New Book Gives Parents the Tools to Raise Tech-Healthy Kids 

Watching too much TV. Looking at porn. Playing too many video games. Talking to strangers. Staying inside all day in a bad mood. Developing body-image issues. Parents have worried about these things for decades—far longer in some cases. And yet, when smartphones offered to put all of this and more directly into kids’ pockets, 24/7, for some reason, we just let it happen.

Today’s kids are getting full Internet access in middle or even elementary school. They’re staying up all night watching YouTube or scrolling Instagram and even using their phones in class. The evidence is strong, even if much of it is circumstantial, that constant access to social media and other distractions is harming teens’ mental health and school performance.

Psychology professor Jean Twenge—whose last book, Generations, I reviewed here as well—has arrived to say enough is enough. In her latest book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, she teaches parents how to proceed.

What’s great about the book is that Twenge provides rules that are simple, bright lines, rooted in common sense—rather than a vague “it depends” framework for how to make decisions about kids and tech. Hard rules are always arbitrary to some extent, but the upside is that they are easy to implement.

Any parent who wants to take control of this situation should keep 10 Rules handy as an authority. The book’s two key recommendations, in my view, are to ban your kids from creating social-media accounts until they’re 16, and to give them their first smartphone along with their driver’s license.

As Twenge notes, puberty is an especially sensitive time for kids, and throwing smartphones and social media into the mix during middle school is a bad call. “16 is a compromise,” she writes, similar to the one we make for driving, and “Kids mature a lot between 13 and 16.”

Yes, kids will find ways to break the rules, but even then, the risk of getting caught will greatly curtail how much they use these technologies. And importantly, this doesn’t mean kids are simply thrown in the deep end at 16.

Twenge encourages parents to start younger kids off with more suitable mobile phones, including the now-retro flip phones—as well as “basic” phones that might, for example, be able to call, text, and pull up maps, but do not have unfettered Internet access or social media apps. Twenge also highly recommends using parental controls on kids’ devices, though, depending on the app, these can sometimes be difficult to set up, and as kids get older, there are legitimate questions about how much privacy they should have.

Other key planks in Twenge’s platform are to keep phones out of kids’ bedrooms overnight; to designate “no-phone zones” (say, the dinner table or a family vacation); to mind the hazards of other devices such as gaming consoles, tablets, and even school-issued laptops; and to give kids more real-world freedom so they have things to do besides stare at screens. She would also like to see a more coordinated, nationwide effort to keep phones out of schools and young kids off social media—issues that policymakers are slowly waking up to.

Oddly enough, when reading 10 Rules, I kept thinking back to Generations and wondering how the next crop of parents-of-tweens-and-teens will fare. Twenge is a Gen Xer whose kids just went through this; I happen to be an older Millennial (born in 1984), whose eldest is soon turning 11. I’m far from alone: The average age at first childbirth is in the late 20s today, so parents confronting a middle-schooler for the first time tend to be 40-ish.

On the one hand, we Millennials are not known as particularly tough people, and I’m not sure how well we’ll be able to say no. (I personally have zero compunction about being the bad guy, but as my kids will tell you, I’m unusually mean.) Yet we have much else going for us.

Having learned to clear our browser histories a quarter-century ago, we’re not naïve about what’s on the Internet or kids’ ability to hide what they’re doing. We’re tech-savvy enough to have a fighting chance with parental controls. We got smartphones young enough in adulthood to have at least some sense of the addiction and social havoc they can leave in their wake. We famously experienced an “analog childhood” before our digital adulthood, and yet we can leave catty Facebook comments with the best of them, so I don’t think we’ll buy the argument that kids will be hopelessly lost in a high-tech world if we pump the brakes on smartphones in middle school.

I beseech my fellow Millennial parents to grab 10 Rules as they navigate these waters. The book weighs in at about 200 pages and makes for a breezy read. Twenge explains each of her points simply, with an occasional chart or study citation to serve as an exclamation point. She provides numerous anecdotes from her own experiences (and mistakes) in raising kids, and she offers handy rejoinders parents are likely to hear from protesting tweens.

And if Junior still insists he must have a smartphone or you’ll be ruining his life, make him read it, too.

Robert VerBruggen is an IFS research fellow and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.