Weekend reads: Lenore Skenazy on how phones are making parents anxious

Smartphones are trust blockers for parents

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This weekend at Lean Out, I’m thrilled to bring you a brilliant essay from Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence co-founded with the American social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt. Today’s column, on the impact of smartphones on parents’ mental health, was originally published in the After Babel newsletter, which is helmed by Haidt (whose recent must-read book is The Anxious Generation). — TH

The moment a baby is born, a parent is too. There is suddenly a new (screaming) person in the world. But just as suddenly, there’s a new you, too. (Also possibly screaming.) You have a new relationship in your life, and a whole new definition of who you are and what your job is.

Something similar happens when you give your child a phone. 

On this Substack and in pop culture right now, a lot of people are thinking about what a phone does to kids, especially vis a vis social media. What are they watching? What are they missing out on? How are phones making them The Anxious Generation?

But today, I’d like to think about how giving a child a phone changes the parent, too. A 2022 Harvard study found that 18% of teens were suffering from anxiety…and 20% of mothers and 15% of fathers were, too. There are usually a lot of causes for any social problem, but here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned: that by being connected to our kids by phones, we, too, are becoming a more Anxious Generation.

“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”

Nancy is the author of The Problem with Parenting, so she thinks a lot about the parenting zeitgeist. Unfortunately, she concluded, “Even those of us who try to be normal cannot be normal when we have the technology.” 

Parents have always worried, of course. But until about 15 years ago, we had no option but to learn to live with it. When my mom let me walk to school as a kindergartener—I know, call the cops—she could see me until I turned the corner. After that, she had to wait till about 3 o’clock before she would see me again. In between, she had no contact. No tracking. No alerts from the school. She didn’t even pack a note in my lunch, because during school, I was sort of off her radar, and she was sort of off mine. That didn’t mean she loved me less. But it did mean that she assumed I was fine without her watching or contacting me.

Think about how great that must feel: Simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do. Ahhhh.   

Today? Even though the murder rate is lower now than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—and data suggests violent crime is “near its lowest level in more than 50 years”—the number of kid-tracking devices is exploding. Globally, what is already a $100 billion market is expected to reach $500 billion by 2030, according to Verified Market Reports. And these devices don’t just give the location, the report added. Today’s parents are demanding panic buttons, fall detection, and apps that automatically unlock the door for their kids, or turn on the lights.

That’s a lot of stuff that parents feel they need to know or do anytime their child isn’t with them. 

The thing is, though: Trust is a muscle. It has to be exercised to get strong. My mom,  who quit her job to stay home with me and my sister, somehow chilled for six hours a day, and then for several more after I ate my snack of cookies and milk (cow’s, whole!), and often went back out to play. In that way, she, like most of the other parents back then, learned to believe in me, our neighbors, and even her own parenting. All were good enough to keep me safe. Her trust muscle grew, because it got daily exercise, thanks to the social norms of the time.

Phones stop that from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch. That’s one reason some parents are worried about school phone bans. A friend showed me the letter from her first grader’s school begging parents not to text their kids throughout the day (usually via watches), even if they were going to be a little late to pick up. Even if they felt like sending a heart emoji.

For the school, the problem is that this is distracting. For the child, the problem is that it keeps pulling off the Band-Aid of self-sufficiency—the ability to be out in the world on their own, handling life. (Lack of that independence is a huge part of what is making kids anxious. More about that in another post. Actually, more on that in my whole book!) Focusing back on parents: It’s bad for us, too, because we get no chance to build that trust muscle. Instead, we keep seeking—and getting—addictive hits of reassurance that our kids are fine, they’re safe, they’re where they should be, and they’re feeling our love. Only constant connection soothes us.

I consider that arrested development…of us. 

In The Anxious Generation, Jon explains attachment theory. Basically, kids need at least one adult in their life who is their rock—someone they know will always be there for them. Their home base. Being sure of that home base allows them to go off-base and explore.

As soon as kids can crawl, they scooch off to the dog or toy (or Ming vase), glancing backward sometimes. Yup, mom’s still there. When the dog barks, they scurry back. On-base, they’re comforted. Off-base, the learning occurs. Off they go again. 

“This process happens dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month, and within a few years, children become less fearful and more likely to want to explore on their own—perhaps by walking to school or a friend’s house with no help from an adult,” writes Jon. “As the child develops, she is able to internalize the secure base. She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.” Here’s his diagram of it:

Diagram of Secure Attachment

Diagram from page 92 of The Anxious Generation. Created by Fay, D. (2013). Diagram of a secure attachment [Photograph]. In Becoming Safely Attached. Updated by Maria Petrova. 

But a phone means the child is less likely to internalize that secure base, because they never have to truly detach, and neither does the parent. 

A few years back I read an article someone wrote about raising Free-Range Kids that interviewed a mom who loved her long hours alone at the creek as a child—an experience she wanted to give her own daughter. And thanks to technology, she said, she could! She got her daughter a smartwatch and sent her out—as if this couldn’t have happened without one. One time when her daughter’s bike chain fell off, the girl was instantly able to reach her dad, who hurried over and fixed it. This made the mom extremely grateful for the phone.

But to me, that’s the opposite of the mom’s experience as a child. Alone without a phone, she’d have had to fix the bike herself or wheel it home. Either way, she’d have solved the problem through grit or ingenuity. Dealing with that problem would have shown her what she’s made of—and would have shown her parents too. 

Instead, the parents got to be the problem-solvers. While that gave them the immediate satisfaction of being there for their child, they didn’t get the long-term satisfaction—and the crucial experience—of seeing their kid succeed (or struggle and still be fine) off-base. Without that, parents aren’t getting the feedback that would allow them to let go a little more. They’re also deprived of the greatest joy of being a parent, which is seeing your kid do something on their own.

It’s the surge of excited disbelief when another parent tells you, “Jason is such a sweet boy. He took the plates to the sink without being asked.” And you go, “Wait—myJason? Curly hair? Missing tooth?” Because suddenly, you get to glimpse the unseeable: who your child is without you. And he seems to have internalized at least one of your lessons—be a good guest—which means he is carrying you in his head and heart. He is off-base and doing fine. The heart soars. 

Of course, sometimes the opposite happens, too. Now that phones let us see the unseeable, we can see what we don’t like, too. Maybe our kid said he was coming straight home, but we see he stopped at the dollar store. Gizmo watches actually give parents the power to listen in on their child’s life, like a bugging device, and I’m sure some have heard their kids using bad words, or being mean. But that info, too, disrupts the off-base experience. Until now, when kids were separated from us, they had a chance to be good or bad and deal with the consequences on their own till they came home. As for us, we had the chance to not know (and fret about) all the nitty-gritty.

Without the opportunity for real separation, we parents are like the kids who don’t get the “dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month” to go off-base and explore on their own. We’re missing out on our half of that attachment cycle—the half no one thinks about: us letting go, us being afraid, us having them come back, feeling comforted by their return, and then allowing them to go off again. We and our children are both unused to letting go. This may explain why so many parents are still tracking their kids at college. 

Is there some way to start letting go that isn’t terrifying, dangerous, or complicated? Yes. Here are a few ideas to try, maybe at first with phones and then without:

1. Sit at a cafe with a friend who also has a kid or kids and have them go together to the other end of the strip mall, or street. (Here’s one example of an 11-year-old girl trying this.) You’ll have more fun and so will they.

2. Send your child on an errand, whether it’s to the store or to a neighbor’s home to deliver something—anything that gets them away from you for a short while, with a little mission that helps you. (Kids love to feel needed.) 

3. Ask your child’s school or teacher to assign The Let Grow Experience. Let Grow is the non-profit I co-founded with Jon and two others. The Experience is a homework assignment that tells kids, “Go home and do something new, on your own, with your parents’ permission but without your parents.” This makes it easy for the parents to let go because it’s an assignment—a little push. And when all the kids are doing it, it renormalizes sending kids out. Collective action for a collective problem. 

Video. The Let Grow Experience.

It is shocking how much easier it is to let go the second time than the first. And the third time, it may feel weird that you were ever so worried. It’s like therapy. I keep hearing stories from parents extremely proud of what their kids did on their own once they let them. Please post yours below! 

I’m not saying that it’s easy to let go, or to resist giving kids a phone. I know that most parents use it for convenience, not control, and that they feel it allows them to give their kids more freedom, not less. But thinking about phones from this angle—the way they seem to alter the parent/child relationship—hopefully provides a little perspective, maybe a little rationale for some phone-free roaming, or, if nothing else, for taking the tracker off sooner rather than later. 

Once we have the ability to watch, assist, and reassure from afar at any moment, it changes our parental role. We’re no longer forced to trust our kids out there. It may feel like we are, but in a way, we’re sort of tricking ourselves. It’s like the driver’s ed teacher who has a separate brake.

Babies were never born with that extra set of brakes before now. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking came children who toddled, walked, ran, and then leaped into the world, with their parents (if we were lucky) in their heads and in their hearts, not their pockets.

Today’s tech has relieved us of the pain of truly letting go. And if you’re wondering why we would be more anxious the more contact we can have with our kids, that’s the answer. The less we need to trust, the less we grow to trust. And the opposite of trust—the opposite of fiercely believing our kids can handle anything—is anxiety.

Phones are making us The Anxious Generation.

Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, the nonprofit promoting childhood independence co-founded by Jonathan Haidt, and author of Free-Range Kids. She also writes for Reason.com.