BusinessDay: Children pay a high price for digital babysitters

Two books explore how social media diminishes our ability to concentrate and contributes to rising anxiety.

By Johan Steyn, 28 August 2024

Published by BusinessDay: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-08-28-johan-steyn-children-pay-a-high-price-for-digital-babysitters/

As a parent of a young child in the digital age, I’m worried about how constant connectivity and digital devices are affecting our ability to focus and our children’s mental health.

I often find myself questioning whether I’m inadvertently outsourcing parts of parenthood to screens. I jokingly say that children have not truly grown up unless they have fallen out of a tree at least once. Are kids missing out on essential childhood experiences because of technology?

Recently, I read two books that have deepened my understanding of these issues: Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again and Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. 

These books explore how the pervasive influence of technology is not only diminishing our ability to concentrate but also contributing to a rise in anxiety and depression. As a parent, these insights are alarming and vital, underscoring the urgent need for all of us to rethink how we approach technology in our homes and communities.

Hari claims that our collective failure to focus is caused by living in an “attentional pathogenic culture”. This culture’s constant flood of information and diversions makes prolonged focus nearly impossible for many. Social media and digital technology’s addictive design contributes to this dilemma. 

He highlights how technology platforms exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximise screen time. Social media’s unending scroll and immediate notifications are especially deceptive, taking our focus away from essential activities. He believes digital detoxes are useful but insufficient.

Free play

Haidt addresses the worrisome growth in youth mental health difficulties, particularly Gen Z, complementing Hari’s focus on attention. The “rewiring of childhood” is crucial to this dilemma, according to Haidt. He claims this rewiring began in the early 2010s when teens adopted smartphones and social media. Unlike earlier generations, Gen Z was involved in the digital environment from an early age, which shaped their mental and emotional development.

Haidt identifies two key factors driving the mental health crisis: the decline of unsupervised, play-based childhoods and the rise of smartphone-based formative years. In previous generations, children spent much time engaging in free play, which was crucial for developing resilience, independence, and social skills. This natural, unstructured playtime allowed children to explore their environments, solve problems and build social connections.

He says this generation has grown up with social media, which has changed how they interact with others. Online affirmation, the “comparison culture”, and dangerous content have all contributed to mental health issues, especially in young females. The elimination of traditional rites of passage and socialisation has made this generation more alone and vulnerable.

The insights from Stolen Focus and The Anxious Generation highlight a troubling trend: as parents, we may increasingly rely on screens as digital babysitters, inadvertently outsourcing essential aspects of parenthood to technology. Both books make it clear that this shift comes at a high cost. While screens offer convenience and short-term relief, they are also contributing to a broader crisis in attention and mental health. 

If we continue down this path, we risk depriving our children of the vital experiences and relationships that foster resilience, creativity, and deep focus. To protect their wellbeing and preserve the essence of childhood, we must reconsider how we integrate technology into our parenting.