Not sure about you, but most families we know are touched in some way by the mental health crisis. So, when we saw the title of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, we were intrigued.

In the fourth week of the month, as we turn our focus with you to Family Culture, Level 4 of your Trinity House, we’re happy to share 5 Family Culture takeaways we drew from Haidt:  

1. “We have overprotected our children in the real world while underprotecting them online.” Amen, Professor Haidt. Implicit in this statement are two mandates for Family Culture: nudge our kids out the door (and worry a lot less about the scrapes and falls) for the “play-based childhood” they deserve, and step up your online protection of your kids.  

2. Reflect on whether the sky-high “opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood” is worth it.“Opportunity cost” is the “loss of other potential gains when one alternative is chosen.” If our Family Culture is phone-based and passive, then we have made a decision to forego “other potential gains” our children could have known (no need to delineate all of those potential gains here…every parent knows deep down that the joys of a flourishing Family Culture are available to us in the deep end, away from the phone-based shallows). 

3. Reflect on the proven near-term cost our children pay for a phone-based childhood: “social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.” When we compare these maladies to a Family Culture rich in relationship, peace, attentiveness, and flourishing, the choice seems obvious.

4. Fill your Family Culture “with something noble and elevated” because if you don’t, “modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” Haidt continues, “That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.” Since the garbage pump is so powerful, parents today need to strive—by God’s grace, and in His peace—to infuse their homes with a love and attentiveness that, frankly, makes the phone seem like the reductionist tool that it is.      

5. Discuss Haidt’s “four norms” with your spouse: 1) “No smartphones before high school.” 2) “No social media before 16.” 3) “Phone-free schools.” 4) “More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.”  

These 5 takeaways are only the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to read an abbreviated (about a 45-minute read) distillation of the book, read his Atlantic essay, “End the Phone-Based Childhood Now.” It is so refreshing when social science delivers the same verdicts and evidence that we as Christian parents tend to make via theology, morality, ethics and common sense.

Parents who buck the trend of handing their young children a phone—and who instead double down on creating a Family Culture rich in play, true cultural pursuits, love, responsibility, attentiveness, and of course faith—take courage! By God’s grace, let’s trade the phone-based childhood for the heaven-in-our-home-based childhood, starting today!