In this week’s Torah portion, the first parasha of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the Israelites’ journeys through the desert. This includes how God condemned the generation of the Exodus to die in the wilderness, because despite God’s assurances, they believed the spies who said they’d all be killed if they tried to take the Land of Israel. Instead, the younger Israelites, those born into the wilderness who had never experienced enslavement in Egypt, would be the ones to enter the Land of Israel. “Moreover, your little ones, who you said would be carried off, your children who do not yet know good from bad, they shall enter it; to them I will give it and they shall possess it” (Deuteronomy 1:39).
This idea—that the generation of former slaves had to die out before the Israelites could enter the Land of Israel—has always been evocative to me. There’s something in here about how true, deep change is made. Something has to die in order for something to be born. Somehow we need to drop all our expectations in order to develop radical new ones. We have to let go completely of the past to imagine a new future. Sometimes it is the children who need to take us into the future, not those of us who started the journey.
I remember sitting with a 12-year-old girl in her kitchen about 10 years ago. I was tutoring her for her bat mitzvah, going over her leining. We talked about what life was like for her. She was feeling a bit lonely, like she didn’t have a setting in which to discuss big ideas. She explained how she would sit with her friends, but even when they were sitting together in person, they were all on their smartphones.
It broke my heart. And I remembered feeling helpless to protect her. This is just how childhood is now, I thought to myself sadly.
That was a time in which smartphones had just come on the scene, and no one was talking about their dangers to human interaction or the development of relationships. Few people looked askance at handing 2-year-olds smartphones to entertain them while waiting for a table at a restaurant. Parenting advice was about giving kids a phone to make sure they were safe when out on their own and avoiding cyberbullying through text or Facebook, but not as much about the negative impact of experiencing the world writ large mediated through a digital veil.
Parenting awareness of this has changed, thank goodness. As a mother of a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old, I spend a lot of parenting energy navigating technology and its infiltration of our lives. I myself have pared down my social media use, with remnant accounts on Facebook and LinkedIn. I don’t post photos of my kids online to give them the freedom to decide whether they want to be findable online in the future. But I often wonder: How will I help my children develop interpersonal skills when even school asks them to go onto screens to complete their homework? How will I help them be bored long enough to find creative things to do, when the iPad, Netflix, and video games are nearby? That’s before we even are into social media.
Jonathan Haidt has become a trusted voice in these questions. His book The Anxious Generation has become a touchstone for today’s parents of teens. He developed four rules of smartphones for kids: none before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and more unsupervised play.
We’re trying our best. In the adult world, new products have popped up to aid in individuals’ attempts to get offline, whether they be lock boxes with timers you can set or “light” phones with only the essential smart functions like maps and a camera but no internet browsing. After reviewing a lot of options, my husband and I opted for a $89 flip phone for our 13-year-old to carry with her as she navigates downtown Toronto on her own and makes plans with friends. Some of her friends’ parents have now opted for flip phones, too, when choosing a phone for their kids. (I’m not making progress on getting other families to get house phones, which we have had since the kids were toddlers, in case of emergency.) At home, she and her brother, in what started as a pandemic-era desperation, have stripped down old iPhones that function as iPods for Spotify and audiobooks, from which they can also FaceTime their grandparents–no internet browser accessible. We have a no-screens playdate rule. My daughter and I discuss the negative mental health impacts of social media and the gendered aspects of constant self-presentation. I’m holding out until at least 16 for social media for the kids. We’re setting up a computer station in the living room from which the kids can use one desktop computer and know that anything they search for is visible to the rest of the house.
There’s only so much we can imagine and prepare for, though. We are leaning heavily on the Jewish wisdom and structure of Shabbat, both to ensure no-tech family and personal time at least one day a week, and also to teach how to host dinner parties and have extended intergenerational conversations about important things. Our approach doesn’t yet include a philosophy on AI for our children. We don’t yet know how to coach them in educational settings or interpersonal relationships in which everyone else is relying on generative AI technology for a boost. Mostly, my husband and I are trying to replicate our own childhoods for our kids, because that is what we can imagine. We are limited in our experience.
Our generation may have been the ones that started this journey by creating addictive technologies and social media platforms, but our children will be the ones to take the reins to create a future for themselves—for all of us. They haven’t resisted well so far, just looking at the usage numbers. One 2022 study found near total pervasiveness of social media use: Up to 95% of youth ages 13–17 reported using a social media platform, and over a third said they use social media “almost constantly.” Most shocking to me, nearly 40% of children ages 8–12 use social media, even though the minimum age is 13.
However, even as they spend an average of 5 hours a day on it, large numbers of young people regret that addictive social media was ever created. Among Gen Z respondents to a survey created by Jonathan Haidt and Will Johnson at The Harris Poll, 34% regretted the creation of Instagram, 37% Facebook, 43% Snapchat, 47% TikTok, and 50% regretted the creation of X/Twitter. Only 19% of Gen Z trust social media and technology companies. In another study, almost half of young people age 16 to 21 wished the internet had never been invented. The whole internet!
This youngest generation, born into a technologically-saturated existence, will have to be the ones to guide us out of it. We already see some rebellion, with variations on “new Luddites” popping up, including high school clubs of teens getting together to draw and create zines and talk, no smartphones in sight. There seems to be a surge in unironic handicraft among Gen Z and a bias for the local and the handmade and against tech overlords.”
We don’t know what the next paradigm of human-technology interaction will look like, but with these levels of regret and addiction, I hope and expect it will look different than today. I can’t quite imagine the way forward beyond Herculean personal self-control efforts, but also I likely won’t be the one to develop the way forward. Just as the generation of Israelites who experienced Egyptian slavery had to die out before the people could enter the Land of Israel, perhaps those who have never known a social-media-free existence will have to be the very ones to create the next evolutionary step for us.
Rabbi Julia Appel is Clal’s Senior Director of Innovation, helping Jewish professionals and lay leaders revitalize their communities by serving their people better. She is passionate about creating Jewish community that meets the challenges of the 21st century – in which Jewish identity is a choice, not an obligation. Her writing has been featured in such publications as The Forward, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Jewish News, among others.