A manual to help parents navigate the digital world.
The effects of screens on children are even worse than you can imagine: they can literally break down the human body. In her forthcoming book, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones, Clare Morell tells the story of an optometrist who discovered that an eight-year-old girl seeking relief from pain in her eyes no longer had Meibomian glands—which means her eyes cannot produce lubricating tears. Hours of daily digital screen time had trained the child to stare, which dried up her glands. At such a tender age she runs the risk of eventual blindness, as do thousands of other pediatric patients with her diagnosis. It is a fitting illustration of the tragic phenomenon that technology is having on human beings: pained children with blank stares who are unable to cry tears.
In a discussion with James Poulos, Morell explains that well-meaning parents should not simply set up safeguards to filter out the toxic effects of addictive technology. This is like advising a drug addict to use only less frequently, even though every dose is toxic, mind-altering, and possibly laced with a deadly synthetic.
Morell makes a compelling case for this analogy. She carefully documents the overwhelming negative health effects of screens on children. They desensitize young people so that they experience boredom after mere moments of time away from the frenetic pace of gaming, social media, or rapid short videos found on TikTok and Instagram. This means technology is neurologically stunting young users so that they cannot develop the inner quiet or self-control necessary to experience reflection.
Its effect on a brain, especially a developing young brain, is akin to drugs like cocaine. A small amount of exposure to screens releases dopamine, which triggers the feeling of pleasure without satisfaction. And an addict is formed. Because of the willful intent of tech companies, the parental controls that apps provide offer a false sense of security. Even the Bible app has holes that can lead to other, far less wholesome apps and content that the filters do not stop.
Screen time also correlates with an inability to regulate emotions, high anxiety, worsening symptomatic presentation for those on the autism spectrum, depression, and other kinds of mental illnesses and behavioral tics. Screens—from iPads in the little hands of toddlers in strollers or at the dinner table to gaming devices and smartphones with social media apps in the hands of pre-teens and teens—are clearly causing a host of negative outcomes in American children.
We’ve all seen the zombie-like kids staring at their digital devices as they sit with their families at a restaurant. They are physically there, but not present; networked to others, but self-absorbed; communicating, but unknown to those nearest to them; staring at airbrushed and AI-altered selfies, but unable to look into a real person’s eyes and hold a conversation.
Morell’s Tech Exit also marshals examples of the way social media apps are conduits for sex predators, pornographers, and sadists. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider that a 2022 study found that 73% of teenagers have been exposed to pornography without seeking it.
Sex in the pornography business is a gross perversion of the natural sexual complementarity between male and female. Online porn-pushers teach their young audiences that sex should not be monogamous, self-giving love done only within a sacramental union which often produces children. Instead, as Morell documents, contemporary pornography is frequently violent, pain-inducing, base, incestual—and even bestial. It does not create, it destroys. Unfortunately, pre-adolescent children with developing brains do not have to work hard to find sexual content online. Illicit material is ubiquitous on social media. Even when adults try to avoid it, popular sites like X promote for-profit sexual content to all of its users.
According to Morell in Tech Exit, the only solution is for adults to organize to force changes in law. Even the most well-meaning and diligent of parents simply cannot keep the flood of content from washing over their children. “But the best protection for all children is to pass laws that restrict these technologies out of childhood altogether,” Morell argues. “This is what our government has done for other dangerous substances and activities like tobacco, alcohol, buying lottery tickets, gambling, and even driving.”
Morell also offers practical advice to help parents purge their homes of addictive technology and search out like-minded families to build tech-free communities bonded by flesh-and-blood friendships. These little tech-free platoons will be the most immediate means of defending against the hordes while legislation is developed and passed that can dig deep moats around families.
A theme of the Trump era is protecting American youth. By executive order the Trump Administration announced that the Department of Education will be closing, and that states will be assuming all control over what young people are taught. Girls will no longer be subjected to the unjust and abusive practice of competing against boys who think they are girls. And the MAHA movement is motivated to optimize children’s chances of having physically and intellectually healthy lives. Moreover, Congress has mandated that the Chinese Communists are prohibited from controlling TikTok, the toxic information warfare app. To be sure, these are all necessary and welcome public policy changes.
But unless adults unplug children from the virtual world that is short-circuiting their kids’ minds, preventing them from receiving, and retaining information and deforming their souls, these good efforts will have limited results.
Parental Guidance
Amid the documentation of the ills and solutions in Tech Exit, Morell asks the most enduring and fundamental questions in this confused and confusing digital age. “What are people—and, in particular, what is childhood—for? When we consider that the peak of human flourishing is self-transcendence, it becomes sharply clear that these technologies are undermining more than just mental health.”
Childhood is that tender time when a young person ought to be given an ecosystem for the proper formation of his soul. This includes discovering the natural world, creating and learning through play, having conversations with other human beings, and reading books and being read to. Parents have a duty to encourage their children to know the permanent things, the things that are good, beautiful, and worthy of their children’s affection. As the famous Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon once said, “It is the tendency of things that are gazed at to get through the eyes into the mind and the heart.”
If parents do the hard work of curating an environment in which their children want to build tree forts and create make-believe worlds, they can be equipped to recognize the good themselves. And by discerning the good, their children stand a chance at navigating our complex, confusing world. By cultivating admiration for the noble and courageous, a child’s conscience will be informed and attuned to making choices that habituate him to be characterized by those very virtues.
If, on the other hand, parents and educators allow children to explore a chaotic virtual world on their own, they will be catechized by every wickedness that streams before them. The digital cocaine undermines their ability to feel, to enjoy, to love—to be fully alive.
Cutting the Strings
Vigen Guroian, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Loyola College, encourages parents to utilize classic fairy tales in their great mission of moral formation. In his book Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, Guroian commends the allegory of Pinocchio, along with several other classic fairy tales.
You know the familiar story. In Carlo Collodi’s novel Pinocchio, the carpenter Geppetto crafts a wooden puppet in the likeness of a young man—a boy. He wishes for Pinocchio, who has good buried in his hard wooden head, to become real. But Pinocchio is selfish, disobedient, intemperate, and foolish. His indulgence in selfishness and immediate gratification leads to misery, pain, and his own suffering, as well as that of others. It is only when Pinocchio makes wise choices for the benefit of others that he finds relief from his troubles, and his hard head gives way to a real boy of flesh. Making wise choices becomes habits, and habits become virtues in service of those he loves. Then, Pinocchio brings honor to his creator and satisfaction for himself without the rigidity and controlling strings of his days as a puppet.
Guroian outlines the societal problem:
And sometimes I also find myself doing what I often criticize in others, nervously rationalizing my laziness or unwillingness to cultivate conscience and a moral sense in my own children. Mostly we fall back on the excuse that we are respecting our children’s freedom by permitting them to determine right from wrong and to choose for themselves clear goals of moral living. But this is the paean of a false freedom that pays misdirected tribute to a deeply flawed notion of individual autonomy. We end up forfeiting our parental authority and failing to be mentors to our children in the moral life. This, I fear, is the actual state of things.
Over the past five years, accelerated by the COVID pandemic, millions of parents have outsourced their mentoring influence to foreign adversaries and tech giants behind the screens they unthinkingly hand to their children. And those mentors are infecting the minds and hearts of young people. They teach American youth that right is wrong, that victims are aggressors, and that heroes are colonizers. It is no wonder that the youth are often confused and frustrated, because they are deprived of the chance to be thoughtful and at ease.
This is why Clare Morell’s book is so important. More than an academic resource documenting the effects of technology, it is a call for drastic action, a call for parents to release their children from the devices that are robbing them of their tears and turning them into wooden puppets—a call for helping their children become real boys and girls.
