When I was a kid in the 90s, my parents would often take me and my three younger siblings to a playground or, if the weather was bad (and in northeast Ohio, it often was), to the PlayPlace at McDonald’s. In retrospect, this surely had its downsides. The ball pit was unsanitary, the food probably worse than cardboard, and I vaguely remember being bitten by a kid my age when I wouldn’t vacate the slide. But we were kids, enjoying the innocence of childhood: laughing, shouting, running around, returning to the table only for another bite of french fries.

In the years since, McDonald’s has closed nearly all of its PlayPlaces (including the one we frequented). On X, Nancy French recently shared a “heart breaking” photo of what has replaced the playground at one location in Tennessee: two plastic chairs in front of two computer screens, a poignant symbol of childhood in the twenty-first century.

Childhood and Properly Formed Loves 

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors agree that “the beginning is the most important part of every work.” At a “young and tender” age, a child’s soul is easily moldable and, once formed, tends to harden into concrete. The book of Proverbs declares a similar rule: train children up in the way they should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it.

After laying down this principle, Socrates turns to, of all things, music, claiming that a young child’s musical education is “most sovereign” because, more than anything else, it vigorously grabs hold of “the inmost part of the soul,” thereby forming his loves “before he is able to grasp reasonable speech.” The music we listen to shapes what we love and hate, what we judge as beautiful and ugly, what we hold just or unjust. 

Following Socrates’ lead, Allan Bloom warned in the 1980s that children’s addiction to the artificial exaltation of rock ‘n’ roll made it very difficult for them to take their education seriously. His point was not to lament falling standardized test scores or an unprepared workforce—or even to moralize about the lyrical content of contemporary music. Rather, Bloom sounded the alarm that, without “strong counterattractions,” Generation X would be dominated by their immature passions. They would not know the “pleasures of reason” and, therefore, would not know how to live the good life.

Rather than vibrantly loving what is lovely and hating what is hateful, many of Bloom’s students, it seemed to him, have had “the color … drained out of their lives,” as if they were recovering from “a serious fling with drugs.” How can the serious study of great texts compete with the spectacle of, say, the Rolling Stones or Michael Jackson? Why would children need to cultivate an imagination when a constant stream of pop music overflows with graphically sexual and violent lyrics? What chance do the habits of the contemplative or prayerful life have against the raw and unearned emotions of contemporary music?

Of course, Bloom admitted, most adults recover from this adolescent obsession and eventually accept the grim responsibility and drudgery of work until they retire (and then die). But, as philosopher Zena Hitz writes, “If I work for the sake of money, spend money on the basic necessities for life, and organize my life around working, then my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work.” If I never ask whether there is something worth doing for its own sake or what “the chief end of man” is, I’ll have no choice but to chase after the wind.

If Bloom was right—that rock music desensitized Generation X to the fundamental questions and deepest joys of life—then digital technology poses an even greater threat to Generation Alpha. For one, the problem is widespread. According to a study by Common Sense Media, more than two-thirds of 8-year-olds have their own tablet, and children aged 5-8 spend an average of 3 hours and 27 minutes on screen media every day. What’s worse, if our societal obsession with rock ‘n’ roll recognized, legitimated, and empowered children’s immature, bodily passions, our addiction to digital technology seems to form passionless, pseudo-disembodied souls. For kids with excessive screen time (colloquially known as “iPad kids”), it’s as if the lights have been turned off.

As a professor at a small liberal arts college, I can attest that many students are “functionally illiterate” and “unable to read and comprehend” serious adult novels. Screens are the medium of moving images, passively received by the user. If text does appear, the medium encourages skimming short paragraphs to inform, not deep reading of great books to challenge assumptions and cultivate wisdom. The “feed” is “snackable”—shaping attention into “discrete bursts that scatter and cascade.” (If you’re reading this article on your device, how much of it have you skimmed?) It’s no wonder that many in the generation raised on screens do not have the attention span or mental fortitude to read a full-length book. In 2024, “brain rot” was Oxford’s word of the year. And now, with powerful generative artificial intelligence at their fingertips, many students (though certainly not all) seem to think that the difficult work of independent thought can and should be “subcontracted” to a machine.

Enter The Tech Exit

“It is easy for me to imagine,” Wendell Berry wrote a quarter century ago, “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” In The Tech Exit, Clare Morell—a young parent and scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center—takes up the task of advising parents about how to bring up creatures rather than machines. “This is the definition of the Tech Exit,” she writes: “no smartphones, social media, tablets, or video games during childhood,” while other screens, such as the family TV and computer, should be used sparingly, publicly, and purposefully. Parents, educators, and pastors will appreciate the “concrete, everyday advice” Morell offers. 

In the first part of the book, Morell cites the research of Jonathan Haidt, Anna Lembke, and Victoria Dunckley in order to highlight the dangers of digital technology—by which she especially means scrolling social media and interactive games on smartphones and tablets—and show why “harm reduction” doesn’t work.

Morell writes that digital tech is more like fentanyl than sugar. Its design features—the infinite scroll through personalized content curated by powerful algorithms and reinforced by constant notifications—work to rewire the reward system of young brains to crave dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that creates and intensifies desire, without satiating it. In other words, digital tech hyperstimulates the brain’s dopamine receptors, which is especially dangerous for children between the ages of ten and twelve (during which time their dopamine receptors double). Its addictive properties are a feature, not a bug.

The results are catastrophic. Digital tech hijacks the nervous system, decimates impulse control, and can lead to mental health issues. Habituated to the user-friendly, sleek digital world, children seem to “lose their appetite for things of the real world,” Morell writes.

Few parents, I would imagine, give their children unfettered access to the digital world. Instead, many well-intentioned parents seem to assume that, since screen-based technologies are “an inevitable part of childhood,” they should set time limits and controls on their children’s smartphones, tablets, and gaming systems. 

But Morell argues that parental controls, at best, are harm-minimization strategies—akin to (as she graphically writes) taking your kids to a bar or strip club but having them wear earplugs. In reality, they’re a myth. Since pocket-sized devices are almost always within reach and social media never turns off, they can occupy a child’s thoughts even when not in use. “These apps are designed to create a perpetual craving,” Morell reminds us. I know from my own experience the phantom twitching of a phone in my pocket. Similarly, content controls are porous, maybe intentionally so. To take just one example: Snapchat, TikTok, and Discord ostensibly offer “parental supervision” tools for accounts of 13- to 15-year-olds. (These apps block third-party controls.) But filters don’t always block sites accessed through in-app browsers; plus, the child can change the settings at any time; parents cannot see their child’s “feed” or messages; and there’s nothing stopping children from signing up for an adult account by lying about their age.

In the second and third parts of the book, Morell writes with religious imagery and advocates fasting from digital tech and feasting on the good things of life “in the real world.” She asks parents to commit to “a digital detox”: totally “eliminate all interactive screen time” for thirty days—enough time to normalize “biorhythms and brain chemistry.” A digital fast, Morell warns, will require a heavy investment of parents’ time, at least initially, as they might need to teach kids how to fill their day with board games or outside play instead of Minecraft. If committing to a full month seems daunting, Morell recommends starting with a week, a day, an hour, or even a meal. 

Using the acronym F-E-A-S-T, Morell then offers practical advice about creating “counterpressures” to our screen-saturated society and filling the void left by the digital detox: parents, find other “tech exit” families in your neighborhood or church; exemplify the low-tech life for your kids by physically distancing yourself from your phone while at home; adopt alternatives for your older kids (such as the Light phone, Gabb phone, Wisephone, or Bark phone); set up screen rules (“no aimless surfacing” or scrolling); and trade screens for real-life responsibilities. Parents already familiar with the dangers of digital technology will probably find these chapters the most helpful, even if the acronym is a bit forced.

How realistic is Morell’s advice? Digital tech has reshaped the world, at times shortening the path to real human goods, perhaps especially for older kids. FaceTime (almost) eliminates distance. Language-learning apps, math games, Chessly, and lectures on YouTube present engaging, world-class instruction on portable screens. Coordinating plans is difficult if you can’t join the group chat. 

For parents, a book on parenting can feel intensely personal, like it’s a stranger in the grocery store making judgmental comments about how you’re raising your kids. Morell writes that no one likes being told what to do. And she tries not to, admitting that the tech exit is not without cost and that many parents she interviewed made reasonable exceptions to the no-tech rule. For example, GPS is a must for some teenage drivers, and some older kids might really benefit from learning to play chess on one of the family computers. But, all else being equal, parents should help their kids choose in-person activities over screens and intentionally use the latter as a tool to accomplish specific tasks rather than as an interface mediating their experience of the world.

Will kids growing up in a tech-free household lack the habit of moderation and simply binge on digital tech once they reach adulthood, in a sort of digital rumspringa? Morell provides anecdotes from the parents and adult children she interviewed. They report that, having developed good habits when they were young, they now use their smartphones as the tools they were designed to be. The evidence, though obviously limited, makes a certain amount of intuitive sense.

Community Solutions?

The book concludes with policy solutions. First, and most urgently, Morell argues that K-12 schools should go screen-free, prohibiting students from possessing smartphones on school grounds and getting rid of “educational” screens like Chromebooks, tablets, and laptops. Morell is on solid ground here. As of 2024, more than 30 percent of countries worldwide (and at least 19 states in America) ban cell phones in schools. Secondly, Morell argues that Congress should ban social media for minors—and, until it does, individual states should take steps towards that end by, for example, requiring parental consent before a minor creates a social media account. 

But Morell’s book does not address the latest push for tech in schools: equipping students to use generative AI, as President Trump’s recent executive order seeks to do. Whereas one school in Texas boasts that replacing teachers with AI has boosted students’ enthusiasm and test scores while reducing time in class, some studies suggest that generative AI can harm learning, especially when used as a “crutch.” How should parents weigh the pros and cons of this powerful new tech? In addition, Morell too quickly dismisses legitimate concerns about the constitutionality of social media bans. For one, a nationwide ban would seem to transgress the limits of Congress’s constitutional authority. Her recitation of the many state laws passed in the past two years belies her argument that federal action is necessary. And courts have consistently ruled that social-media bans violate minors’ free speech rights, to which Morell says surprisingly little, only mentioning in a footnote that such laws “will have constitutional challenges to overcome.”

Still, Morell has done good work for parents concerned with the dangers of digital tech in their children’s lives. Screens are not an inevitable part of childhood, and The Tech Exit helps illuminate the path towards living in the real world—that is, as Wendell Berry put it, living as creatures and not as machines. Because the mind is free, but our days are numbered, we ought to turn our hearts to wisdom.

Resisting the temptation of screens is a constant struggle. A dad myself, I now find myself in my parents’ shoes, trying to find someplace dry in which my kids can run out their energy. Our local library has a small, indoor play place, but the last time we went, it was closed for cleaning. The four gaming computers in the kids’ area, however, were open.