Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Clare Morell
Read between
June 24 - June 25, 2025
But I’m not just a researcher; I’m a parent. My research convinced me never to give social media or smartphones to my own children.
They all accepted the premise that screen-based technologies are an inevitable part of childhood, so the best they could offer parents was harm reduction.
Molly and Tim feel like they have totally lost Emma to the screens. It wasn’t just a matter of some time diverted from other activities, as they had anticipated; it’s all Emma wants to do. She’s compulsively drawn to the screens. It’s never enough. And even when she isn’t online, the screen activities still dominate her thoughts and behavior.
It turns out one of the most important things they did was to offer their children lives free of screens. They filled their children’s lives with books, sports, music, and lots of independent play outside in the woods behind their house or at the arts and crafts table in their basement. And when it came to screens? They used alternatives to smartphones like a Gizmo watch to stay in touch with their oldest daughter when she got to middle school, then purchased her a Gabb phone (a non-smartphone alternative) when she started high school. They didn’t allow any social media or video games. Their
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The Tech Exit, therefore, starts with F: Find Other Families. By working with other families in your communities and schools, you can create counterpressures to push screens back out of childhood.
To do this, parents E: Explain, Educate, and Exemplify. They explain their rationale, educate children about the dangers of digital technology, and exemplify healthy tech use.
Tech Exit families also A: Adopt Alternatives.
They also S: Set Up Digital Accountability and Family Screen Rules.
They disallow private technology and establish rules for screens in the home, like using screens only publicly and purposefully.
And finally, they T: Trade Screens for Real-Life Responsibilities and Pursuits. They replace screens with positive responsibiliti...
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He does so by showing studies where teens’ depressive symptoms improved when they reduced their use of social media platforms[1] and other studies indicating that the more time a girl spends on social media, the more likely she is to be depressed.[2]
The unfortunate reality is that social media creates negative network effects where, even if a few teens use it in a school or organization, it affects the entire cohort of young people, including those who don’t use social media at all.[3]
Friendships are built around likes, reshares, and memes, not shared experiences, adventures, or baring their hearts to one another.
but that assumes (1) that all parents are enforcing limits and (2) that the kids are limited at the same times of day.
And even when they aren’t interacting on the apps, they are thinking about them and what they may be missing out on.
Limits can even exacerbate loneliness as teens constantly fear what they are missing out on. FOMO is very real, and the feeling of missing experiences can cause anxiety and depression.[6]
we need the hormone oxytocin to bond with one another. It’s a happiness hormone that we can get only from eye contact and physical touch during in-person interaction with other human beings. We can’t get oxytocin through a screen.[7]
Beyond the social dynamics, time limits also do nothing to address the inherent addictive nature of these technologies.
Digital technologies are not like sugar. For the developing brains of children and teens, they are more like fentanyl.
But dopamine doesn’t create satisfaction or lasting pleasure; it only produces “wanting” so that we will repeat that action.[10]
the problem isn’t that people lack willpower; it’s that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.”[14]
The brain’s dopamine receptors multiply between the ages of ten and twelve. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex, which enables self-control, isn’t fully developed until age twenty-five. In other words, children’s brains are “all gas pedal with no brakes” when it comes to craving the social feedback that tech readily and constantly serves up to kids.[15]
Social media is designed to make people check their accounts compulsively.
shared how they saw their tween sons change as each boy became compulsively drawn to a gaming app. “Even fifteen minutes a day on it was too much for my son,” explained Haley. “He spent the rest of the day thinking about the game, waiting until he could get back on it.”
Even when he wasn’t on, all he wanted to do was play it. Because these apps are designed to create a perpetual craving, no time limit will ever be enough.
Research shows the mere presence of a smartphone is mentally consuming and distracting.[18]
She found the majority of these struggles were caused or exacerbated by the child’s use of interactive screens (video games, tablets, smartphones).
Many parents find handing a child a screen, especially a child with ADHD or autism, can be helpful to calm them down. But Dr. Dunckley warns that “over time and as usage increases or accumulates, the ‘user’ will begin to experience mood changes, sleep disturbances, shortened attention span, irritability, depression, defensiveness, an inability to tolerate stress, and a general worsening of functioning.”[24]
taking the screens away reduced symptoms by at least 50 percent.
A study found that the use of mobile devices to calm young children “worsened their emotional regulation skills over time.”
“We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.”[31]
Screens exact costs on children’s tastes and creativity, habituating them to the virtual world and drawing them away from the real world.
how screens create a need for an ever-increasing level of stimulation to achieve the same dopamine rush, rendering offline activities unbearably dull by comparison.
There is so much sensory overwhelm in the virtual world that it can dull the senses to the beauty and pleasures that we’re supposed to experience in the natural world.”
The experience of waiting until a thought strikes, which means sitting somewhat uncomfortably with what feels like nothingness, kids now interpret as something having gone wrong.”
“if a child’s mind is always receiving input, there is no silence or space for it to develop its own ideas and thoughts,” Haley tells me. Screens wire children toward consumption rather than creation, and over time that creative muscle atrophies.
An eight-year-old child shouldn’t have already lost these glands.
Since the girl was a year old, starting with Baby Mozart, she had been watching screens for four or more hours per day. That was it. Just screens.
She told me that when staring at screens, kids aren’t blinking.
The kids who lose them will have dry eye for their whole lives, constantly working with drops to keep their eyes lubricated so that scar tissue doesn’t build up.
In the meantime, she sees about twenty kids each week who have dry-eye symptoms.
The screen-time parents are constantly having to stand between a drug-dispensing machine and an underdeveloped brain.
One in three minors report having an online sexual interaction (and one in five report having one with someone they believe to be an adult).
If parents can’t meaningfully oversee their children’s online activity and communications, and if account restrictions can’t truly be locked in by a parent, then the idea that these are parental controls is a myth.
For example, Bark monitors a child’s texts, emails, web browser activity, and some apps using its AI technology and sends the parent alerts if it detects explicit images or other unsafe content, like cyberbullying, violence, or drug/alcohol content.[11]
They don’t always work to block sites accessed inside apps (via in-app browsers), which is dangerous when a child can get to PornHub inside of Snapchat in just five clicks.[14]
In a 2022 study, 73 percent of the teens surveyed reported that they had been exposed to porn. The average age of first exposure was twelve.
“I’ve never seen a smartphone without Instagram. The two are one and the same. If a child has a smartphone, they will get to social media.” It’s technically possible to prevent, but it’s extremely difficult to police and enforce.
YouVersion’s Bible app. Parents assumed their children were spending all this time on the app reading Bible verses. It turns out, however, people were using the app’s community feature to establish connections, “in some instances linking younger users with strangers sharing illicit content.”
When a parent deletes an app (whether paid or free) from their child’s phone, the child can redownload it without asking permission again.[31] Ask to Buy happens only once, so there isn’t a way to effectively take apps away from kids once they have them.
