When school principal Christina Mehaffey first saw the Discover page of Snapchat, she could not believe what she was seeing. The algorithm of an app that was ubiquitous on the phones of her students at Faustina Academy was promoting content that was unambiguously pornographic. She decided to conduct an experiment. The incoming ninth grade class, with buy-in from their parents, would be barred from all forms of social media. The experiment was repeated the following year so that half the students (grade 9 and 10) were on social media and half (grades 11 and 12) were off.
The cultural difference between the two cohorts quickly became apparent. The younger students were more respectful to teachers, had healthier relationships with each other, and “locker room” talk among the boys disappeared. As a result, beginning with the ’23–24 school year, all students of Faustina Academy were required to go social media–free. “You can find freedoms somewhere else,” Mehaffey explained to parents. “But we are going to have a different culture here.”
What is childhood for? This is the fundamental question of Clare Morrell’s excellent new book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. Morrell joins authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge in sounding the alarm about the harmful effects of digital technology on young people. As the subheading suggests, The Tech Exit’s brisk 200 pages are focused on providing families, communities, and schools with an actionable handbook for escaping smartphone culture and all its attendant pathologies. Morrell’s prescriptions are countercultural not only in advocating for a vision of childhood freed from the iPad. She also demands that families and schools, including public institutions, get serious about what we want kids to have achieved when they come of age—namely, self-mastery.
Morrell begins the book by attacking the moderate position on screen time. Haidt’s The Anxious Generation makes the case that social media, usually accessed through smartphones, is causing a mental health crisis among teenagers, including increased depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. One conclusion from Haidt’s work could be that controlling and limiting time spent on social media solves the problem. In this spirit, the major tech companies, including Apple, Google, and Meta, have released features on their devices and apps that promise parents the ability to manage their children’s use of smartphones and protect them from harm on the internet. Problem solved?
Not so fast, says Morrell. For starters, most or all these tools have workarounds that children, who are masters of finding loopholes, will exploit. Worse, these loopholes and gaps can lead to the children themselves being exploited by peers, cyberbullies, child pornographers, and blackmailers. Morrell relates a few harrowing examples of child protections that failed. Even with safeguards, the internet is a dangerous place for children.
Setting aside the worst-case scenarios, however, social media and smartphones have “pernicious network effects” that infect the relationships they mediate and that time limits do nothing to mitigate. The malign influence of digitized social networks appears especially pronounced in generations for whom social media is not just a support to “real world” friendship (as could plausibly be said of early versions of Facebook and MySpace) but is a primary medium of relationship. Peer groups built on likes, snaps, and memes are flimsy things. The group chat is a poor training ground for forming substantial friendships.
The Tech Exit is especially concerned with smartphone culture’s effect on childhood formation and family culture. Parents who impose strict limits often find themselves stuck in a state of constant warfare with their children over screen time, in which even time spent away from screens becomes about the screens. “Even fifteen minutes a day on it was too much for my son,” one mother reports. “He spent the rest of the day thinking about the game, waiting until he could get back on it.” The way smartphone apps lodge themselves in the imaginations of young children is no accident, of course. “When we examine smartphones and social media apps,” Morrell writes, “it’s clear they are designed to undermine any impulse control or effort to use them in moderation.”
It is precisely in this way that digital technology poses a serious threat to the whole project of growing up. For Morrell, the harm of screen time for children is not something that can be managed or redirected toward a positive end (e.g., the remarkable conceit that iPad games are “educational”). “As parents, our job is to consider what is forming our children and to manage what they are being formed into,” Morrell insists.
Every time we hand our children a screen, technology answers that question for us. By their nature, screens form children into self-focused consumers. The screen exists to serve them, and it never runs out of content and amusement. Tech companies have designed it this way, with the infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, bright colors, and noises, all to keep children engaged and constantly coming back for more. They begin to believe that life is for entertainment and instant gratification. The medium is the message. And kids have gotten the message.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s recent film, the interestingly disastrous Megalopolis, Cesar Catilina asks: “Is this society, is this way we’re living, the only one that’s available to us?” With the many parents, educators, and activists she interviews, Morrell answers with a resounding “No!” She defines the “Tech Exit” as “no smartphones, social media, tablets, or video games during childhood.” The movement does not demand, it should be noted, a wholesale rejection of modern technology. Many of the strategies proposed by the book encourage either a healthier relationship with certain tech or the use of alternative devices, including a growing number of interesting “dumbphones” (the book’s extensive appendix includes several examples, besides many other excellent resources). The Tech Exit is not a flight from the modern world and the many blessings of innovation. Rather, it is a guide to giving children a childhood free of the cynicism, materialism, anxiety, impulsivity, and self-centeredness that early exposure to digital technologies is engendering—that is, an introduction to the world unmediated by screens.
Morrell’s prescriptions for families, for which she uses the acronym “F.E.A.S.T.,” assume that smartphone culture is the default. Given all the pressures that make owning smartphones nearly a prerequisite for navigating contemporary American life—from social networks to school assignments to scanning tickets at professional sporting events—a family that attempts to make the Tech Exit alone is unlikely to meet success. As such, Morrell’s plan begins with “Find Other Families.” Exiting with others gives families two key things they need to be successful in resisting screens in the long run,” Morrell writes. “First, it gives parents allies, and second, it gives kids friends who also aren’t on screens.” Morrell’s F.E.A.S.T. plan does not require parents to cut off their children’s friends from non–Tech Exit families, but it does ask parents to consider carefully the role digital technology plays in their kids’ friendships. Other steps of the plan include making sure the family understands why they are making the Tech Exit (“Explain, Educate, and Exemplify”); adopting positive alternatives to digital tech; setting up family screen rules (Morrell advocates for regularly scheduled family movie night); and trading screens for “real-life responsibilities and pursuits.”
One of the great pleasures of the book is reading the inspiring, sometimes quite dramatic, stories of families and institutions making their Tech Exit. These include narratives of families navigating children’s iPad withdrawal symptoms, the founding of activist mom groups, friends getting together for no-tech “forest school,” and institutions like Faustina Academy exchanging student freedoms for freedom from social media. Morrell gives us a glimpse into a rich world of social innovation and an attractive counterculture, comparing it favorably to other successful grassroots movements including campaigns against drunk driving, smoking, and drugs.
The last two chapters of the book focus on removing screens from schools and reforming laws to better protect children online. Civil libertarians might object to Morrell’s call for beefing up online age-verification rules as violating free speech. Such objections presume an outdated understanding of the internet and the available technology, however. The offline lives of (non–Tech Exit) children are utterly entwined with the online world. Arguments that used to seem specious (“People need ID to enter an adult bookstore—why not a porn site?”) today seem rather obvious. At the state level, Louisiana has led the way in introducing online protections for minors using advanced digital identification technology that verifies the age of users while keeping their identities anonymous.
Whether or not one is persuaded by all aspects of the F.E.A.S.T. plan or the author’s public policy proposals, Morrell’s book offers the opportunity to consider seriously what smartphone culture is doing to our kids—and whether this society, this way we are living, is the only one available to us. It also asks parents and educators to get serious about the end goal of child formation. “This book’s message is deeper than just what we need to do to ameliorate the damages from our modern digital devices,” Morrell writes. “It’s fundamentally a call to pursue the path to human flourishing, to embrace the goods that we know are best for life.” One “Tech Exit mom” whom Morrell interviewed shared that her goal as a parent is to raise children capable of “self-gift”—children “who contribute to their family and community” and who “will go out and make this world a better place.”
But we cannot give what we do not have. Pope St. John Paul II taught that self-possession is a prerequisite for self-giving. I do not think he would have encouraged parents to give their children iPads.
