Anti-phone childhoods and why I'm getting a strong personal urge to make work around this.
After reading The Anxious Generation and seeing my three year old pretend anything small and rectangular is her 'phone'- it's freaking me out enough to want to do something, now.
We’ve been careful, but I’m not sure it’s enough…
Even though my husband and I are super careful about the amount of time we spend on phones and screens in front of our 1 and 3 year old daughters, B (3) is constantly picking up something small and rectangular and saying it’s her phone.
Or the other day, she was swiping on a bubble bath bottle asking what I wanted to watch on the iPad 🫠…Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but after reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I’m all too aware of the slippery slope we could be on here.
We regularly let her watch a bit of Cbeebies when she was growing up and occasionally would pass her the iPad in the car when she got bored and tetchy on long car journeys - but now I’m thinking differently about how we do screen time and even telly, and hope our past habits aren’t reversible.
Halfway through reading The Anxious Generation, a friend told me Jonathan Haidt is widely criticised within the scientific community. Apparently he is known for picking and choosing data that supports his ‘clickbait’ book titles… but even with this in mind, the anecdotal, person-centered evidence in this book AND what we can all SEE and FEEL when we use smartphones and social media ourselves AS ADULTS - is undeniable.
When I returned to Instagram after sporadic use during maternity leave, it was shocking.
I’ve come to accept that using Instagram for both of my work hats (my business and artistic practice) is unavoidable, but I knew that I didn’t want it to steal focus from my baby and affect my mental health during my maternity leave, so I stepped away.
Of course I had all the good intentions of scheduling loads of stuff so my business didn’t stop whilst I was off, but did I get round to it approaching giving birth? Did I hell 🫠
Anyway. After some time just living in the real world and looking after baba, I came back to both my artist and business profiles and did a couple of posts on my first day ‘back’ when my youngest started with a childminder…
You know that feeling when you think ‘I’m feeling good, I’ll have another coffee to keep this going, to treat myself’? Then you have another coffee and feel…awful! Jittery, anxious, and claustrophobic in your own body ‘cause you can’t reverse the choice you just made?!
Well that’s how I felt after posting to Instagram after a break. I wasn’t posting anything personal or controversial and didn’t feel bothered about the outcome - the like/share/whatever metrics (and keep those hidden as a default) so WHY did I feel so wired and hyped up after hitting post?!
It’s clear to me that using a smartphone and social media is a wrecking ball for our nervous system - why would I want to give that to my child before their brains are fully developed?
The analogy Haidt uses of tech companies sending our children to live on Mars and hoping for the best is one that resonated with me a lot.
Why our phone use shatters their childhood if left unchecked
I get that we are living busy lives and the pressure to be constantly productive, working or ‘doing’ all the things on socials is MASSIVE - I’m juggling it all at the moment too as I try to weave work and earning back into being a mum of two - but I thought I’d share some bits from the book that made me sit up and take notice. (The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt)
“Although new technologies have long distracted parents from their children, smartphones are uniquely effective at interfering with the bond between parent and child. With notifications constantly pinging and interrupting, some parents attend to their smartphones more than to their children, even when they are playing together.”
Smartphones even have an impact on babies:
Infants in the first few weeks of life have enough muscular control to mimic a few facial expressions, and the many rounds of mutual gazing and face making are important means of fostering attachment between parents and children. Smartphones can disrupt this essential face-to-face interaction.
I’ve always had notifications turned off but weirdly, I notice the older generation doesn’t. This year I realised my mum wasn’t putting her phone on silent at night time so whatsapp messages would often wake her later at night!
This means when we hang out with grandparents there are constant dings and pings as they get what’s app/facebook/email notifications and often attend to them straight away, even if they’re in the middle of a conversation or game with the kids. Does anyone else find this?
Making art about this isn’t new -
I’ve been gently obsessed about our addiction to phones for a while now. Louise Orwin (my former business partner and brilliant artist) and I made a project waaaay back called Unplugged which was a one day long, 1 person experience about detaching yourself from your phone that took people from London to Whitstable, to the sea and back.
They ended up on a train to the coast without their phones but supplied with a handmade instruction book with a map, activities for their. hands and instructions for their IRL solo experience. We included some colouring-in (a giant I AM HERE NOW) and writing a postcard to someone to post in a postbox - mainly to start getting over the ‘awkwardness’ of not having something to look at or hold without a phone.
The experience helped them get used to being ‘unplugged’. They encountered some humans and found things we’d planted for them - switching into the mode of discovery and curiosity. Eventually they met with 6 other individuals who had been on the same experience, sharing a bottle of wine on the train back to London.
Louise and I were on the same train back, which we only revealed right at the end. Seeing this group of strangers chatting like old friends, with no phones in sight was magical.
We don’t really have any images or video of the project as it was 2017. Collecting content for Instagram would have been the complete anti-thesis of the concept!
Behind the scenes: the process of making new work
For a lot of my projects, there’s a deep research phase that involves lots of reading across science, philosophy, history, neuroscience and the big thinkers of our time.
I’ve often plonked down at Wellcome Collection library or the British Library for the day to let myself meander down multiple rabbit holes to see what sticks, fuelled by good coffee and too-expensive snacks.
This is my current bookstack at home 👆🏼 (the joys of being in Central London libraries all day hasn’t come back online since having kids 🫠).
If this is going to turn into a concrete project, the next stage will be about reading research, plus chatting to other parents about children, smartphones and their own phone use.
I’d love to hear what you think (and feel) about this. Feel free to drop a comment below about your use of phones with young children, or how much you allow your kids to be on phones and ipads etc.
I’m keen to keep this a respectful and judgement-free space, with lots of different opinions and experiences on the topic. I’m hoping Substack is the place for that…