Cheetos, iPhones are ruining kids
With apologies to Allen Ginsberg: I am seeing the best minds of our middle-school generation destroyed by Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and iPhones.
Teenagers dragging themselves out of bed each day to mainline TikTok and Snapchat. Measuring themselves by the yardstick of filtered Kardashian perfection and falling short. Getting expelled from school for sending AI-generated naked photos of classmates.
Between the negative brain effects of ultra-processed foods, and what can only be called smartphone use disorder, something has gone terribly awry.
In our home lately, the 13-year-old and I seem to be having daily conflicts over food and phones. When she moved in with me at age 8, she had a smartphone, which I put away. Her preference for ultra-processed food was already well-established.
We waited until eighth grade to get her an iPhone, as recommended by childhood experts, but I don’t think we waited long enough. Her first phone allowed her to take pictures, make calls and text, but it had no internet functions. In my view, it was perfect. In hers, an embarrassment.
When her iPhone arrived at the beginning of this school year, everything changed. Though we made a contract outlining the rules, her phone was never out of sight. Even when it was supposed to be put away, surreptitious use continued.
Taking away the phone as a consequence of breaking the rules, a stipulation in our contract, resulted in meltdowns. How are young teenagers supposed to regulate their phone use when they haven’t yet figured out how to regulate their moods or relationships? Giving a kid a smartphone is like putting a bomb in their hands and hoping it never goes off.
I am worn down trying to monitor my niece’s phone behavior and making sure she consumes a healthier diet.
A recent Wall Street Journal included an illustration of a human brain made of Cheetos. “Ultra-processed foods may not only affect our bodies,” the story began, “but our brains too. New research suggests links between ultra-processed foods — such as chips, many cereals and most packaged snacks at the grocery store — and changes in the way we learn, remember and feel.”
Because the foods mimic other addictive substances, the story said, “some scientists are proposing a new mental-health condition called ‘ultra-processed food disorder.’”
These foods shouldn’t be banned for everyone, all the time, but they shouldn’t be on offer at school during school hours.
Each weekday morning, I drop off my niece at school and watch as nearly every kid shuffles along, eyes focused not on the world around them, but on their phones. When I pick her up in the afternoon, same thing.
In The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, proposed that smartphones have changed the very nature of childhood — and not for the better.
“What is childhood — including adolescence — and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it?” Haidt asks. “If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.”
Among them, he writes, kids spend less time playing with each other, less time taking physical risks (like climbing trees), less time interacting face to face, less time learning from real-time conversational cues and less time learning how to resolve conflict (why do that when you can just block your antagonist?).
He suggests that the psychological development of children born in and after 1996 has been fundamentally altered by the ubiquity of smartphones.
“Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting ‘in sync’ does,” he writes. “Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.”
Add to that the insecurities inherent in an adolescent’s budding sexuality, or the indescribably mean way middle-school girls can behave with one another, plus the availability of online porn and you have a social nightmare on your hands.
“My claim,” writes Haidt, “is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.”
He proposes four simple correctives that wouldn’t cost a penny: No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. More independence, free play and responsibility in the real world.
How I wish it were as easy as writing down such commonsense rules, or even passing a law.