Set children and parents free from smartphones
Timothy P. Carney
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WASHINGTON — “Be sure to have your app open before you come to the ticket gate, but DO NOT press the green button on your screen until you reach the gate!”
The volunteers manning the gates for the soccer championship game were trying their best to help the befuddled middle-aged customers like myself, but my problem was more basic. My wife had set up our account on the Ticket Spicket app, but the password hadn’t stuck. I had to step out of line with five children, call Katie, and wait for her to look up the password and send it to me. Then, I logged in, opened the tickets, and managed not to press the green button (“That tears the ticket,” one volunteer explained) until I was back at the gates.
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“Do you have any questions?” a volunteer dad asked me as I tried to enter the password.
“Just one. Why do you do it this way? It’s stupid.”
“Well, the conference went ticketless last year,” he explained, making sure I knew it was the fault not of the venue or the volunteer dads but of the local Catholic athletic conference.
That makes it all the more upsetting. The real problem with requiring app-based “tickets” to a high school sporting event isn’t that some Generation Xers and boomers will struggle with the app. It’s that every attendee needs either a smartphone or a parent with a smartphone.
And that’s a problem. Children should be able to go cheer at a high school game without their parents, and parents shouldn’t be pressured into giving their children smartphones. Yet here is a Catholic entity that, in its own words, “was organized exclusively for fostering the spiritual, academic, social and athletic development,” choosing a policy that undermines childhood independence and makes parenting harder while enforcing a norm that children should have smartphones.
Different parents have different reasons for giving their children smartphones or not, but the most common explanation I’ve heard from parents is: “All her friends were communicating on apps like Instagram, so we had to get her an Android or iPhone or she’d be a social outcast.”
Millions of parents feel pressured into getting their children a smartphone and allowing them on social media — and then they live to lament it.
Many teenagers — and, in turn, many families — suffer thanks to smartphones. These devices pull children away from their family and their communities but not necessarily in favor of other communities or friend circles. Rather, social media and smartphones often draw a child into a dark, inward-looking, unreal world of social comparison and alienation.
Smartphones can be sadness machines, and schools should discourage them rather than encourage them. Schools ought to ban students from bringing smartphones inside the building, ban any coaches or teachers from using smartphone apps for communications or schoolwork, and share with parents the research suggesting the negative effects of smartphones.
Education writer Doug Lemov calls smartphones in the schoolhouse “an intruder that actively erodes a young mind’s ability to focus and sustain attention and also magnifies anxiety, loneliness, and depression.”
Raising children is hard. Doing it well and without undue anxiety requires community support. We need role models, peers, and informal support groups on all sorts of things, including resisting the relentless push to put screens in front of our children.
Every institution in America should help parents with the smartphone pressure, and child-facing institutions, above all, should lead the way.
It is not difficult to accept paper tickets, even if only printed-off tickets, at a high school sporting event. It may be harder for lacrosse coaches to communicate if their players don’t have the app, but sacrifice has always been part of helping children become well-adjusted adults.
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In fairness, I can’t simply point my finger at other institutions for steering the culture astray. My own smartphone usage, often while my children are talking to me, is thoughtless and sets a bad example. Children will flock to the things that steal their parents’ attention. If a child takes to TikTok, it might be subconsciously because Dad seems to care about the stuff on the screen more than the people in his home.
So, I’ll beat my breast and resolve to amend my ways by keeping my phone out of my hand as much as possible. But it would be nice to get some support from the institutions in our culture by not making a smartphone a necessity for functioning in the world.