Fair Lawn, N.J.’s Avi Kestenbaum bought iPads for his seven-year-old son and four-year-old daughter, which they use to play games and watch cartoons. He believes that virtually every child in the Modern Orthodox world has an iPad and his kids should be no exception. Kestenbaum plans to buy his kids smartphones, albeit ones with stripped-down capabilities, when they reach bar/bat mitzvah age, and will allow them to use social media when they reach high school. “It’s just the reality,” he explained, “Kids need to be on social media to be included socially.”
The sense that the march of technological progress is inevitable is not limited to the Modern Orthodox. New York City’s Chaya Klein sends her four daughters, including two in high school, to Bais Yaakov. While her 16-year-old limits herself to a flip phone on principle, her 14-year-old has no such qualms and spends most evenings chatting with her friends on WhatsApp and Google Chat. Klein places strict limits on her kids’ access to technology – they can only use their parents’ smartphones or the family computer and cannot use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, or Facebook. Still, Klein feels that she must make concessions to the times. “I have to let them communicate 2024 style.”
Kestenbaum and Klein are illustrative of a collective action problem that Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, describes in his recent book, The Anxious Generation. Haidt presents data documenting how teen mental health diagnoses have roughly tripled since smartphones and social media became ubiquitous around 2010, a phenomenon he dubbed “The Great Rewiring.” Approximately twelve percent of boys and one-third of girls now have a diagnosable mental health condition such as depression and anxiety. Per Haidt, the depression crisis can be tied directly to the widespread adoption and addictiveness of social media platforms.
Ironically, research suggests that most people, even most kids, don’t even like social media. Leonardo Bursztyn, an economist at the University of Chicago, and several of his colleagues found that students would actually pay to not have to be on TikTok and Instagram, so long as others in their peer group also divest. Kids are trapped in a vicious cycle wherein they believe they must be active online to fit in. Consequently, parents feel the need to allow their kids regular access to these platforms to spare them from being socially ostracized.
Haidt feels that smart devices and social media have destroyed childhood. In addition to rising rates of anxiety and depression, kids miss out on real-life connections and fail to learn the skills necessary to build relationships. “From about 50 million BC to 2010, young mammals played,” he stated at a recent event hosted by Tikvah Fund. “You have to play to wire up your brain.”
The Anxious Generation proposes four norms that Haidt hopes will be adopted globally:
- No smartphones before high school. Only flip phones, which research demonstrates are not harmful.
- No social media before 16. Young kids do not have the prefrontal cortex necessary to guard against gamified social media feeds.
- Phone-free schools – both elementary and high schools.
- More unsupervised play so that kids naturally develop social and self-governing skills.
Haidt is on a speaking and interview tour promoting his book, and his arguments are gathering steam. But his ideas were anticipated by a number of Orthodox parents and educators. Shira Donath, Psy.D., received a call from Rabbi Daniel Price, head of school at Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey, ahead of the 2022 school year. Rabbi Price asked Donath, a psychologist and RYNJ parent, to join a committee to explore ways to limit the harms of smart devices. “Rabbi Price saw the direction things were going,” she said.
Donath set up a system of parent ambassadors to form working groups and offer educational programs. Many parents were quite receptive. Parents with younger kids in particular, seeing how personal devices have affected middle and high-schoolers, were eager for solutions.
Unfettered access to social media platforms is harmful in multiple ways, explained Donath. Kids are vulnerable to what she termed “the selfie experience” – a sense of comparison to a curated online life unreflective of reality. “Kids are unequipped to separate the real from the fake.” Another danger of hypersocial digital omniscience, Donath continued, is that kids know immediately when they’ve been left out of a gathering.
That said, Donath feels the community is experiencing something of a watershed moment. “There’s a lot more data available now as to how damaging this all is,” she explained. “My oldest is in fourth grade and, to my knowledge, no one in her friend group has a personal device.”
There are other indications that the Orthodox community at large has reached an inflection point. On April 4, the head of school of Yavneh Academy in Paramus, N.J., Rabbi Jonathan Knapp, sent parents a mass email with the subject line “Introducing Yavneh Healthy Tech.” The letter cited Haidt’s research and his Tikvah Fund talk and pledged to empower parents “to delay smartphone and social media use for their children.”
The reaction from Yavneh parents has been overwhelmingly positive. “This letter was many months in the making,” said Rabbi Knapp, “The data is now clear – these technologies are having a negative impact on kids and teens.”
Still, Rabbi Knapp realized that the problem cannot be combated unilaterally. “This effort can only work as an active partnership between schools and parents. Only then can we turn this collective action problem into a collective action solution.”
Batya Tenenbaum, a mother of five in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is a committee member of Mothers Unite to Stall Technology, or M.U.S.T. Founded in Flatbush in 2018, M.U.S.T. aims to slow kids’ adoption of smart devices. Mothers of a students in a class make M.U.S.T. pacts to avoid purchasing smartphones for their kids during the school year. The pact is renewed each year with the idea that, the earlier the pact is made, the easier it will be to maintain it when students reach middle and high school. The M.U.S.T protocols were adopted by a group of Chabad mothers, including Tenenbaum, four years ago. When the initiative gained traction in Crown Heights, Tenenbaum and company opened their branch to Chabad communities worldwide.
They were received enthusiastically. “Communities from Panama, South Africa, Australia, and all over the U.S. reached out to us,” Tenenbaum recalled. “Everyone is struggling with this issue. We have to let our kids have a childhood.”
Over 150 Chabad classes worldwide have committed to the M.U.S.T. pact. In addition to the plethora of research testifying to the harmful consequences of smartphone technology, the M.U.S.T. mothers are spurred by the teachings of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe. “The Rebbe taught that every home is a Mikdash Me’at, a mini Beis HaMikdash,” Tenenbaum explained. “The ubiquity of smartphones directly contravenes that notion.”
“I don’t think Dr. Haidt’s four norms go far enough,” Tenenbaum continued. “I would ban smartphones for high-schoolers too.”
Kate Davis, a mother of four in Teaneck, N.J., is inclined to agree. In her opinion, social media can be “painful and dangerous.”
“In Silicon Valley, they understand the harms of social media and don’t let their kids on these platforms,” said Davis. “That tells me everything I need to know.” Still, Davis recognizes that teenagers, to some degree, will always manifest a degree of autonomy. She gives her kids smartphones when they reach bar or bat mitzvah age, but these devices are carefully monitored and filtered by her husband, with extensive usage limits in place. “There has to be a path for teens to learn to be responsible digital citizens.
As awareness of the dangers spreads, parents – Orthodox and otherwise – are growing increasingly wary of child smartphone use. Already, several U.S. states have banned smartphones in class, with more clamoring to follow suit. As Rabbi Knapp expressed, “We as a society have reached a tipping point. Things need to change.”
Some names have been changed to protect privacy.
