Phones Don't Prepare Kids for the Future

Human skills do.

When parents think about limiting their kids’ screen time, often they will worry that they are setting their child up for a future disadvantage. If a child has not grown up using the devices that dominate the professional world, how will they function effectively in that environment? Won’t it make them less attractive candidates for employment, and won’t they always be playing catch-up with peers who are far more tech-savvy?

These are reasonable concerns for a parent to have. After all, much of what we do in the first 18 years of a child’s life is prepare them for the inevitable move away from home and entry into independent adulthood. But I do think the assumption that professional success is tied to technological proficiency is overblown, as is the idea that it must be trained from a young age. I also think that a focus on “digital literacy” can come at the cost of other advantageous life-skills training.

I got my first MacBook at age 19. I remember opening it up and wondering how on earth to use it; I’d never seen that sort of interface before. It didn’t take long before I knew how to use that computer instinctively, and probably could have navigated it in my sleep. Those skills continued to develop throughout adulthood. I might not be a coder, but most people do not need to be.

Modern devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptops are designed to be intuitive. That’s a huge part of why they’ve been so widely adopted. We adults learned how to use them later in life, despite not having been trained on them since kindergarten. We humans are good at adapting readily to new developments. My smartest computer scientist friend didn’t even see the Internet until high school. Remember how foreign Zoom felt just a few years ago? Now, no one thinks twice about logging onto an online meeting.

Furthermore, technology is evolving so quickly that the devices and software our children will use professionally in five, 10, or 15 years’ time will look nothing like they do now. To allocate precious educational hours to learning programs that are destined for extinction seems inefficient, particularly when there are other skills that might be more useful, as well as transferrable.

Human Skills Matter More

Our children are best served by learning skills that set them apart from machines. In a world where more and more training converges on technological competency, I expect that the young adults who know how to do other things will be the ones who stand out. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote in Hidden Potential, “The skills that make us human are increasingly important to master.”

In a future professional environment full of brilliant young computer programmers and app developers, it is the person who can engage with others, make eye contact, carry a conversation, read facial cues and body language, demonstrate resilience, and offer practical problem-solving abilities that will stand out. And those skills are best developed offline, in real life, over time.

Being screen-free (or greatly screen-reduced) optimizes a child’s learning ability. Psychiatrist Victoria Dunckley says studies have yet to find any correlation between technology skills and better wages, whereas excessive exposure to tech comes at a price—overstimulation, emotional dysregulation, circadian rhythm disruption, impaired blood flow and hormone balance, and chronic stress levels. The child who will be left behind, she says, is more likely to be “the child who cannot concentrate.”

It's not just about the future, either; this approach is relevant even now, when teens are looking for part-time jobs. I was delighted to read in The Opt-Out Family about employers who wish they could hire students without phones. As one Wireless Zone franchise owner told author Erin Loechner:

“I would happily hire someone who didn’t have a mobile phone. It is a constant struggle keeping employees working while they are on the clock. Personal mobile devices exacerbate this time-theft more than any other distraction. I would have to imagine an employee who doesn’t have a mobile device would have other priorities that would also align with a good work ethic.”

Another business owner said, “Oh, I’d hire that person in a heartbeat. But do they even exist?”

I’m not saying that kids should be digitally illiterate. In fact, I think that’s impossible these days. Unless they’re growing up in total social isolation, kids will encounter these devices—and they will learn how to use them. Even my children, who do not own phones, tablets, TV, or video games of their own, are astonishingly proficient whenever they borrow my smartphone or laptop to do something. They hang out with kids who have them, and they attend Ontario’s public education system, which offers an abundance of screen time (much to my frustration). We don’t need to add purposefully to that exposure under the guise of “preparing for the future.”

Parents should also be careful not to use that as a justification for their own disinclination to curb access to devices. Ask whether you’re reluctant to do so because you actually think it’ll hurt their future chances at employment or whether you would just rather avoid the awkward conversation, the ongoing pushback, and the possibility of your child feeling left out.

What Are They Learning?

Another reason not to allow unfettered access in the name of “learning” is that we know kids don’t use their devices in particularly formative ways. Contrary to what many parents and educators would like to believe, they’re not spending much time practicing their coding, studying Google maps, learning a new language, or watching science experiment videos. (No doubt, some do, but even then, it comprises a relatively small percentage of total screen time.)

The stats show that teens spend an average of 8 hours, 40 minutes, on entertainment-based screen time each day (not including schoolwork), and approximately 4.8 hours of that is spent on social media alone.

There, kids (particularly girls) spend an inordinate amount of time engaging in visual comparison, relational aggression, and heightened emotional sharing. The next top categories are YouTube and gaming, which boys tend to gravitate to in order to satisfy a craving for “agency-building activities,” such as exploring, competing, playing at war, and mastering skills, except that it doesn’t develop any real skills and leaves them feeling even more lonely and disconnected.

And even if kids were doing educational things on their devices, it takes up time that could be spent developing other skills, like building things, playing sports, making in-person friends, learning an instrument, learning how to draw, reading books, helping out with chores, making food, and focusing on schoolwork.

Smartphones, like it or not, “reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.” The phone itself becomes the most interesting thing in a kid’s life. Jonathan Haidt captured this best when he compared smartphones to cuckoo birds in The Anxious Generation:

“Smartphones are like the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. The cuckoo egg hatches before the others, and the cuckoo hatchling promptly pushes the other eggs out of the nest in order to commandeer all of the food brought by the unsuspecting mother. Similarly, when a smartphone, tablet, or video game console lands in a child’s life, it will push out most other activities, at least partially.”

While parents need to give a certain amount of attention to the future, they do their kids a disservice by forgetting the profound lessons that an unplugged childhood, with its abundance of free play, exploration, experimentation, and human relationships has to offer. That’s what we should be focusing on giving our kids, rather than disrupting a foundational life stage with new, fleeting forms of technology that are not likely to stick around all that long. By all means, prepare them for the future, but by going beyond the devices.

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