now like anti-social characters, a little odd and power-hungry, not the heightened visionaries they were once claimed to be. The real innovators of the present time are the ones saying no to the digital wave.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.