Christine Rosen on Protecting Kids in a Digital Age
In this episode, we dive into one of the most pressing issues facing families today: the impact of social media on children. With mounting evidence showing the risks tied to online platforms, what can parents do to safeguard their kids while navigating the digital world? Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and expert on technology, culture, and society, offers insight into how we can create safer online environments for the next generation.
About Christine Rosen
Along with being a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Rosen is a columnist for commentary magazine and one of the cohost of The Commentary Magazine Podcast. She is also a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and senior editor of The New Atlantis.
In September 2024, Rosen released, The Extinction of Experience, a book about how technology meditates our engagement with our surroundings, for better and for worse. She discuses how technology, particularly social media, is alienating us from each other in everyday life, especially in younger generations, and what we can do about it. Rosen is also a writer and senior editor of The New Atlantis: A journal of Technology and Society, where she covers the social impact of technology, bioethics, and the history of genetics.
Many of her essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
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Christine Rosen 0:00
I want to talk a little bit about technology in general, but specifically social media, and in particular, what it's doing to our kids. We all, all of us, if we're honest, know what it's doing to ourselves, those of us who are on it, and we've done a sort of massive social experiment over the last 10 to 15 years in using social media platforms, Facebook now meta, and not really assuming this was all for the good, right? This is a this is a positive development. Well, we're learning that it's not all good. So I want to talk a little bit about what the data and the research now tell us about some of the harms. And I am not a total Luddite, although I'm often accused of that Adam is correct that art. We have a lot of back and forth among the scholars, so we have some very libertarian economists on staff. And when Facebook or meta meta comes to meet with us pretty regularly, tell us what they're doing, we get to ask questions. And I'm always off in the corner with one of my other colleagues with my hand up, and they're like, don't ask her no, but we're gonna, we're gonna let you talk first, but we disagree, and we have debates. I've learned a lot from them, and hopefully they've done the same with me, and it's one of the things I love about being at AEI, is that we can have these intellectual discussions.
So I want to just look at the end of January. If anybody was watching the news. You might have seen all the tech company CEOs did their sort of annual migration to Washington, DC. Usually this is, you know, not, not very news making. They come. They come to send to the senators who then pretend to know something about technology, and nothing changes. But this last session was interesting because Mark Zuckerberg was confronted CEO of meta, with a bunch of parents who had come into the gallery in the Senate hearing room with pictures of their dead children, which they held up silently. And he was obviously very concerned about the optics of this. And at one point he stood up and he said, I'm sorry for everything you've all gone through. Now, if you followed Mark Zuckerberg. That's perhaps the most human moment he's ever elicited in public. So we were like, OK, Mark, but then he went on in his testimony to say something that was a flat out lie. He said the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes. That's a lie. We know it's a lie. We have the data. We have the evidence that that is a lie. And so one of the things that I want to talk about is how we understand who, where the responsibility lies with social media. Because as a parent, I have 217 year old boys, I used to be the kind of parent who's like, you know what this is? This is a problem for parents to solve at home. I don't, I don't think the federal government needs to get involved. You know, we need to just let parents just let parents decide on their own. I don't think that's true any longer, now that we know the harms that some of these platforms cause to children, we know, for example, by studying adolescent mental health, that since 2010 we've seen a rapid rewiring of childhood from what some social psychologists call play based childhood to a phone based experience, not just screen based, phone based, because since 2012 or so the massive use of smartphones among children has you see the skyrocketing use level, but you also see some new mental health challenges.
Heavy social media use is now a major cause of adolescent mental health issues, depression, anxiety, self harm, suicide has increased significantly, particularly among adolescents. And it's not just teenagers. Tweens are also experiencing some of these negative, harmful mental health effects as well. And you've probably seen some stories about this in the news here or there, but there's a lot of data, and you can track it to about 2011 2012 which is when the smartphone became ubiquitous in this country, and when kids started generally carrying smartphones around and having access to these platforms. It's not just depression, anxiety, self harm. There's some other interesting, broader trends that we see among young people in this country that should worry us a little bit, and that's attitude or worldview changes. So how they think of their world, how they think of the future. Psychologist named Gene Twenge has done research on levels of narcissism among younger generations of Americans. Those have been tracked in a series of studies for about the last 50 years, those are on the rise. So there's a higher level of Express narcissism among younger generations. And that's also been something that's been in the news a lot, right? They're all running around taking selfies of themselves. Oh, they're all on Instagram. It's terrible. But I was struck by a different finding, and this one concerns me more than the narcissism, which I think kids outgrow as they become adults in age, and that's pessimism. So the percentage of 12th graders. There's a survey called Monitoring the Future, which has been done every year since the 1970s and they ask a question about which is supposed to be a measure of narcissism.
The statement is, people like me don't have much of a chance at a successful life. So they asked this to 12th graders over the years. So in 1977 5% of girls and 8% of boys said, Yeah, I don't have much of a chance of a successful life. So very, very low numbers, that's increased by 68% among girls and 42% among boys since 2010 so you see this, the rates were below 10% for decade, decade, decade, and they've started to go up consistently. Now they're still under 50% so that's good, but that pessimism should worry us, because these are the people who are going to be taking care of all of us in a few decades. They're going to run this country. They're going to be in charge of all of the policy making decisions we need them to have, and we want them to have what I think is one of the greatest strengths of our own country, which is an optimism, an idea that they can solve problems, not a pessimism. But you can see this link tracking very closely to screen time and particularly to phone and social media use. So Pew Research, which I recommend if anybody wants to look at Internet data, if you want good, solid statistics, Pew Research, top of the line, great stuff. They found nearly half of American teens say they are online, quote, almost constantly. And here's some data. So 2021 most recent data on tweens, you know, middle schoolers, they're on screens, staring at screens of some sort, five hours and 33 minutes a day. Teenagers are on screens eight hours 40 minutes a day. That was a couple years ago. It usually goes up a little bit each year. So is this bad?
This is where the debates start. Right? People say, Well, we have to be tech savvy in order to know what to do in the future, we have to make sure our kids know how to use all this stuff, or else they'll be left out. There are arguments to be made about all of that, but I as a so I was trained as a historian, so I actually think there are definitely political and policy solutions to many questions, but I also think politics is downstream of culture, and what I mean by that is that the best solutions are those that come from people on the ground, people who are experiencing this with their kids. You guys, basically. So when we think through some solutions, and I'm going to tell you some of the stuff that I've been seeing and studying and some of the groups I've been talking to about this, it really does begin in the home. This is a this is a conservative idea that I embrace, parents have to really think about the choices you're making. And I joke only a little bit that we have to kind of all be a little bit more Amish.
So if you study the Amish, what they do before they bring in they do use technology. This is the stereotype of the Amish, is that they're fearful of zippers, and they won't ever use a technology. It's not true. They really they don't use zippers. Zippers are off the table, but what they do is they have a series of questions as a community that they ask before they introduce any technology into their homes. In particular, they so phones, for example, they ask questions. Is a phone going to disrupt the rhythm of our family time? You know, the way we sit around the table, and how we, what we do after a meal, and how we how we function as a family. And if it is, can we still have a phone, but put it somewhere else, not in the home. And that has been a solution for many Amish communities. The phones outside the home. So they use it because they need it for their for their work, but they don't have it inside the home. They do that with all kinds of technologies. And I think there's a there's an argument for all of us as parents to think about doing that ourselves when it comes to the use of these technologies. So at home, you know, there have been a number of projects you might have anyone heard of, wait until eighth. This is this, right? This is a group of parents.
I think it started in Texas. What they found because they all had middle schoolers, and for those of you who I'm on the other end of middle school. It doesn't really get better, but I try to pretend it does. Middle school is tough for kids, right? It's a really awkward age. Middle school is just terrible. And that's also when most kids want, or if they haven't gotten phones already, they really want the phone, right? And boy, is it. Is it a difficult thing to do to be the parent who doesn't give your kid the phone. My boys got a phone at the end of eighth grade, and I still hear about it. They're about it. They're about to graduate from high school, and they still say that was a terrible decision, mom. But I also had a couple of other parents in my in their friend group who had made that same decision. So groups like wait until eighth formalize that in a way. They get a whole group of parents together and say, we're all going to sign this thing that says none of our kids are getting a phone until eighth grade. And what that does is that the parents can say to the kids, you're not getting a phone, but neither all your friends. And that lessens the peer pressure and the demands for the phone, that that can work really, really well, but not for every community. So if you, if you're thinking about more collective action, I think, and that is, I know it sounds, sounds like a hippie, 60s phrase whenever I say it, but there's a conservative argument for collective action, which I will try to make the case for. And that's that, you know, those small parent groups might not be enough, given the saturation of technology and the widespread use, right? So there's some other options. If you are a parent in a private school situation where you have an administration at your school that actually listens to parents and cares about what. Parents think and cares about harms to children, which hopefully they do. You can argue for a phone, free school experience, and this is another thing parents across the country are starting to do public school parents, of which I am one, it's a little harder.
There's more bureaucracy, but you can go and you can say, look, here's the data. We know this is harmful to kids. We know it's distracting. The teachers don't really like the kids having the phones. Either we would like during the school hours, no phones. They either put them, lock them in the locker, or they put them in those bags. If you've been to a concert where nobody wants you to tape them, you know they have these wander bags. They have all kinds of interesting solutions. Kids can still have phones, but they can't have them out during class. So the schools that have experienced experimented with this, have had really good results. The teachers love this. They really do, because it allows them to actually talk to their students without the distractions of the phone. So that's another kind of collective action, a broader thing. Again, it takes parents stepping up and making some noise. You've got to be the squeaky wheel in those scenarios.
A third option in the sort of private space that I've heard from, and I'm happy to for anyone who's interested in doing this in a community here that's had some initial success in Birmingham. That was where, through church leadership, youth group leadership, in particular, a lot of parents were coming to a youth pastor in Birmingham, and they're like, We don't know what to do. We don't have any information. We don't know how to talk to our kids about this. So he started a little task force, and he enlisted other church leaders in the community, enlisted some educational leaders and some local political leaders, all of whom were parents with similar concerns, and they started a task force. And they're like, OK, first, we need to know what the problem is, lay it out, educate parents about it, answer their questions, and then try to come up with solutions. So they're in the very early stages of that, but they've had interesting success. So I was talking recently to the to the head of this task force. He said, well, people don't like bumper stickers. I was like, that's interesting. So they thought we'd get, they'd give out these awareness bumper stickers about, you know, low tech stuff. No, that didn't fly. But what did work is that they did an annual research report of like a page or two, just sort of saying, Here's what we know. Of the current research about social media by age, by gender, because it's different for boys than it is for girls.
We know a lot more about the risky ages for girls versus boys, and they just gave it out to parents at youth group meetings at schools, and they're like, look, this is information on the bottom was, if you have more questions, and they're now trying to build towards, you know, more educational meetings, bringing in more experts to talk to parents, and just helping parents have what they need to know to make decisions, both within their homes but also in their communities. So there that, I think, is a very promising small c conservative way of, you know, the little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them, these, these little little platoons of people who try to make things better, right? So we need more of that. That said, we also have law, right? Law is a useful tool. One of the ways that the social media companies are now finding that out is that they're starting to face lawsuits. There have been quite a few lawsuits filed here in the US. They have so far not been wildly successful because of the way we structure our technology laws. But in the UK, for example, some parents of a child who committed suicide after being terribly bullied on a social media platform won a judgment against meta of quite a large sum, and that actually shifted how meta did some of their business in the UK. So I often talk with groups of technology folks, and we have these meetings, these off the record meetings, and I was in one where those of us who weren't in the tech industry, but who study it, we're all sitting around and we're offering our earnest solutions. And there's one woman at the end of the table just looking at everyone, shaking her head. And I was like, we haven't heard from you. She's a prosecutor. She goes, we just need to sue here and here. And she listed. She's like lawsuits actually can be quite effective at prodding large companies to think about how they might change. And I thought it was interesting, and she did make a fairly good case for some of it, and she slightly scared the representative from meta, which was also interesting. But legislation can also have some benefits. So here in Tennessee, in your state legislature, there's a bill that's been proposed about social media being limited to people over the age of 18, requiring age verification.
I know a lot of you probably watched Marsha Blackburn recently. She's been on top of a lot of this with the kids Online Safety Act. She's very good at grilling the tech CEO. She's actually, I enjoyed watching her do that, not just because, when you try to, I meet with their their people fairly regularly, companies like meta and Tiktok, and they're very smooth. They're very good lobbyists. And when you ask them, they'll tell you things like, you know, we hear your concerns, and we we have all these new parental controls for Instagram and like, if your daughter's on Instagram and looking at things that might be harming her, she'll get a prompt saying, Do you really want to keep looking at this? She's like, isn't that great? I was like, Do you have a prompt that says close the app? She's like, Well, no, okay, so they're very good at kind of wanting to be regulated, or acting as if they do. Want to be regulated, but they're not, and they know there aren't consequences their kids as young as 11 and 12 on these platforms regularly. The companies have known that from the beginning. They are happy with that, because they're capturing an audience at a very young age who will stick with them over time and over different platforms, and they have a huge amount of data on your children, which your kids have no right to the it's their data. So I think that some of these pieces of legislation are going to prove to be a good prod for these companies.
I think they will face a lot of scrutiny in the courts, and we've seen that already. There's a lot of concern about free speech, and I'm a pretty staunch free speech person, but when it comes to kids, there are a lot of things we don't let kids do. My kids can't go get a tattoo right now, or smoke cigarettes, buy cigarettes. They might be able to smoke them. They can. They can't buy cigarettes. They can't buy alcohol. They can't they just both got their driver's licenses, if you're ever in DC and like, northwest area of DC, just, you know, drive a little more carefully there, but they they had. The state actually does impose limits on what kids can do and what kids have access to. We do it all the time. We have seat belt laws that we didn't used to have. I'm 50 years old. I'm a Gen Xer. I remember getting in the back of my grandma's enormous, enormous Buick, and she was sitting on two phone books because she was a very small lady, and we would roll around in the back of the Buick with no seat belts on. I mean, it was incredibly dangerous, and she'd be chain smoking. And you look back and you're like, you know, law can do some good things, right? Law has a place, and we have to come to some agreement about that. So one of the things very encouraging, both about the Blackburn, the Cosa bill, and some of the others moving through the Senate and the House.
They're all they're actually all bipartisan, genuinely bipartisan. I mean, Tom Cotton sponsored a bill with, like the most liberal senator from Hawaii. These two don't get they don't agree on anything. They came to an agreement on this. So it is one of the few areas in a very polarized political culture, where both sides have some sense that something needs to be done. Both sides also get a lot of money from technology companies, which now out lobby Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms combined. They spend a huge amount of money on Capitol Hill and in advertising, and they have resources that are very difficult to challenge, if you're you know a researcher who's like, I found out this stuff is bad. Well, I had a friend who shall remain nameless, who found out a lot of stuff about things like infinite scrolling, all the stuff that's built into these platforms and the design of the platforms, how this was bad for people, because it was kind of like machine gambling, like they couldn't stop playing the slot. She's like, it seems like this was designed to make people addicted to it. And they were like, you're absolutely right. That's such interesting research. And they hired her. She works for Apple now, so, and you know, she was, she was an academic.
I mean, her salary quintupled in a moment. And she's trying to do the ethical thing and do good work there. But they do have a lot of people who are trying to design this stuff. So that's another area where I think it's important to think about the design and the platforms. What I don't have any tolerance for any longer are either my lovely libertarian colleagues or people lawmakers who say it's up to parents. It's all on us. So if your kid gets hooked on this stuff or is getting blackmailed or extorted over pictures that were stolen from the cloud that they shouldn't have put on their phone. It's all up to us. I say that's wrong, that's wrong. That's not true anymore. That might have been true at the beginning, but now we know enough to know that these platforms have been designed actively to get kids on them as early as possible with no repercussions. And they know, they know the harm they're doing. The Wall Street Journal has a series of technology reporters who've been doing excellent work, particularly on Instagram and on how Instagram functions and what they know and when they know it. And it's horrifying to read. I mean, the irresponsibility of these companies when it comes to our kids and what's happening to our kids is pretty appalling. It's also harming not just mental health, not just sort of kids views of their future. It's actually kind of making them dumber. Arguably, there are some, you know, we do global scores and reading and math and science. This is an international student assessment, and the scores for reading math and science in particular, began plummeting worldwide in all the countries where you also saw heavy infiltration of smartphone use, around 2010 2011 2012 the same. You know, when you when you kind of reach peak capacity, with the with most people owning a smartphone, kids, scores are going down. And there's, you know, there's lots of arguments for why that's happening, but the idea that having this amazing thing in your hand, with the world's knowledge at your fingertips, would make all our kids geniuses not panning out so far, not panning out. So a couple other things, couple other platform fixes that could be done again.
These are going to be hard to persuade the large companies to do unless they face some threat, whether it's heavier regulation. Shouldn't, or maybe lawsuits, but things like infinite scroll. Anyone who uses an Instagram or looks at the reels, right? It never stops. Tiktok is actually the absolute master of this. You could design a platform, especially if you if you age, age limit it. You could say, you know, if you're under 16, infinite scroll isn't available, and what that would do is actually slow down what these kids are consuming. So as adults, that's where I do become libertarian. I'm like, if we just want to infinitely scroll ourselves into oblivion, that's fine. We're adults. But for kids, you could build that in, right? If you have some sort of actual age gate, keeping the algorithms that encourage us, as Spencer was saying, it's designed to make you forget time. It literally is like a casino. You go in a casino, right? There are no clocks, no windows, that's so you lose track of time, so you forget kind of you don't have those things that remind you to get out or to don't sell your clothes, to do one more trick at the blackjack table. These platforms are designed with those same principles. There's a wonderful book called very scholarly, but extremely well written, called addiction by design that looks at machine gambling. And if you look at how it's the behavioral and operant conditioning principles, you know the BF Skinner stuff, you know the pellet, the food, intermittent reward. That's exactly how these platforms are designed. And we know it when we use them, we can see it happening to ourselves, right? It's much more dangerous for kids whose prefrontal cortexes aren't there yet, right? I mean, this is why they can't rent cars until they're 25 they're not fully developed yet. So that is actually activating and encouraging parts of their brains that are long term going to make it harder for them to exercise more control later. So those platform fixes are possible but difficult.
Finally, some other policy fixes. These are things where, again, maybe not by legal routes, but by encouraging these companies with threats of litigation or for regulation, things like basic things don't have geolocation on for if kids are using your app, people should be able to track where your kids are higher privacy bars, you know, in terms of the kind of information that shared across platforms and the nudges. The nudges not just the algorithms that keep you infinitely scrolling. There's lots of things that these platforms design to nudge you to certain behavior. So the somebody once asked me, like, what's the most devastating technology thinking, I'm going to say like, a nuclear bomb, because I just seen Oppenheimer. I was like, is the like button on Facebook that destroyed civilization? Because that suddenly people started chasing the likes, right? Just like they had originally been chasing the number of friends. Then it was likes. I need to. Need the likes. Need the likes. Need the likes. Same thing on Instagram, which is also obviously owned by Facebook, meta, same idea they built into their things that encourage the worst sort of our lizard brains to want to seek approval, to want to seek reaction. And so those things, those are design choices. We can change the design of these things just like we've changed the design of the way we build bridges now, we could do that with these platforms, if there's the motivation for that. So finally, I'll go a little broad here, and then I'll open it up to questions, because I just, I finished a book that is sort of a screed. I know I'm so optimistic and positive tonight, right? Aren't you all like, Oh, we're going to fix this. I'm a little, I'm a little pessimistic about some of the very optimistic about what we can do as communities and as parents and as small groups. I think we can actually accomplish a lot.
But here's what I want to leave you with, in terms of thinking about what to do when you're looking at your own kid who's staring at a phone, these devices are changed. They have world view shaping possibilities. And by that I mean these kids today are raised with toys that talk to them, baby monitors that watch them, devices that entertain them constantly. They've done studies now where kids will open books and try to swipe it literally changes the way that people, most children today, are never taught there. Most are taught some basic handwriting, but often after they're taught keyboarding, very few kids today are taught how to write in cursive. And I know this might this is where I become a history fuddy duddy, but that means they can't read our founding documents, which are written in cursive, written in script. That means they can't read a lot of things that are that are never going to be on Google, but are sitting in archives that have something to teach us and have something to remind them about what their history as human beings and what in particular their history as Americans means. There's also cognitive benefits to learning to handwrite before you learn to type or swipe. There's all kinds of research about cursive handwriting and what it means for reading, analysis, later, for kids. So we actually know that these things have value beyond just being able to sign your name, which, by the way, ask an average high schooler to write their name in cursive.
It's horrifying. I make my sons do it. Sometimes make them write the grocery list. Sometimes like just practice writing. They never have to write chatgpt, by the way, is. Changing this, a lot of teachers are going back to the remember the blue books. I don't know how many of you grew up using blue books. I did. I'm an old person, but because they can't trust that the kids aren't using chatgpt During exam answers, so they're giving them blue books and a pen. And these kids are like, this going to take hours. They're like, that's fine. We know you won't cheat. So you know, that's a funny little Luddite moment. But what worries me is, for all of us, not just kids. We expect life on demand. We've become more impatient. We mediate things that we didn't use to mediate. I have a friend who's a longtime diplomat State Department, and she she told me a very scary story the other day. She said her the hardest part of her job now is training the younger diplomats. I was like, why? I mean, are they what they do. They not know about history. She's like they don't know how to interact with other human beings. She has to teach them how to shake hands and look people in the eye and to listen in a conversation without, you know, being distracted by doing something else. It's a skill. These are human skills. We were actually designed to look each other in the face and to build trust in person, with each other, in smaller groups, and we now live in a world where so much of that is mediated, and we now have an audience of, you know, the entire globe with just a touch of a finger.
And that changes how we see ourselves as people, I think, and it changes what changes how we treat the most vulnerable. So I've been talking a lot about kids, but one of the stories in my book that really concerns me, because we will all be at this point in our lives one day, was the story of a man who was in a hospital in California and he was very sick, and when it came time to tell him that he was actually terminally ill, a telerobot came in and it had an iPad with the screen of an actual doctor who then delivered this news to him. And this was actually in a story about how telemedicine and all this, all these great things look this guy gets a doctor giving him his his his diagnosis. And I was horrified by this. That's a moment where a human being needs to look another human being in the eye and say, I'm sorry, this is the news I have to give you. And if we start thinking that there's no difference between those two things, we start losing something important about what it means to be human. And I think we are headed in because we enjoy the convenience, we enjoy the possibility. We are headed in that direction, and we are not thinking about the choices we're making along the way. And so I really hope we will think about that.
I talked to a lot of teachers, and one of the things they say is that their job has become much more difficult because all the kids, even the best behaved kids, have a I actually says they have a they're used to a supernatural level of stimulation in their everyday life. So one, one thing I'll suggest leaving as a sort of just as something all families should try to do more of, is just open, free play time for your kids. No screens, just like let them go wild doing whatever it is, but without a screen, without meeting and without us as parents meddling in the play. I had twin boys, and so as you can imagine, there was like constant crashing and things being thrown around when they were young. And I'd always have to be like, nobody screamed, nobody's harmed, like the dog isn't barking. It's fine, but this is what this kind of risky play. Again, as human creatures we were, we evolved that way to do that time, space, freedom. These are three things that a lot of kids don't get these days. They don't get that open time. They don't get that go out and play and come back when the street lights came on. That was what I heard as a kid. And a kid. They're monitored and tracked by us a lot more than they need to be, right? We want them to be safe, but they don't have to be as safe as astronauts going to the moon like we you know, we can scale it back for their sake. And these This allows them to learn things like self control, autonomy, confidence, a lot of the anxiety you see in kids these days, because they haven't been trusted to try stuff and fail. So those are all things that, although tech adjacent, I think our technology use often exacerbates.
These are the challenges of raising good human beings. But I would argue sometimes we're letting our technology make that harder than it needs to be. And it's not always, not always a benefit, although there are benefits to it. Do.
