I’m guilty. I’ll just get that out of the way before I write another word.

More than a quarter of today’s kids report that they’re not allowed to play unsupervised outside, even in the front yard! When my kids were young, I struggled with this very thing. As a result, they spent more time in front of screens than I would have probably intended. So when I came across this article in The Atlantic earlier this year (totally worth a full read), this sentence especially stopped me in my tracks:

“Digital technology has given kids access to virtual worlds, where they’re allowed to roam far more freely than in the real one.”

Oof.

Freedom. In the interviews and nationally representative research we conducted for For Parents Only, we found that teens and tweens will do almost anything to get and keep freedom. After all, before our kids taste real freedom, they don’t know what it is like. We mediate everything for them. We drive them everywhere, including to the wide array of adult-organized activities that usually take up all their “free” time. But when our tweens and teens start getting the feeling of being able to go where they want to go and talk to who they want to talk to and do what they want to do . . . it is practically addictive for them.

The trouble is, if we’re not letting them have those types of freedoms in the real world, our kids will find them in the online one. They’ll look for freedom on screens. Which it turns out, are actually addictive for them.

It only makes sense that in our kids’ insatiable quest to find freedom (nearly three out of four teenagers in our research said they “have to have it”), phones and other personal digital media (like gaming and connecting with others online) are the one frontier where they can roam freely. And make no mistake, they are roaming freely.

In this week’s part 1 on this topic, we’ll look at the data and some unrecognized risks that come with keeping our kids inside, over-scheduled, and with devices in hand. And next time in part 2, I’ll be back with six steps we can take right now to help our kids navigate their digital world with boundaries and confidence.

Where Did all the Free Play Go?

The first generation of true digital natives, Gen Zers are now 13 to 28 years old. And they’re telling us by a huge margin that they’ve had it with screen time. More than 8 in 10 Gen Zers (84%) would like to ditch their smartphones in favor of life in the real world. (And yes, I know that most of them don’t actually want to be without a smartphone, but it’s telling that they starkly see the downsides.)

Parents, we would do well to listen to them. Today, a majority of kids ages 8-12 already have smartphones. Nearly three in four play an online game where they can interact with friends (and strangers!) online. Yet, 45% prefer to spend their time free-playing with friends.

So, what’s stopping them? As you’ve likely already guessed, it’s … us.

Researchers for a recent Harris Poll asked parents what would happen if two 10-year-olds were playing unsupervised at a park. Six in ten parents thought injury was likely. Half of parents thought abduction was likely. (In reality, kidnapping in the U.S. is so rare that a child would have to play outside for an average of 750,000 years before being abducted.)

Our kids want unstructured play time. Yet in the name of keeping them “safe,” we’ve stopped letting them have it. As social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt has observed, “We overprotect children in the real world and under protect them online.”

Children ages 8 to 18 in the U.S. now spend 7.5 hours a day watching or using screens. (And, according to Gallup, almost five of those are spent on social media.) That means almost half of their waking hours are spent staring at screens.

Courtesy of our tendency to worry about low-risk possibilities, while not recognizing high-risk ones, our kids are now fully in the throes of phone-based childhoods.

The Toll Screen Time Takes on our Kids

In an analysis of millions of adolescents over time, researchers found that 52% of Boomer adolescents in the 1970s spent time with their friends almost every day. By 2017, that number dropped to 28%. The same researchers also found that adolescent loneliness (associated with immune system dysfunction, poor sleep quality, and depression, for starters) spiked between 2010 and 2017. (It’s worth noting that smartphones began being widely adopted by teens in 2011.)

What’s the price we’re paying for less social connection and more screen time?

Gen Z is in poor mental health, is lagging in academics, and is starting families, careers, and companies at substantially lower rates than previous generations, says Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

In an interview for this blog, Molly DeFrank, author of Digital Detox: The Two-Week Tech Reset for Kids, said that some kids are even developing “virtual autism”—behaviors that mimic autism but are rooted in delays in social skills and attention span owing to screen time. “The brain prunes away connections that aren’t being used at ages 4-5 and then again in adolescence. So whatever kids are not doing at those ages, they’re not getting good at.”

Let’s help them get good at the right things. I’ll be back next week in part 2 with six actions you can take starting today to, as DeFrank says, “undo the tech trance” in your kids.

If you are interested in having Shaunti bring research-based strategies, practical wisdom and biblical principles to your next event, please contact Nicole Owens at nowens@shaunti.com.

On our podcast, I Wish You Could Hear This, Jeff and I offer proven steps to help you thrive in your life, faith and relationships. In other words, we’ll offer the practical help you’ve grown accustomed to right here in this blog space.  You’ll take away specific steps that help you today. Listen, follow, and share with your friends on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other platforms.

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