Name: Smartphones Are Rewiring Our Brains—Here’s How Parents Can Say No | Clare Morell
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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] How have screens and social media altered the brains of children? What is the long-term impact on their happiness and ability to be prosperous, fulfilled adults later on?

“Looking at the brain science, we really have to treat screens more in the category of a highly addictive drug like digital fentanyl than sugar,” argues Clare Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.”

“These companies are in a race to the bottom. They’re all in a race to get the youngest users. The incentives are not in place for them to put child safety first,” she says.

While many apps advertise parental controls, the reality is there are far more hidden ways children can access addictive, dangerous, or pornographic content than parents may think, Morell says.

“I just wanted to push back against this premise that the smartphone is an inevitable part of childhood. It doesn’t need to be.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Clare Morell, it’s so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you so much for having me.

You advocate for a complete screen exit for kids and even perhaps young adults. That sounds, I think to a lot of people watching right now, almost an impossible position to take. How is this even possible to do in our society?

Yes, I understand that because of the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, parents often feel like it’s just impossible to completely resist, and that’s why I wrote my book, The Tech Exit, to actually show parents that a smartphone-free childhood is possible. In fact, a lot of families have done this, and this is how to do it successfully. I wanted to push back against the premise that the smartphone is an inevitable part of childhood. It doesn’t need to be.

In fact, if we look back a little bit in history, you know, the iPhone is only 18-years-old. It actually turns 18 this June. It came out in June of 2007. Up until 18 years ago, smartphones weren’t even a part of childhood. So the fact that now it seems so impossible is something that actually needs to be pushed back on. My book not only shows parents that it’s possible; it’s actually fundamentally a positive way of leading your family through childhood because it shows that saying no to screens, pushing back against smartphones and social media in childhood, is saying yes to so much more in the real world. What these families have filled childhood with instead is really a positive good of the real world that any parent wants for their child.

Just, you know, it has been 18 years, and certainly some significant portion of that would be younger and younger people being involved in screens. You know, for example, my nephews, right? They have significant limits on the screen time they can use, but I can see how engrossed they get when they participate in this. You can see they have this kind of strong pull to it. I myself have a strong pull to the phone or some specific apps. So, you know, this is a very real thing, but you kind of need it for what you’re doing, or you imagine that you need it for what you’re doing.

Certainly, swaths of society and all sorts of kids, as you point out in your book, are using it often. It’s a way to communicate; it’s kind of, you know, actually replaced some forms of communication, but you really have to kind of, it’s not just a text exit, but it would be like a social system exit or something, right?

I do think a lot of parents feel that pressure that, you know, they’re required to have an app for their child to participate in a certain sports team, or some schools now require you to have a certain app to actually enter the school building or to check in at school-wide assemblies. The kind of smartphone culture has created a very app-based culture; everything is now an app on the smartphone. Things that used to be tools have now all become one thing on this device.

What I explain in my book is that a couple of things I think are key to making this possible. One is that these families who have done this have found other families to do this with them. I think there is a collective aspect to the harms of social media and smartphones because even the kids who aren’t on them experience the negative impacts on the social dynamics. If all the other kids are communicating through Snapchat, it just affects the social environment for everyone, even the kids not on that.

What these families found was that even just finding a few other families in your school, neighborhood, or church community to resist these things together really provided a kind of positive buffer and an antidote against some of those social group collective harms. The second thing is that regarding the kind of app requirements, a lot of these families adopt alternatives. Some parents aren’t even aware that in just the last five years, there are several phones on the market now—non-smartphones—that still allow certain tools and functionality that you might want your child to have.

They let you call and text, so you can be in touch with your child. Most of them also offer GPS if your teenager starts driving, but without an internet browser, without social media apps, and without addictive gaming apps. I personally gave up my smartphone two-and-a-half years ago. I have an alternative called the Wyze Phone, and I have certain apps and tools I need on it, like Uber, Venmo, or GPS, but it has no internet browser, no email, no social media, and no gaming apps. To participate in some of these things that are required, there are alternative phones that allow certain functionality but without all the dangers of a smartphone. A lot of the families I interviewed adopted these alternatives.

But the bigger thing that I found was that actually rejecting the premise of the inevitability of the smartphone was itself the solution. If the coach said your kid needs an app to participate, they just didn’t accept that answer. They found workarounds. They were like, well, if my child is going to be on the team, we’re just going to need a different way for you to be in touch with him.

These families said that by pushing back, they were able to find workarounds. Every parent that pushes back makes it easier for the next parent. I would encourage parents to stand up a little bit more to this kind of assumed smartphone culture, especially in childhood. There’s just no reason a child needs a smartphone.

I’ve been focusing on the near impossibility of seeming to be able to do it, but what is it that we’re actually trying to fix here? What is the depth of that problem?

That’s how I actually start the book because I want to explain to parents some of the underlying nature of this technology and why the current strategies that I think most parents adopt of screen time limits and parental controls just aren’t enough for the depth and the nature of the harms from these devices. I actually wrote the book for what I would call moderate parents—a parent that thinks, okay, I understand smartphones are harmful, so we’re going to put these limits in place. We’re going to have these parental controls. So we can kind of have the technology and avoid the harms, this idea that you can have both.

What I try to unpack in the book is that these harm reduction measures aren’t working the way that I think parents were told they would by the tech companies or the ways that you would assume. The problem is that we have a root metaphor problem, as I say in the book. We’ve treated screens and the category of something like sugar, which is okay in moderation, but just don’t give too much of it to your kids. We’ve kind of put screens in that camp.

The brain research, like that cited by Dr. Lembke and other experts, shows that the amount of dopamine and how quickly it’s released and how constantly it’s released by these devices acts on the brain more like a highly addictive drug than something that is not safe even in moderation because of the addictive effects behind it.

As a society, when we recognize something is inherently harmful or extremely addictive to a child, we just say it’s not safe for children. Things like tobacco, alcohol, and drugs have been regulated out of childhood. I’m trying to say that looking at the brain research, knowing the neuroscience behind how these screens are designed to hijack our human brain vulnerabilities, especially of children’s developing brains and nervous systems, is just too powerful.

What I try to explain to parents is that because dopamine creates a constant craving for more, it never creates satisfaction, and so the child will always want more. The screen time limit is never enough, and the screen time limits you put in place don’t map onto a child’s mental or emotional time. You may say you can only have 15 minutes on the app, but the child can spend the rest of the day living in that virtual world, wondering what has happened since they’ve been on the app.

Those hits of dopamine just always draw them back for more. They wonder, what new likes or followers have I gotten? The virtual world stays with them long after their eyes might leave the app. That’s what I try to explain in my book: looking at the brain science, we really have to treat screens more in the category of a highly addictive drug, like digital fentanyl, more than sugar.

Explain to me how that works. How did we get to having the apps that our children, that we use, but even our children use, are in effect digital fentanyl?

Yes. I think it’s really helpful to understand the business model behind these things because I do think the tech companies are to blame, and they’ve really lied to parents that you can use our products, just put parental controls and time limits in place, and your kid will be fine. The business model is meant to maximally extract users’ time, attention, and data because the service appears to us to be free, but they’re selling that data about time and attention to advertisers, and so their business model is inherently predatory.

They want us to spend as much of our time as possible on these apps, including children, and they recognize the younger they hook a user to their product, the more money they’re going to profit off of that person over the course of their lifetime. They want to have them adopt it young so that they’ll continue to stick with a certain app or tool as they get older. But the problem is that they’ve designed the features of these devices and technologies to be inherently addictive to our brains.

Addiction scientists will explain that part of the reason they’re so addictive is there’s this uncertainty of rewards. Like a slot machine in a casino, part of what makes it so addictive is you don’t know whether or not you’re going to get a reward, and it’s the same with social media. You kind of don’t know when you go back on if you’re going to have a new follower or a new notification. Those kinds of variable rewards, which you don’t know the schedule to, are what makes it so compulsive to use because you constantly want to go back and see if you’re going to get that hit of dopamine.

The algorithms of the social media companies have really changed. When they first came out, they were more social; you saw posts from your friends or your family members, and at a certain point, your feed would just stop if you didn’t have any new content from the people that you were following. Now what I try to explain to parents is social media is recommendation media. The algorithms are dumping things into kids’ feeds from all corners of the internet—complete strangers, people they’ve never met—because it’s all based on this algorithm. They study what you linger on or what you watch or what your friend is watching or your friend is liking.

And so the algorithm just supplies an endless stream of constant dopamine hits. It’s an infinite scroll. Now you can just scroll for hours, and it’s endless. The problem is just that the design, the way the companies have built their products with these notifications, the metrics they’ve created like likes and followers, and the algorithms and the infinite scroll all create compulsive use. They all make our brains want to use more and more and more, and there’s no satisfaction; the time limit will never be enough for what the brain is drawn back to.

When we first spoke on camera, I wanted to speak with you about the problems of online pornography because I believe it’s one of these unspoken, massive issues. There’s also this dimension of putting things into the feed that people may not have seen yet but are known to be highly addictive, known to be highly enticing. And this would be that category.

That’s what I explained. So the second chapter of the book is on how parental controls are a myth because I think parents are like, well, I don’t want them coming across this bad content, so I’ll just enable the filters or the parental controls. What I try to explain to parents is that if you’re handing a child a smartphone, you’re handing them access to pornography. It is impossible to effectively lock down every path or channel to the internet where a child could come across pornography.

The problem is in the app-based system of the smartphone. You may have a filter installed on the web browser, but every app has its own browser, and often the filter can’t filter inside of the apps. Nowadays, it’s like the pornography is actually on the feed of the social media app itself; they don’t even have to click through to a porn website, and your controls do nothing to change what’s on the feed. That’s completely controlled by the algorithms of the companies. And so you can’t shield out all the pornographic content or just other dangerous content you wouldn’t want your children seeing, like drug-related content or violence; it’s all in the feeds themselves.

And then the problem is that if a child even lingers for a few seconds over a post in the feed, the algorithm aggressively goes to work. So they might be curious, oh, what’s this? They linger on it for a few seconds. Immediately, their feed just becomes dominated by more and more and more of that content.

The Wall Street Journal and other outlets have reported; they’ve done investigations and found that these algorithms really send kids down dangerous rabbit holes very quickly because they can stumble across something and then just get sucked into a dangerous corner of the internet. So what I’ve tried to explain to parents is that it’s just impossible to effectively lock down a smartphone because there are hundreds of apps. Every app has its own portal to the internet.

The problem is most of these really harmful apps, like Snapchat and TikTok, don’t allow any third-party controls access to their content. So I think parents install software thinking, oh, I’ll be able to control it. But most of the dangerous apps won’t allow access to what’s going on inside the app. It will just tell you, oh, you know, your child has spent an hour on Snapchat. A parent will have no idea that a child could actually click through to PornHub, one of the major pornography websites, inside of Snapchat without ever leaving the app in just five clicks.

And so I really feel for parents that it is just a complete uphill battle to think that you can somehow make the smartphone a safe device for a child, and that’s of course what the tech companies will tell you. But my research over the last several years and really any child safety expert you will talk to will just explain that the minute you hand your child a smartphone, they’re going to come across dangerous content because it’s just impossible to lock down.

There’s also this dimension of the arms race, if you will, between these different types of apps.

That’s the problem: the tech companies, we can’t trust them to regulate themselves because they are for-profit companies. And so if Meta voluntarily puts more safeguards in place, they feel like they’re going to lose users to the other apps. They probably will. And so I’ve heard the expression before: these companies are in a race to the bottom. They’re all in a race to get the youngest users. The incentives are not in place for them to put child safety first. Their profits are always going to come before children’s safety.

You mentioned TikTok. I’ve originally heard that in the context of TikTok, right? And so, you know, fentanyl kills tens of thousands every year. Wow. There’s a very strong argument to be made that this is a very directed military strategy of the Chinese Communist Party, which seeks to subvert America and the free world, right? And with TikTok being under control of the CCP, it’s sort of, again, that arms race exists in a very real sense because now TikTok is getting more market share because they absolutely have no safeguards.

In fact, they’re quite happy to feed things that will be damaging in a light way, hooking and getting people more into the system so they can put more programming that will be amenable to their plans, so to speak. But that, of course, affects the whole ecosystem. This is what just struck me as we’re talking, right? It’s not just TikTok, but every other app that’s competing with TikTok.

Yes, exactly. And I think with TikTok in particular, if you have an app that’s under the control of a foreign adversary, we have to be especially on guard because they do not have the interests of America’s children in mind at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. They would love to just undermine our national vitality in future generations. And so that is why I think it’s an apt analogy to say that TikTok is digital fentanyl because they’re exporting this incredibly dangerous app to Americans.

Meanwhile, the Chinese version is very, very different. It’s like the spinach version of the app for kids. You know, it’s very mundane, academic content, not aggressive algorithms, very time-limited, and the version they’re exporting to America’s kids is just completely undermining their well-being. It’s also important to understand that these companies, even the ones based in America, are not American companies.

They view themselves very much as global companies. They don’t put the interests of Americans first. Again, it’s really about their profits. It’s a profit model that is based on maximizing addiction. And so I think we all have to be extremely wary of how we’re using these technologies, particularly for the next generation.

I’ve heard a number of interviews with executives from some of these tech companies who basically say they would never let their kid a mile away from their own technology. I just find that to be bizarre.

I think it’s incredibly revealing because they, of all people, understand what they’re doing with the technology. And the fact that they wouldn’t let their own children near it, I think, just speaks to exactly why we should all be considering opting out because of how harmful it is. It is to our kids and their well-being.

You’re basically saying, though, that the only way to really stop the app-specific apps is to stop the whole phone because there’s always, and you know, kids are smart.

Yes, there’s always a backdoor. I had one child safety expert say, well, I have plenty of parents who give their kid a smartphone. They say, well, they’re not gonna get Instagram on it. And she’s like, that’s just impossible because maybe you block the app, but like through any other app, they can get to a web browser and go to<a href="http://instagram.com"> instagram.com</a> and create an account. It’s so hard to effectively lock down a smartphone.

And because it is this app-based ecosystem, there’s just thousands of portals to the internet on one device that is incredibly small and difficult for parents to oversee. I mean, it’s even different than letting a child use a desktop computer in the family living room where they’re going on to do some research project that a parent can easily oversee.

The smartphone is inherently private, secret, individualized, and even the form of entertainment is so individualized because the algorithms are learning you and it’s you on the screen. It’s not this shared experience like a television even would be in a family living room. And so just the inherent nature and design of the smartphone is very individualized, very addictive, very harmful.

And I think we have similar analogies and similar precedents. When we recognize, again, that something is so inherently addictive or harmful to a child’s developing brain, we’ve said, you know, we’re not going to allow kids to buy and purchase tobacco or alcohol because it’s just—there’s the nature of the thing itself that is damaging.

And I’m trying to explain to parents that that is the point that we are at with smartphones. And that these hurdles I think that parents see in their minds that would keep them from completely opting out are really not as big as you would think. And that there are so many families—hundreds—it’s a growing movement across the states, across the globe, honestly, lots of countries where we are seeing this opt-out approach and that families are really doing this together in their local communities, successfully pushing the smartphone back out of childhood.

And so the message of the book is both that a smartphone-free childhood is necessary, but also that it’s possible and parents are doing this and this is how they’ve done it, and so I really try to practically give parents steps to follow, like step by step this is how to do it.

When you look at the various studies that you’ve looked at, now we have, you know, at least 10 years of data, I don’t know, maybe 15 in some cases of the effect of these technologies on kids and, frankly, adults and how brains work. Can you lay out for me sort of the most, some of the studies that really struck you that maybe can illustrate the depth of the problem  to our audience?

I think the research that was most striking to me was that it’s not about using these things too much, because I think a lot of people say, okay, it’s the amount of time kids are spending on it. But there were studies that were done. So, like the University of North Carolina did a brain study, and it was just about how often a child checked a social media app during the day. So, not how long they were going on it, but again, that habitual just checking behavior because of the compulsion it creates, that they saw divergent brain development over time in children who were just frequent checkers of social media.

So that’s just maybe pulling out your phone for a second just to see if there’s a new notification. And so they showed divergent brain development over time, and they became hypersensitive to social rewards beyond a normal level of development—again, kind of craving that type of social feedback that social media is feeding.

A doctor named Dr. Victoria Dunckley, she has a practice, and she was seeing lots of kids coming in with symptoms honestly looking like autism or ADHD—poor focus, tantrums, sleep disturbances. And what she found was that just doing a screen detox for 30 days, in a lot of cases, eliminated the symptoms entirely, that it was not actually autism or ADHD. This had been induced by the screen.

And so she’s termed this phenomenon electronic screen syndrome. And what she said is that it doesn’t come even from other use of the technologies, but just from habitual use of it, even a small amount of time on a daily basis. What she says is it accumulates over time to be too overwhelming to a child’s developing nervous system. It puts the body in this kind of fight-or-flight mode. And so that she found was from even just a limited kind of daily use of screens—not even what you would call maybe excessive of multiple hours a day, but just something about the screen itself is dysregulating to a child’s nervous system.

The last thing I would say are two points on the kind of dangers of even being in a small amount of time: kids through the screen are only getting dopamine. They’re not getting a hormone called oxytocin. So it’s what the screens are replacing. And so oxytocin is—you only get it through physical touch or eye contact in real life. It’s all centered around a real-life relationship.

So when kids are interacting with their peers through the screens, they’re not getting oxytocin. And so we’re seeing a loneliness epidemic because you would think, oh, kids are more connected than ever, but they’re not forming real deep friendships. The connections online are very shallow and they’re based on superficial things like likes or followers, but they’re not getting the oxytocin. So there’s also this question of what kids are being deprived of when real life is being substituted by the screens.

And then the last thing I’ll say is it’s not just an opportunity cost of time spent. Parents think, okay, well, just 15 minutes a day because we do want them doing other things like going outside and reading books or riding their bikes. But the opportunity cost is not just time. It’s also their tastes, like their appetites for things.

Addiction scientists explain that this is a process called desensitization, that their brains become used to this artificially high level of dopamine released by these notifications, these kinds of features of the screens, and they become desensitized to pleasures in the real world. And so they actually find going on a bike ride or reading a book to be very mundane, to be very boring and dull by comparison.

And so even a small amount of time on the screen is training their tastes toward this very artificially high level of dopamine, where even then when they are in the real world, they’re not experiencing the pleasures of the real world that we would want for them.

And of course, the pornography—this last example you gave is the kind of ultimate, perhaps, case in point. It’s very difficult to have a normal relationship as this sort of, I don’t know, is it a ladder? What do you call it, desensitization?

Desensitization, yes. I think as your brain becomes habituated and used to it, an artificially high burst of pleasure, and so then actually being with someone in real life for the pleasures of the real world does not elicit the pleasure that they’re supposed to because your brain has become dulled to that. It’s become habituated to such a high artificial level. Wow.

What about—so we’ve had, you said, 18 years since the iPhone was introduced. I don’t know how many years we’ve had, you know, this sort of social media arms race, if you will, but it’s at least a decade, if not longer.

Yes, probably around 2012 that it really started taking off.

Yes, right. And so what kind of damage has already been done? How reversible is it?

I try to explain in my book. The message of The Tech Exit is actually that it’s never too late to reverse course if you’ve given these things to your own kids, because it’s actually possible to detox. And I think, you know, addiction scientists would explain that addicts can actually become sober—like people quit their addictions and your body and brain can reset. And I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but if we know that these things are harmful, then it is what is best and necessary to do.

And I try to share a lot of hopeful stories and examples of families who did successfully detox from these things, and they thought it was initially going to be impossible. They literally couldn’t imagine their sons just functioning without the screens because it was such a strong habit and there was such a compulsion toward it. And they said the first two weeks were terrible. Like it was really hard. This mom said she was playing Monopoly for hours a day with her sons just to replace the screens.

And so it takes a lot of initial parental time and attention when you’re trying to help a child break that habit. But what I recommend in the book is doing a 30-day digital detox because there’s science behind this—that something about 30 days really helps the body’s brain and nervous system to reset. And that the families then, when they pushed through those first two hard weeks, they hit 30 days and they started to see the benefits in their kids. They started to actually see their appetites for real-world things come back. They started to see their emotions start to regulate, and the nervous system calmed down from the kind of hyper-stimulation of the screens.

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