While driving through Yosemite National Park in June, my husband and I listened to an interview with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, on the podcast “Honestly” with Bari Weiss. We are parents to six children and our oldest is 13. We have talked a lot about kids and technology, but hearing Haidt articulate what research says about the devastating effects of smartphones on youth pushed us to bring our questions and concerns into dialogue with our friends.

One night when visiting with these friends, we realized that several of us had listened to the same podcast interview and another had purchased The Anxious Generation and had started reading it! We decided then to come up with a way to invite others in the community into the conversation about all of this.

For any parent, hearing Haidt talk about the tragic things so many kids have suffered on account of social media is downright scary. And yet we had the conviction that we did not want to start from a place of fear or focus on restrictions. Each of us reached out to more friends, family, and community members involved with youth and asked them to join us one evening to talk about our own experience and the Honestly podcast. Thirty people showed up and we opened the evening by reading aloud a passage from Haidt’s book:

This subject isn't just for parents, teachers, and others who care for or about children. It is for anyone who wants to understand how the most rapid rewiring of human relationships and consciousness in human history has made it harder for all of us to think, focus, forget ourselves enough to care about others, and build close relationships … It is about how to reclaim human life for human beings in all generations.

We had two goals: first, to open a dialogue about smartphone use starting from our own experience and the things Haidt shares in The Anxious Generation; and second, to initiate the first step in collective action that can help “free the anxious generation.”

We broke up into small groups and asked a simple question: “Why do you care about this?” The conversations were lively, and many shared not only the concerns they have about their kids, but their own struggle to be fully present in life, rather than constantly occupied and distracted on their phones. I invited my sister-in-law, a recent CLU graduate, to share her experience deleting YouTube in search of a greater engagement with her life, and how fruitful this change had been. Everyone agreed that they want their children to experience a more free, more unplugged childhood and less passive screen time. While the conversation continued down many avenues, including addressing this with our local public school district, it became clear that all people present had a desire for change and that everyone was grateful for a place to talk about these things.

We then invited people to a follow-up Town Hall-style meeting that we opened up to our entire town. We posted flyers and published an article in the newspaper, inviting everyone. When the night of that second meeting arrived we nervously waited to see who would join us at our small-town City Hall gymnasium. That second conversation was beautiful, showing me that an intuition or question becomes more true the more it is shared.

Through all of this, I have learned several things. First, I was glad I took the risk of sharing something that is important to me with others and inviting them into a dialogue that goes beyond what we would perhaps normally share. I also realized that we can learn so much from one another – many questions and experiences that were shared during those nights have really stayed with me.

The third lesson has to do with how we went about organizing this. When all of this started, I had been reading Davide Prosperi’s words on communal leadership and synodality. I was very struck by the insistence that it is our communion that leads. My personality type is such that I can easily take the lead on things and plow forward, but I saw this as a precious opportunity to grow. I discovered that I was being given friends with whom to undertake this work and that it was worthwhile to really listen to one another when making decisions. It was not easy, but it was more fruitful.

We are very happy to have taken these initial steps to foster a better culture surrounding our use of technology, and grateful for the education in the movement that helps us to propose these conversations in a way that corresponds to us and to others. “Reclaiming human life for human beings in all generations” doesn’t solely originate from careful smartphone use; it is born from risking to share every question or judgment we have, and within this risking everything is open to correction and to further discovery.

Stephanie, Crosby, MN