Helping Reasonable Parents See the Unreasonableness of Teenage Social Media

This is the final post in a series exploring Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death chapter by chapter. You need not read the book or previous points to appreciate this one. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, part 6 here, part 7 here, part 8 here, part 9 here, part 10 here, and part 11 here. In this essay, I will respond to Chapter 11: The Huxleyan Warning.

In Infinite Jest, author David Foster Wallace follows the stories of recovering addicts in a derelict rehab facility. Don Gately, the facility’s ex-addict administrator, observes wryly that the worst thing for a recovering addict isn’t stupidity, it’s intelligence. In his view, “the educated newcomers are the worst,” a point proven when an Ivy League cocaine addict uses his Ivy League mind to make an imminently reasonable case that 12-step programs are just sloganeering nonsense and that he’d be better off figuring out his addiction on his own.

He’s the exception to the recovering-addict rule. But of course, he’s not. Soon after, his Ivy League face made a covenant in blood with Ivy League concrete. It was his final, drug-addled fall.

This principle applies to almost all destructive behavior and destructive decision-making. Reasonableness and intelligence hinder us because the reasonable/intelligent part of our brains excels not at making disinterested, objective evaluations but at making ad hoc (and sophisticated-sounding!) justifications for whatever our heart wants.

I’ve recently made “Let's protect teens and preteens from social media and smartphones because it induces anxiety, depression, and body-image issues” a bit of a personal cause. My hope (and it really may never amount to more than that) is that by the time my daughter is 13, there will be enough parents in my camp to make us all seem a little less crazy — and help my daughter feel like she’s not alone.

¹ This problem is pervasive and well-studied. Jonathan Haidt made an entire book out of it. Which is well worth reading, in addition to Infinite Jest.

Interestingly, I’ve found parents who gave their kids unfettered access to digital technology the easiest to convince. As their previous parenting shows, they never thought much about what social media might do to their kids, and once alerted, it didn’t require much thinking to change their minds. (Although it remains to be seen whether they’ll change their parenting.)

The people I’ve found most resistant are the most intelligent, reasonable, and responsible parents who’ve already taken small steps in the direction of digital-floodgate-opening. They assure me that their child is different from other children and that their approach is safer than other approaches. And on the surface, it all sounds quite reasonable. Here are some common rejoinders to my pleas:

“My son’s very responsible.”

“He’s not on every social media. Just one.”

“She’s only allowed to use it for 60 minutes a day, and it’s monitored.”

“All they see are silly, harmless videos.”

“We use apps to restrict his access online and what he can see.”

“It would hurt our relationship if I said no, so this mutual builds trust.”

“Her account is private, so no one can see her stuff.”

“All he posts are funny dances, gags, and memes.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, I doubt most parents are actually able to monitor, control, and limit the use (and much less so the psychological ramifications) of teenage smartphones. Yes, you’re smart. But your kid is smarter than you. 

But that’s not my main point. My main point is to say that parents who take this approach really do sound reasonable! And surely it is a better approach than allowing your children to wander the digital range without limits. Nonetheless, I cannot help but hear the Ivy League addict in our reasonableness. My kid is different. I’m smart enough to curtail the catastrophic costs of adolescent smartphone usage. The question, of course, is whether a reasonable parent’s child will successfully avoid faceplanting on the same digital pavement most teens meet with brutal certainty.

I believe the reasonable-sounding approach is attractive because, on the surface, social media really does seem like harmless fun. This takes me to an astute observation of media critic Neil Postman—an observation all reasonable parents should consider. 

Writing in 1985, he observed that while much of the world suffered under Orwellian mechanisms of control (top-down, military-based surveillance, imprisonment, and coercion), America was never really at risk of becoming that kind of nation. He wrote, 

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. … We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson.”

In other words, if social media and digital entertainment were obviously a prison, we Americans might be the first people to resist. But Postman is aware that there’s a different kind of prison. One in which Big Brother doesn’t watch us. No, we watch Big Brother, because he’s entertaining and amusing and engaging and addicting.

Postman warns that we are not prepared for such invisible prisons. He writes, “But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

He was describing television, but he might as well be describing TikTok dance videos. And his point is clear: this is precisely the sort of prison reasonable people can’t see because it looks so harmless—which makes it precisely the sort of prison reasonable people often find themselves locked within.

I’ve been careful to describe the “My kid is different and my solutions are better” approach as “reasonable-sounding” because there is so much evidence that your kid is not different and that your solutions haven’t worked for other reasonable parents in the past. The simple fact is that social media is terrible for the mental health of teens and preteens. Full-stop. 

As Postman notes, the answer is not to become a Luddite. No one is saying “No phones” or “No social media” forever. Or at least no one who’s serious. He says the only way to “break the spell” is to endeavor to ask the hard questions about communication technology — and this very act is ideologically and psychologically loaded. To ask those questions and take the best answers seriously is inevitably to take radical steps toward restricting the role of technology in your life, and especially, in the lives of developing children. To ask the question is to invite a truly reasonable response. A response rooted in the best research, which is unequivocal about the negative effects of social media on children and teens. 

As we entertain ourselves to death on our devices, the real risk isn’t that we’re laughing instead of thinking. No, it’s that, as Neil Postman concluded, we don’t know what we’re laughing about and why we stopped thinking. That will be the final, greatest magic trick of all: when children who grew up addicted to digital dope can no longer grasp why their brains are muddled and their mental health is a mess. 

The church should be (and may be) the very last bastion of sanity and true reason in our ever-more insane digital world. Christians should be on the frontlines showing a better, more beautiful way: digital sobriety. Choosing Christ over conformity to our digitized culture.