On a Tuesday night in Overland Park, Kansas, 150 parents sit in folding chairs in the school library and try to solve a problem that their own mothers never had to deal with. There’s no cell phone on the table. That was done on purpose. Through a local program called START (Stand Together And Rethink Technology), people are talking about a question that seems simple but isn’t: how do you get a middle schooler off of screens when everyone else is? “We can’t call our moms about this one,” said Krista Boan, who runs the program. That line makes me feel something deep down. There are a lot of smart adults in the room, but the challenge they face feels really new—uncharted in a way that parenting books haven’t caught up to yet.
There wasn’t long ago when the anxiety went the other way. The worry was getting to it. Rich kids would get online earlier, learn how to use technology better faster, and fall behind everyone else. Devices were brought into classrooms by schools. Digital infrastructure in low-income areas was paid for by grants. The aim was to get closer. That worry hasn’t gone away, but a new one has grown up next to it, and it’s almost the opposite of the first one.
Now, parents who build screens for a living are most likely to limit their kids’ use of them. In Silicon Valley, engineers who work at Facebook raise their kids with almost no screens around. There are people on the boards of Waldorf schools who used to work for Microsoft and Intel. These schools treat tablets the same way older generations did cigarettes: as something adults might use, but not around kids. Tech workers love the Waldorf School of the Peninsula because it doesn’t have many screens. A public middle school a few miles away uses its one-to-one iPad program as a selling point. At the same time and in the same place, both are true.
The facts behind this change are hard to deal with. Teenagers from low-income families spend about eight hours a day watching screens for fun. That number drops to about five and a half hours for peers with more money. Also, studies have shown that black and Hispanic kids are much more likely to be around screens than white kids. There are big differences between these. They are structural ones that are getting bigger.
Richard Freed is a psychologist who wrote a book on the subject and divides his time between giving talks in Palo Alto and working with families in the far East Bay. He said it simply: parents in wealthier areas have already read the research before he talks to them. When he goes to low-income areas, he’s often the first person to bring up the idea that screen time might be linked to issues with focus or changes in behavior. He said there is a huge gap in knowledge. That gap doesn’t get smaller by itself.
Another thing that makes this harder is that the tools are made to not be put down easily. It’s not a mistake that YouTube has autoplay, Instagram refreshes like a slot machine, and Snapchat lets you make streaks. They are the result of carefully manipulating people’s minds. Freed and more than 200 other psychologists have officially asked the American Psychological Association to speak out against the work that some psychologists are doing to make kids’ platforms more addicting.
It’s funny how Chris Anderson, who used to be editor of Wired magazine, talked about the change: the first digital divide was about who had access to technology. He said that the new one is about who can break it.
It seems like this is already turning into something class-based and self-reinforcing. Play-based, screen-light preschools are slowly coming back to wealthy areas. At the same time, several states have been expanding a federally funded online-only preschool program. This program serves tens of thousands of kids whose parents probably don’t have many options and don’t have time to plan afternoons without screens. The difference isn’t very big. There are steps. That being said, it’s real and going in a bad direction.
Back in Overland Park, Rachael Brownsberger recently took the TV off the wall and cut the cable. She is married to a man who runs a concrete company and has two boys. The older son, who has ADHD, would get mad every time the TV screen turned off. A Wii, a PlayStation, a Nintendo, a MacBook, and an iPhone were on his Christmas list. He wasn’t going to get any of them, she told him. She called herself the mean mom. She also said that knowing her neighbors are going through the same thing is the only thing that makes it bearable.
She said that it takes a group. Yes, that could be the problem. There might not be 150 parents in every neighborhood on a Tuesday night who have the time, the information, and the social connections to work together to fight back. Even though people want to live a screen-free life, it is still more of a privilege than a movement, at least for now.
