Why the Current Approach to Teen Digital Addiction is Broken
By Akshay Ganesh
From the perspective of a 16 year-old navigating digital distractions firsthand
When people talk about screen time overuse among teenagers, the same monotonous soundbites are repeated over and over:
“Social media is destroying attention spans.”
“We need to take phones out of schools.”
“Teens today have no self-control."
“Gen-Z is doomed.”
In fact, it was these media narratives that drove me to start this Substack—to launch Developings as a movement aimed at reframing the conversation and creating real solutions. The problem isn’t explicitly about teenage media overuse. Part of it has been perpetuated by industry experts who oversimplify the issue and push surface level solutions. Their detachment from the teenage experience shows in the solutions they propose. And while these soundbites may sound good on paper or in conversation, all they really do is prolong these issues into adulthood. An ideological shift has to be made before any change can occur, and it has to happen soon.
Why the Mainstream Narrative is Flawed
One of the most common solutions pushed by these experts in the idea of delay and restrict. Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business and one of the most reputable sources in the teenage social psychology industry, has a four-step solution which he details in his book, The Anxious Generation. I will summarize it below:
Delay Smartphone Introduction: Haidt recommends that children should not have smartphones before entering high school. This delay helps prevent early exposure to potential online harms and encourages healthier developmental experiences.
Postpone Social Media Usage: He advises that children should avoid social media until at least the age of 16. This postponement aims to protect adolescents from the negative impacts of social media during critical developmental years.
Implement Phone-Free School Environments: Haidt advocates for schools to enforce policies that keep the learning environment free from smartphones, thereby reducing distractions and promoting better social interactions among students.
Encourage Unsupervised Play and Independence: He emphasizes the importance of providing children with opportunities for unsupervised play and fostering independence. Such experiences are crucial for developing resilience and essential life skills.
At its core, and speaking from the perspective of a teenager who has actually struggled with these issues, this is an overly optimistic, incredibly naive approach. The solution doesn’t address the problem at its root; it simply delays it. What Haidt is failing to consider here is that the use of social media, phones, and electronics is inevitable. By withholding teenagers’ access to these devices for as long as possible, this solution is simply prolonging the issue into adulthood, and overestimating an 18 year-old’s ability to create their own digital habits.
Let’s step back and try to understand what Haidt’s solution really is. At a simple level, really he’s just trying to limit teenagers’ access to the digital world for as long as possible. But delaying access doesn’t teach self-regulation. It only reduces the actual window of time that parents have to help their kids build healthy digital habits. Imagine you’re a parent following Haidt’s strategy. You have withheld your child’s social media access until 16, effectively socially ostracizing them from their peers during that time, and finally, on their 16th birthday, you hand them free rein. Can you see the flaw in this? The kids will go apeshit, probably spend hours on it each day, and lead themselves down a cycle of destruction. And as a teenager, I personally couldn’t blame them for trying to make up for lost time.
Haidt’s justification for his solution comes in two words: collective action. This is the idea that in order for any progress to happen within this issue, a majority of parents across the country have to come together to collectively restrict their children’s access to the online world. The following is a direct quote from Haidt’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience:
This is just flat-out ridiculous. The notion that every parent, or even a half or a third of the parents in this country would restrict their child’s access to the digital world for 80 percent of their childhood is almost laughable. Haidt claims the time is right for “a big push.” But even if we were to hypothetically assume that his plan could come into fruition, what would the outcome really be? That the childhoods of our current generation will more closely emulate Haidt’s (and Gen X’s) own? And even if every parent withheld their child’s social media until 16, it wouldn’t change the fact that these teens would eventually gain unrestricted access—without the tools to manage it.
Let me propose a scenario. Let’s say that instead of a moody teenager, we were dealing with a chronic smoker or a meth addict. In that case, nobody would suggest that the solution is to simply take away the substance and hope for the best. Of course not. Because that would be ridiculous. The answer there is fairly straightforward. It would involve deep education, understanding the role of dopamine in addiction and how it can rewire one’s brain, and most importantly, structured rehabilitation. Yet when it comes to digital addiction, these kinds of solutions don’t exist for teenagers. And the ones that do are, well, incredibly oversimplified and naive.
So my closing call is fairly simple. We need a solution to this problem, and we need one fast. And the solution cannot be based on preventative measures and parental control. It has to be based on a component of teen self-control. If we cannot educate these teens to understand that excessive digital media use is inherently bad for them, then our generation’s future will suffer. Technology is relatively new, and we need an equally modern solution to match. We as a society cannot just sit back and let people like Jonathan Haidt put a Band-Aid over the problem and pretend to fix it. We need a sustainable, long-term solution, and we need deeply to consider to the opinions of the youth when discussing the issue. And until that happens, we’re leaving the future of our country unprepared for the digital world they’re going to inherit.