Chapter 12 What Parents Can Do Now

Chapter 12

What Parents Can Do Now

In The Gardener and the Carpenter , the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that the word “parenting” was essentially never used until the 1950s, and only became popular in the 1970s. For nearly all of human history, people grew up in environments where they observed many people caring for many children. There was plenty of local wisdom and no need for parenting experts.

But in the 1970s, family life changed. Families grew smaller and more mobile; people spent more time working and going to school; parenthood was delayed, often into the 30s. New parents lost access to local wisdom and began to rely more on experts. As they did so, they found it easy to approach parenthood with the mindset that had led them to success in school and work: If I can just find the right training, I can do the job well, and I’ll produce a superior product.

Gopnik says that parents began to think like carpenters who have a clear idea in mind of what they are trying to achieve. They look carefully at the materials they have to work with, and it is their job to assemble those materials into a finished product that can be judged by everyone against clear standards: Are the right angles perfect? Does the door work? Gopnik notes that “messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once.” [1]

Gopnik says that a better way to think about child rearing is as a gardener. Your job is to “create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.” It takes some work, but you don’t have to be a perfectionist. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and the plants will do their thing, unpredictably and often with delightful surprises. Gopnik urges us to embrace the messiness and unpredictability of raising children:

Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys.... We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

In this book I have argued that we have vastly and needlessly overprotected our children in the real world. In Gopnik’s terms: Many of us have adopted an overcontrolling carpenter mentality, which prevents our children from flourishing. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices and failing to do much weeding. We let the internet and social media take over the garden. We have left young people to grow up in digital social networks rather than in communities where they can put down roots. Then we are surprised that our children are lonely, starving for real human connections.

We need to become thoughtful gardeners in both realms. In the following pages, Lenore and I offer specific suggestions for how to do that, organized by the age of the child (although some of the suggestions apply to more than one age). [2]

For Parents of Young Children (Ages 0 to 5)

In the first few years of life, children are developing basic perceptual and cognitive systems (such as vision, hearing, and language processing) and mastering basic skills (walking, talking, fine motor skills, agility skills like climbing and running). In the early years, as long as the child has a “good enough” environment with good nutrition, loving adults, and time to play, there is a limit to what parents can do to create better-than-normal outcomes. [3] What young children need is a lot of time to interact with you, with other loving adults, with other kids, and with the real world. Particularly in these years, and particularly in the United States, child care is an enormous and vexing puzzle. But these are the larger goals to keep in mind.

More (and Better) Experience in the Real World

As I discussed in chapter 3, attachment theory tells us that children need a secure base—a reliable and loving adult who will be there for them when needed. But the function of that base is to be a launching point for adventures off base, where the most valuable learning happens. Many of the best adventures are going to happen with other children, in free play. And when that play includes kids of mixed ages, the learning is deepened because children learn best by trying something that is just a little beyond their current abilities—in other words, something a slightly older kid is doing. Older kids can also benefit from interacting with younger kids, taking on the role of a teacher or older sibling. So, the best thing you can do for your young children is to give them plenty of playtime, with some age diversity, and a secure loving base from which they set off to play.

As for your own interactions with your child, they don’t have to be “optimized.” You don’t have to make every second special or educational. It’s a relationship, not a class. But what you do often matters far more than what you say , so watch your own phone habits. Be a good role model who is not giving continuous partial attention to both the phone and the child.

Also, trust young children’s deep desire to help out. Even at age 2 or 3, children can put the forks on the place mats or help load the washing machine. Providing children with responsibility around the house makes them feel like an essential part of the family, and giving them more responsibility as they grow could offer some protection against later feelings of uselessness. In fact, a rising number of adolescents now agree with the statement “My life is not very useful.”? [4]

Less (and Better) Experience on Screens

Smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions are not suitable for very young children. Compared with other objects and toys, these devices transmit intense and gripping sensory stimulation. At the same time, they encourage more passive behavior and information consumption, which can delay learning. This is why most authorities recommend against making screens a part of daily life in the first two years, and using them sparingly until the age of 6 or so. [5] The child’s brain is “expecting” to wire up in a three-dimensional, five-senses world of people and things.

But one kind of screen time may be valuable in moderation: interacting with family members or friends via FaceTime, Zoom, or other video platforms. A key insight gained from research on screens and young children is that active , synchronous virtual interactions with other humans—what most of us call a video chat—can foster language learning and bonding, while passive , asynchronous viewing of a prerecorded video yields minimal benefits and in some cases even backfires and disrupts language learning, particularly for those under 2 years old. [6]

Expert advice on screens is clear and somewhat consistent across the Western world. [7] A representative set of recommendations that seem reasonable to me comes from the American Academy of Child the train Max needed for the last mile home was not running that night. Max was nervous, but he improvised. He walked upstairs from the subway station and hailed a yellow cab—which I had taught him how to do but he had never done on his own—and made it home safely at 1:00 a.m. From that day on he was a different person, with more confidence, and from that day on we treated him differently and gave him still more independence. Jayne and I would not have said yes to Max’s request had we not let him walk to school years earlier, and grown to trust him without tracking his blue dot at every moment.

Less (and Better) Experience on Screens

“It’s been so nice getting to interact with you for these past six years. Here’s your first device.”

Figure 12.1. H. Lin, in The New Yorker . [17]

Children in elementary and middle school are doing a lot of learning, and screen-based activities can play a valuable role. However, for many children, time spent on screens expands like a gas to fill every available moment, and the content of that gas is almost entirely entertainment, not educational. So it is not enough to just delay the first smartphone until high school; parents need to keep a lid on total screen-based activities because of the high opportunity cost that they impose and the habits they create. Parents should also be mindful of the behaviors they model. [18]

The average 8-to-12-year-old spends between four and six hours a day on recreational screen activities, across multiple screens. [19] This is why most medical authorities and national health organizations recommend that parents place a limit on total recreational screen time for children in this age range. The government of Quebec offers representative guidance in a concise form with the right level of flexibility:

For 6-to-12-year-olds: As a general rule, no more than two hours per day is recommended for screen-based recreational activities. However, this depends on the content (social media, video games, chats, TV, and so forth), the context (time of day, multitasking, and so on), and the young person’s individual traits (age, physical and mental health, analytical skills, critical thinking, and so on). Parental supervision must therefore be based on these criteria. For younger children especially, the content should be educational, and the devices should be used in common areas, where adults can control the content, rather than in children’s bedrooms.

Drawing from the various lists of recommendations, and from the research presented earlier in this book, I offer the following additional suggestions:

Learn how to use parental controls and content filters on all the digital devices in your home. You want your children to become self-governing and self-controlled, with no parental controls or monitoring by the time they reach age 18, but that does not mean you should immediately give them full independence in the online world before their frontal cortex is up to the task. Tech companies employ tools that will hook children, so use parental controls in this age range to fight back. And if it makes sense for your family, set a total amount of time for recreational screen use. Time limits can be complicated to work out, and they can backfire if set too high (the child will then try to “use up” all available time [20] ). But if you don’t set a total limit, the platforms will grab more and more time, including sleep time. Some parents use monitoring programs that allow them to read their children’s texts and other communications. There may be cases in which this is necessary, but in general I think it is preferable to avoid monitoring private conversations and to focus instead on blocking access to age-inappropriate sites and apps, and specifying times when devices can and cannot be used. It is possible to overprotect in the virtual world, especially when it shades over into surveillance, sometimes without the child’s knowledge. Visit CommonSenseMedia.com for guidance on using parental controls. [21]

Focus more on maximizing in-person activity and sleep than on total screen hours. The main harm done by most screen activities is the opportunity cost, which directly drives two of the four foundational harms that I described in chapter 5: social deprivation and sleep deprivation. If your children are spending a lot of time in person with friends, such as on sports teams or in unstructured play or hangouts, if they are getting plenty of sleep, and if they show no signs of addiction or problematic use on any devices, then you may be able to loosen up on the screen-time limit. Likewise, playing video games with a friend, in person and in moderation, is better than playing alone in one’s room. Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift , recommends no more than 40 minutes a night on school nights, and no more than an hour a day on weekends. [22] However, many families use the rule of allowing longer periods, but only on weekends. As with social media use, limits are hard to impose if you are the only family imposing them, so try to coordinate with the parents of your child’s friends. When many families impose similar limits, they break out of the collective action trap and everyone is better off.

Provide clear structure to the day and the week. As we saw in chapter 8, structuring time and space is a precondition for rituals and other communal activities, which strengthen the feeling of belonging in a community—even one as small as a two-person family. Shared meals should be phone-free so that family members attend to each other. Having a regular family movie night would be good. Be wary of allowing devices in bedrooms at these younger age, but if you do, then all devices should be removed from bedrooms by a fixed time, which should be at least 30 minutes before the scheduled bedtime. [23] Consider taking a “digital Sabbath” every week: a full day where no screen devices are used. Consider taking a screen-free week every year, perhaps on a vacation in a beautiful natural setting.

Look for signs of addiction or problematic use. Screen-based activities are fun, and video games in particular are widely enjoyed by nearly all children in this age range. As I showed in chapter 7, video games in moderation do not seem to be harmful for most children, and yet there is a large subgroup of children and adolescents (in the ballpark of 7%) who end up either truly addicted or else showing signs of what is called problematic use, which means that the activity is interfering with other areas of functioning. Pornography, social media, and video games are the three categories of activity most likely to lead to problematic use among adolescents, and years of problematic use may cause lasting changes, as Chris discussed in chapter 7 when he said he feels like a “hollow operating system.” The American Psychological Association offers these guidelines for recognizing “problematic social media use,” but they apply fairly well to any screen-based activity.

Your child’s social media use might be causing problems if:

it interferes with their daily routines and commitments, such as school, work, friendships, and extracurricular activities

they experience strong cravings to check social media

they lie or use deceptive behavior to spend time online

they often choose social media over in-person social interactions

it prevents them from getting at least eight hours of quality sleep each night

it prevents them from engaging in regular physical activity

they keep using social media even when they express a desire to stop

If your children show one or more of these signs, you should talk to them. If they can’t self-correct immediately, or if they are showing multiple signs, then take steps to remove access for a period of time to allow for a digital detox and dopamine reset. Consult sites that specialize in advice for video game and social media addiction. [24]

Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16. Let your children get well into puberty, past the most vulnerable early years, before letting them plug into powerful socializing agents like TikTok or Instagram. This doesn’t mean they can never see any content from these sites.; as long as they can get to a web browser, they’ll get to the platforms. But there’s a difference between viewing TikTok videos on a browser and opening an account on TikTok, which you reach via the app on your smartphone during every spare moment. Opening an account is a major step in which adolescents provide personal data to the platform, put themselves into a stream of personalized content chosen by an algorithm to maximize engagement, and begin to post content themselves. Delay that fateful step until well into high school.

Talk with your preteen about the risks, and listen to their thoughts . Even without a social media account, all children will encounter age-inappropriate content online. Exposure to pornography is virtually certain. Talk with your preteens about the risks inherent in posting public content or sharing personal information online, including sexting and cyberbullying. Ask them what problems they see in their peers’ online habits, and ask them how they think they can avoid such problems themselves. [25]

You have to let go online eventually. But if you can keep the quantity of online time lower and the quality higher in this long period of childhood and early adolescence (ages 6–13), you’ll make room for more real-world engagement, and you’ll buy time for your child’s brain to develop better self-control and less fragmented attention.

For Parents of Teens Ages 13–18 (High School)

Consistent with the notion of a path to adulthood, the transition to high school should be a major milestone at which adolescents get an increase in freedoms and responsibilities in the real world and in the virtual world.

More (and Better) Experience in the Real World

Adolescents have nearly all begun puberty by the time they start high school, and this is the period when rates of depression and anxiety start to rise more steeply. In earlier chapters, I made the case that helping young people feel useful and connected to real-world communities is pivotal to their social and emotional development, so it is important that adolescents take on some adult-level challenges and responsibilities. Finding non-parental role models also becomes more valuable during this period.

Increase their mobility. Let your teens master the transportation modes that make sense for where you live: bicycles, buses, subways, trains, whatever. As they grow, so should the boundaries of their world. Encourage them to get their driver’s licenses as soon as they are eligible, and give them driving lessons and encouragement to use the car, if you have one. Encourage more and better off-base excursions with friends. Let your teen hang out at a “third place” (not home or school) like the Y, the mall, the park, a pizzeria—basically, a place where they can be with their friends, away from adult supervision. Otherwise, the only place they can socialize freely is online.

Rely more on your teen at home. Teens can cook, clean, run errands on a bicycle or public transit, and, once they turn 16, run errands using a car. Relying on your teen is not just a tool to instill work ethic. It’s also a way to ward off the growing feeling among Gen Z teens that their lives are useless. One 13-year-old told Lenore that when she started doing more things on her own, including runs to the drugstore for her mom, and getting herself places without being driven, she started to realize just how much time her mom spent doing boring, thankless things like carpooling and sitting through freezing soccer games. Once she started empathizing with her mom—and helping out more—the two stopped fighting as much because, in a way, now they were on the same team.

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job. Having a boss who is not a parent is a great experience, even when it’s not a pleasant one. Even one-off gigs are good. Shoveling a neighbor’s driveway requires talking to an adult, negotiating a fee, and completing the task. Earning your own money—and having control over how it is spent—is an empowering feeling for a young person.

Find ways for them to nurture and lead. Any job that requires guiding or caring for younger children is ideal, such as a babysitter, camp counselor, or assistant coach. Even as they need mentors themselves, they can serve as a mentor to younger kids. Helping younger kids seems to turn on an empathy switch and a leadership gene. Lenore saw this happen the first time her younger son went on a Boy Scout overnight camping trip, at the age of 11. He was beyond excited. He was also beyond unprepared: He forgot his sleeping bag. Oh, did he cry when he realized that; he thought he’d be sent home. Then an older Scout—a high school student—said, “Don’t worry! I always bring an extra sleeping bag for just this kind of situation!” Lenore’s son was grateful, and so was she when she heard the story. Lenore was even more grateful years later when she learned that in fact the older Scout had not brought an extra sleeping bag. He slept on the cold, hard ground. That’s how you become a leader.

Consider a high school exchange program . These have a long history. A visitor to England in 1500 wrote, “Everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.” [26] Yes, even in medieval Britain, people realized this experience would broaden a kid’s world. It can also be easier for a kid to listen to someone other than Mom or Dad. One modern-day program to consider is the American Exchange Project. [27] It sends high school seniors from all over the United States to spend a week with a family in another state, in the hopes of weaving a polarized country back together. And it’s free! Meanwhile, the American Field Service has been sending high school students all over the globe for decades. [28] Teens live with a family and attend the local school. Alternatively, you can host a student from abroad. [29] CISV International, pioneered by the child psychologist Dr. Doris Allen, fosters intercultural friendship through exchanges and other youth programming beginning at age 11. There are CISV chapters in more than 60 countries around the world. [30]

Bigger thrills in nature. Let your teens go on bigger, longer adventures, with their friends or with a group: backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, hiking, swimming—trips that get them out into nature and inspire real-world thrills, wonder, and competence. Consider programs that run a month or longer with organizations such as Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School, which are designed to foster self-reliance, social responsibility, self-confidence, and camaraderie (and do not require prior outdoor experience). There are also a number of free or subsidized programs, [31] as discussed in chapter 10. [32] As Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, explained,

There is more to us than we know. If we can be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to settle for less. There exists within everyone a grand passion, an outlandish thirst for adventure, a desire to live boldly and vividly through the journey of life.

Take a gap year after high school. Many young people go directly to college without any sense of what else is out there. How are they supposed to know what they want to do with their lives—or even whether college is their best option? Let young adults discover more about their interests and about the world. They can get a job and save up money. Travel. Volunteer. They are not damaging their college prospects. They are improving their chances of finding a path they want to pursue, and they are improving their competence at following any path. A gap year is intended not to postpone a young person’s transition to adulthood but rather to accelerate it. It’s a year to build skills, responsibility, and independence. You can find a list of organizations that can help your teen plan a gap year at gapyearassociation.org. Scholarships and subsidies are often available. [33]

The idea behind all of these suggestions is to let teens grow more confident and competent by engaging with the real world. Encourage activities that stretch them beyond their comfort zone. Yours too! Risking a serious injury for no good reason is dumb. But some risk is part of any hero’s journey, and there’s plenty of risk in not taking the journey too.

Less (and Better) Experience on Screens

The teen years should be a time of loosening restrictions as teens mature and gain greater ability to inhibit impulses and exercise self-control. The frontal cortex is not fully developed until the mid-20s, but a 16-year-old can and should be given more autonomy and self-determination than a 12-year-old.

Whenever you transition your teens from basic phones to smartphones, talk to them and monitor how the transition is going. You should continue to set parameters within which they have autonomy, such as maintaining family rules about when phones and other devices can and cannot be used. High school students are even more likely to be sleep deprived than middle school students, so help your teen develop a good evening routine, one in which the phone is removed from the bedroom by a set time each night. Most of my students say that the last thing they do at night before closing their eyes is to check their texts and social media accounts. It’s also the first thing they do in the morning before getting out of bed. Don’t let your children develop this habit.

Whenever you let your children open social media accounts, look out for signs of problematic or addictive use. Ask them how their online lives are helping them to achieve their goals, or hindering them. Educate them about how social media works and how it hooks and harms many users by going through the “Youth Toolkit” and other resources at the Center for Humane Technology. [34]

I want to make one final point, about how smartphones changed parent-child relationships. Around 2012, when adolescents started getting smartphones—and when those anxiety graphs shot upward—something else happened: Their parents got smartphones too. Those smartphones gave parents a new superpower that they did not have in the era of flip phones: the ability to track their children’s movements at every moment. Lenore pointed out to me that this could be part of the reason for increased anxiety and decreased confidence. Parents began to surveil their children everywhere, such as when they’re on their way to school, or when they’re hanging out with their friends after school. If anything looked unusual, the parent could call or text right away, or could grill the child about her activities when she returned home. Whether we think of the phone as “the world’s longest umbilical cord” or as an “invisible fence,” childhood autonomy plummeted when kids started carrying them. Even if a parent rarely looks at the tracker, and even if a kid never summons Mom to come get him because his bike chain broke, the fact that this is always possible makes it more difficult for children and adolescents to feel that they are on their own, trusted and competent. And it makes it more difficult for parents to let go.

Lenore and I have debated the merits of tracking for years. Jayne and I began tracking our children as soon as we gave them phones, and we know it made it easier for us to let them out earlier to begin their free-range childhoods in New York City. But as I have heard Lenore describe the growing surveillance of children and the computer-assisted monitoring of their academic performance, sometimes with instant notification of grades and daily updates on classroom behavior, I have begun to feel creeped out. And even though tracking helped Jayne and me gain confidence in our kids when they were young, and it helps us now to manage family logistics, such as when everyone will get home for dinner, will we ever turn it off? Should we? I don’t know the answer.

In Sum

Being a parent is always a challenge, and it has become far more challenging in our era of rapid social and technological change. However, there is a lot that parents can do to become better “gardeners”—those who create a space in which their children can learn and grow—in contrast to “carpenters” who try to mold and shape their children directly.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the real world, it should be to give your children far more unsupervised free play, of the sort you probably enjoyed at that age. That means giving them a longer and better play-based childhood, with ever-growing independence and responsibility.

If you do one thing to be a better gardener in the virtual world, it should be to delay your children’s full entry into the phone-based childhood by delaying when you give them their first smartphone (or any “smart” device). Give only basic phones before the start of high school, and try to coordinate with other parents so that your children do not feel that they are the only ones without smartphones in middle school.

There are many other ways to increase your children’s engagement with the real world and embeddedness in communities, including sending them to a technology-free sleepaway camp, going camping, and helping them find additional settings in which they can hang out with other children who are not carrying smartphones.

As your children get older, increase their mobility and encourage them to find part-time jobs and ways to learn from other adults. Consider an exchange program, a summer wilderness program, and a gap year.

A free-range childhood is more likely to produce confident, competent young adults, with lower levels of anxiety, than is a childhood ruled by safetyism, fear, and constant adult supervision. The biggest obstacle is the parents’ own anxiety about letting a child out of sight, unchaperoned by an adult. This takes practice, but the ultimate pleasure of being able to trust your child outweighs the temporary anxieties of letting go.

Most authorities recommend little or no screen time in the first 18–24 months (other than video calls with family members) and limited screen time through the age of 5 or 6.

For children in elementary and middle school, use parental controls, provide clear limits, and designate some times and places as no-device zones. Look out for signs of problematic or addictive use.

Your actions as a parent can contribute to solving the collective action problem. If you delay giving your child a smartphone, it makes it easier for other parents to do so. If you give your child more independence, it makes it easier for other parents to do so too. If you do it together, with other families, it will make it easier still, and more fun.