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The transformation of childhood from real-world experiences to virtual experiences has contributed to a number of harms including increased social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. The list, however, does not stop there. Here are three additional harms from the article entitled "The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood", published in The Atlantic, March 13, 2024.

Staying on task is difficult for an adult, but for an adolescent, whose prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed, trying to stay on task while engaged with the nearly constant interruptions of a smartphone is nearly impossible. Studies have shown that the typical adolescent gets well over 200 notifications in a day, over 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for any meaningful, creative, substantive task, yet teens find their attention being divided and diverted by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences. It even happens in the classroom. When students text and check their social media during class, their grades and learning suffer. Fragmented attention and disrupted learning may explain why benchmark test scores in the U.S. and around the world began to decline in the early 2010s.

Social media and gaming platforms are designed to hook users. Most teens do not become addicted, but multiple studies show that the rates of problematic use of smartphones is between 5 and 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that approximately 1 out of every 7-10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that would disrupt various areas of life and look a lot like addiction resulting in increased anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability?

Ages 9 to 15 are crucial years for cultural learning, and that is the age span in which most children get a smartphone and sign up to consume large volumes of content from random strangers, most produced by other adolescents in blocks of a few seconds. This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations. The result is a lack of meaning and direction in life.

“A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70%, to more than one in five.”

Next time . . . how can it be that an entire generation is hooked on smartphones that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using?