Parents Expect Answers To Moral Questions About Smartphones
(ANALYSIS) A pediatrician recently asked one of Emily Harrison’s children a logical question during pre-exam paperwork: Do you have a smartphone?
Doctors often ask children practical questions, such as whether they’re getting enough sleep, have seen changes in their appetites or have started playing sports. These days, they may ask about anxiety or depression.
A smartphone question makes sense after years of research into how these devices, and social media programs, affect mental and physical health. The question is why are church leaders not discussing these issues in sermons and education programs, said Harrison, author of the Dear Christian Parent online newsletter.
“This is a safety issue, yet we're hesitant to say it's a safety issue,” she said, reached by Zoom.
In churches, that might sound like: “If you allow this, then you are a bad parent.” Thus, clergy may be reluctant to offer smartphone warnings, even though “we make statements on many other topics all of the time for kids inside the church.”
Pastors seem to be “afraid of backlash. ... I think church leaders are way out of touch on this, because what parents are looking for is somebody to give them a firm line, a stance to take,” she added. In other words: “This stuff is not for kids — period.”
It’s important that politicians in powerful states such as California and New York have banned or severely restricted student smartphone use during school hours, noted Harrison. It has become normal for these issues to be discussed openly, especially since the 2024 release of the “The Anxious Generation,” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University.
“There isn't a debate anymore about whether this is safe for kids,” she said. “So, why won't the church say so?”
For most parents, said Harrison, the question is not “if” children get phones, but “when.” In a recent essay, “On Giving My 15 Year Old a Cellphone,” she walked readers through the digital and moral issues raised by the various devices sold by cellular service providers.
First, there is an old-school option — a flip phone, with a tiny screen. However, Harrison discovered that most of these devices now have internet browsers.
“Believing there had to be a better deal to be found,” she wrote, “I went to Verizon and the salesman said I couldn't turn off the browser (nor did he understand why I would want to), but ... did I see the latest colors available on the most expensive iPhone model available? He smiled while waving his Vanna White hands toward the Apple display. They were pretty swweeeet looking, I was told. ... I thanked him for his time and headed home.”
There were also dumb phones with no internet access, but with screen icons that would appeal to elementary-school students.
With the popular smartphones, she said, sales personnel kept stressing, “There’s a way to make it safe!”
From her research, Harrison knew that most kids could bypass parental controls “in a matter of minutes when they were bored,” or will watch how-to videos online.
The bottom line: Parents cannot expect a salesman to understand moral questions linked to smartphones.
“He was there to make the sale,” she said. “He wasn't there to help me parent.”
It’s hard to even imagine a store in which sales personnel were trained to discuss the moral implications of digital devices with or without access to the internet. Her family, she said, finally found a cellphone built with an operating system specifically designed to allow practical apps, such as banking or maps, but not social media platforms that promote endless scrolling.
Church leaders need to realize that parents are under tremendous pressure, said Harrison.
“I get it. It’s hard for my kid to hang out with his buddies, and they're all talking about memes and things they've seen on social media, and he has to say, ‘I don't know what you’re talking about,’” she said. “Sorry. That's what I say: ‘Sorry. I'm sorry that the world is like this. I'm sorry that this is what's going on. But God picked this time and this place for you to grow up, and he picked this time and this place for me to be a parent. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to shirk our responsibilities to do what is best for you.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.