So some teens locked up their smartphones (sort of) ...

And went camping? On their own? The Times (and After Babel) discuss a brave experiment in England

In the growing world of smartphone warfare, this Decca Aitkenhead feature from The Times has been creating some major buzz. Let’s officially kick that piece up weekend “think piece” status. The headline: “What happened when I made my sons and their friends go without smartphones.”

I’m not sure that the word “made” applies, in this experiment. I would use the word “bribe.” However, desperate times call for desperate actions.

Here are the key details of this one-month project. Aitkenhead asked her sons (ages 13 and 14) to lock their smartphones in a kSafe time lock container (Amazon information here). The device was set to allow them access to their smartphones for one hour a day.

The goal was to see if this family could recruit any of the boys’ friends — male and female — to take part in the experiment.

In addition to the kSafe, they were given a Light Phone, described as, “an American wi-fi-enabled device designed to allow calls, texts and group chats, with an alarm, calculator, basic music player, directions, calendar, note/voice memo — and nothing else. Black and white like a Kindle, it has no camera (though the most recent version now does), no apps, no Google, nothing.”

That “bribe” hook?

The recruitment drive required interminable coaxing and ultimately financial incentive. Participants could choose to sell their Light Phone and kSafe containers on eBay after the experiment ended, and pocket about £250. With varying degrees of dread, two boys aged 13 and four aged 14 eventually agreed.

Recruiting girls proved puzzlingly difficult. … Whenever I’d ask my sons why our house was only ever full of boys, they’d say girls were immature. The opposite was traditionally true, so I was confused. “They’re silly,” they said, “ ’cos they’ve been TikTokified.”

I didn’t really know what they meant, but managed to recruit two who live 50 miles away.

The kit the teens were given for this exercise — which began in June — also included (#triggerwarning) an actual book — a copy of Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Imagine that.

What kind of kids are we talking about? In many ways, I thought that this is one of the more shocking paragraphs in the whole piece. These were the best-case scenario young people, in many ways. But look at the details about when they were given their first smartphones.

These are teens in robust mental health, unafflicted by the social anxiety and depression Haidt writes about. The boys go to local co-ed state schools and play a lot of sport, the girls have hectic extracurricular schedules, and all come from happy family homes, with parents who give a lot of thought to their screen time. Most didn’t get their first phone until the end of year 6 — so mostly aged 11 — and have always had screen-time limits. Several aren’t allowed TikTok, and Rowan, 13, can’t even have Snapchat. Only Joe, 13, confesses to feeling highly anxious about forgoing his phone. He was the youngest to get one, in year 4.

This is the “cautious” scenario for smartphone use. How young is “young,” in terms of when many other children are handed doorways into the Internet? The Times ran this chart with the Aitkenhead feature.

At first, the guys were reluctant to yield their smartphones — even in this limited-ban scenario — but insisted that it was no big deal.

The girls? That was a totally different situation. For starters, it was hard to get the girls to consider taking part. Why?

I ask how much time they spend on their phones. In unison: “Too long.” Rose pulls out hers to show me. It is Saturday, and her week’s screen time has reached 41 hours and 48 minutes, of which almost 32 hours were on social media. Both have Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. So they love social media? They look at me as if I must be mad.

“It’s a trap,” Edie says. “You’re stuck, because if you do escape, you’re classed as a weirdo, and you’ll fall behind on trends, you won’t understand what people are talking about.” Rose jumps in, “But if you do watch TikTok, you’re going to get influenced. You know it’s all fake, but you still feel like it’s real. You still can’t help comparing yourself with everyone who looks pretty, and feeling bad about yourself. And you’re going to get addicted. It’s literally like a drug.”

Edie deleted TikTok once, “Because it steals all my time, and that makes me feel shit about myself.” She ended up re-downloading the app. “But then,” Rose adds, “if you follow every trend, you get called a basic bitch. And if you don’t, you’re a weirdo. There’s no escape, because your social popularity is totally linked to your social media. So if you don’t post, you get made fun of. But then if you lip-synch to the wrong song on TikTok, you get made fun of for the rest of the year.”

In a perfect, but impossible world, would these brave girls like to see the smartphone social-media platforms vanish? Just like they had never been created?

… I ask if Edie and Rose would uninvent it if they could. Both, without hesitation: “Yes.”

Rose’s face fills with dreamy longing. “It would be like Stand By Me, wouldn’t it? I love that film. I’d love that.”

Let’s jump to the second phase of the Aitkenhead experient — a direct attack on “safetyism,” the belief that young people should never be allowed to do anything on their own.

The author’s sons had quite a bit of experience with camping. This led to a radical proposal — teens camping on their own.

With clueless naivety, I therefore hatch a plan to offer the teens an unsupervised and smartphoneless camping trip in the countryside. The children, by now used to navigating the world without their devices, love this idea. I put the plan to The Sunday Times — and all hell breaks loose.

“It sounds like there is a lot that could go wrong,” a manager emails. A campfire is a “no-no”. Another manager joins the thread. She wants the teens fitted with GPS trackers, and shadowed by a qualified first aider — or, safer still, for me to “find someone whose children have already done this, and interview them” instead. The health and safety team join. “There should be a level of chaperoning.”

What feels like a thousand emails later, they are persuaded that it is not outlandishly dangerous for teenagers to take public transport unaccompanied, walk across some fields and camp in someone’s garden. Parental waivers are submitted, and an exhaustive five-page risk assessment compiled. Having never had to engage with any health and safety bureaucracy before, I’d had no idea this was normal.

Once again, we hit the essential paradox. It is totally unsafe for kids to camp out in a preselected rural garden linked to family and friends, to make 'smores and chat while sitting around their own campfire. It’s unsafe for them to get to this specific garden using public transportation and maps created in advance.

However, it is totally safe — in fact, parents would say that it is essential to safety — for children to have devices in their pockets that open doors into the wild, wild world of the unfiltered Internet. Parents feel safer, in other words.

During the camping, Aitkenhead was in the friend’s house, near the garden, “on call” in cause there is some kind of emergency. Other than that, she left the kids alone during this 24-hour adventure.

The details of the camping trip are quite fun. The young people didn’t get much sleep (and there was some rain), but they loved it. They immediately asked when they could, on their own, camp out again. Could this be a “normal thing,” like every now and then?

At the end of the month, some lessons had been learned, or that’s what the boys said when interviewed. It helped that the guys started getting more sleep, when those smartphones were locked up.

Everyone agreed that it was crucial that these young people did not feel alone — that there were others involved in the experiment. It was a team thing.

Everyone struggled at first. “But then,” Lincoln says, “you begin to notice things, because you’re not part of it. You start to see that whatever’s going on on your smartphone doesn’t matter. You’ll never say on your deathbed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time on my phone.’ ”

Elliot noticed that Snapchat streaks are “completely pointless. They don’t do anything, do they?” Lincoln noticed that kids at his school had no idea how to have a meaningful conversation. “Their attention spans are too short.” Isaac noticed that the ten seconds it took to get up and find the TV remote, rather than get Netflix up on his phone, was long enough to remind him not to get distracted from his homework. Rowan noticed that 99 per cent of the chat on his WhatsApp groups was meaningless, and has muted most of them.

On the train to my house to be interviewed, Elliot “noticed that literally every other passenger was just staring down at their phone.”

What about the girls?

I thought it was poignant that the girls were not interviewed at the end of the month. Did they decline that contact with the adult who set this up? There was this from an adult source:

The girls’ relief when the month is over also suggests that social media’s grip on them is vice-like. “It’s like an addict’s behaviour,” Dahlia’s mother says. “Like, ‘I’ve done the rehab. I proved I could do it.’ But now she’s straight back on it.”

#SIGH

At the omnipresent After Babel Substack, Lenore Skenazy summed up the lessons learned during this experiment (readers may want to read the Jonathan Haidt intro to this summary, as well). Aitkenhead learned:

(1) Even well-adjusted kids who aren’t watching porn and self-harm videos become better-adjusted after a month of Light Phones and two days of independence.

(2) It is sickeningly ironic that “school timetables, sports clubs, public transport, homework are all organized around the assumption that every teenager owns a smartphone.”

(3) Simply tracking kids changes their childhood. As one of the boy’s moms told Decca, “He came back from the camping trip revitalized. And it’s the same with tracking, isn’t it? Actually, giving them a bit of space and freedom is good for them.”

(4) Being allowed to do some things on their own seems to benefit kids at least as much as taking away their phones.

By all means, Read. It. All.

But I will ask an obvious question: Would leaders of religious congregations and parachurch groups dare to organize this kind of experiment, with adults playing a role in the planning and execution of these activities (but otherwise trying to keep a bit of distance)?

Remember, it’s SAFER for them to have smartphones. Right?

Just asking.