For fall break, I took my daughter to Seattle to explore the city, visit the aquarium, ride the Ferris wheel, and take the elevator to the top of the Space Needle. For a curious and joyful 5-year-old this mother-daughter weekend was filled with many highlights for her, including seeing the character Iron Man’s mask and crawling into a vampire’s coffin at the Museum of Pop Culture. The bonus for her was a weekend away from her sibling, a rare occurrence that both of my children proclaimed as a good thing. One night at dinner, we watched as a group of seven teenagers—it should be known that my daughter is obsessed with teenagers and can hardly wait to become one despite my urgings not to wish away her childhood—walk into the restaurant dressed in ballgowns and holding small bouquets of pink roses.
Darcy pointed out the sequin dresses, and I explained that the group was likely celebrating homecoming or some other fall school-wide event. The big group was assigned a table right next to us—all the better for us to observe teenagers on a night on the town. Even when the host handed the high schools the menu, they kept a tight grip on their phones.
I’ve tried not to fall into the whiny trap that goes like this: kids these days are always on their phones or young people are so attached to their phones it’s like a third appendage. But that evening it certainly felt like the cellphone was an extension of their bodies. The group was mesmerized by the glow of their screens, and I watched as two young women took selfie after selfie after selfie. There was no conversation, save a few quips of laughter here and there. They posed, preened, and tapped but didn’t spend much time together around the table, interacting with each other in the tux-and-sequin flesh.
It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I scanned the rest of the restaurant and while many other tables weren’t as sucked into their phones as this table was, many diners kept their phones close at reach or routinely checked them. Our game of tic-tac-toe on a scratch piece of paper seemed so quaint and foreign compared to everyone else.
As a parent and community college instructor, I’m hyperaware of smartphone usage. And I don’t restrict my ire to members of the Gen Z and younger generations. Ask my dad and he’ll tell you that I scold him when he comes to visit and I find him sitting on the couch absorbed on his phone while the kids build with Legos next to him. I badger my spouse about his usage and typically overlook my own screentime. What I witnessed at the restaurant made me think back to what a Missoula writer predicted about smartphones: they’ll be the younger generation’s version of smoking. Addictive, but frowned upon. He’s also a parent and his optimism about screen usage gives me hope, but after that night at dinner I felt less sure. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” childhood itself has been rewired thanks to a phone-based landscape. The outcomes of a childhood overly reliant on phones, devices, and social media usage goes beyond more than stifling in-person communication at dinner. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide have surged in girls and boys since 2008 across the Western world where life revolves around a screen. I can’t avoid it, either. At my daughter’s preschool, I have to use an app to check her in each morning.
What will change for us to view phones as dangerous and unhealthy as cigarettes? It certainly feels like a disgusting habit after I spend a half hour scrolling after the kids are in bed. How many more alarming statistics to parents, educators, lawmakers, and technology providers need about the mental health about kids and teens before they realize their products are like nicotine, or perhaps even worse?
The very same writer who shared his hope that when his 3-year-old son become a teenager, smartphones will suffer the same fate as cigarettes: a nasty habit that once was popular, but now isn’t, recently shared in his newsletter this blunt sentiment that captures more of what I felt as I watched the group of friends intoxicated by the glow of their screens: you look dumb staring a phone.
Now, each time I pick up my phone, I think: this looks dumb, doesn’t it? And then I put it away.