That scary smartphone question: "Is it too late?"

The mom who created the Better Screen Time website offers a response

After several years of talking to religious believers about smartphones and “screens culture” I can honestly say that this is the question that I hear more than any other: “What can I do now? It’s too late.”

What these parents and grandparents, and even young people, mean is simple: They already live, study, work and relax in environments that, on multiple levels, are silos defined by glowing digital screens.

A few weeks ago, my extended family visited the Alpine Visitors Center near the top of Rocky Mountain National Park. It’s stunning, to say the least.

I looked around, at one point, and noticed that most of the people had smartphones in their hands. Yes, many of them were using their phones to take photos or record videos to, I assume, post on social media. I took a photo or two myself.

My point is not that all of these smartphones were “bad,” in this case. However, the thought did occur to me that decades earlier, I had taken a photo of my late parents in that setting that, today, is framed and hangs in our dining room. I used a high-quality camera, but that camera was not the main lens through which I viewed that moment. I don’t think I saw anyone, in 2025, carrying a real camera.

The world has changed, right?

Apparently, I am not the only person who frequently hears the “It’s too late” lament. In their introduction to a new After Babel essay, Zach Rausch and Jonathon Haidt noted that the most common resistance that they face in their work is a “feeling of resignation” in which people are concerned, but they keep saying: “The train has left the station — there’s nothing we can do.”

But many people, from individual parents to concerned legislators, are attempting to do SOMETHING.

This led to a short, important essay by Andrea Davis, the mother of five kids and founder of the Better Screen Time website. She also wrote this book: “Creating a Tech-Healthy Family — Ten Must-Have Conversations to Help You Worry Less and Connect More With Your Kids.”

The title of the After Babel essay is “It's Never Too Late to Turn Things Around.” As Haidt and Rausch note in their introduction, “sometimes, we can call trains back to stations, especially when they are full of children.”

As you would expect, the Davis essay includes “start-over” tips and I will get to a few of them in a moment. But, first, it’s important to hear a bit of her own story, which starts with the decision, during a 2017 move to a new city, to hand their 12-year-old daughter (“She is the classic oldest child — super responsible”) a smartphone to help her navigate their new location.

This essential overture proceeds from that point:

I know this sounds strange, but we kept our TV in the closet — pulling it out once a week for family movie night or for special occasions, like the Olympics. We worked hard to keep screens from being the focus of family time.

This is why it was such a shock when, several months after giving our daughter a smartphone, she came home from school, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and started scrolling with one hand while eating with the other. She didn’t even look up to talk to me.

It used to be a "How was your day?" moment, but suddenly this phone was more important than our daily chat. I sat there at the table wondering, “Where did my kid go?” A few months later I was leaning over the kitchen counter looking at my own phone, when I came across a social media post from my daughter — the same kid who cleaned her room without being asked. In her video, she was holding her hand to her head and lip syncing about a Glock.

Yes, a Glock — as in the semiofficial handgun of modern America. Let’s keep reading.

That experience “triggered” something inside Davis and some key elements of her family’s life began to change.

I was done with the smartphone. I realized at that moment that we had failed her. We had given her too much, too soon. The algorithms had pulled my child into content that was completely inappropriate for her age, and I had no way to control what she was seeing. Her developing brain was no match for this powerful tech. In the words of the former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, it wasn’t a “fair fight.”

My husband and I agreed we needed a major tech reset in our home. When we told her we were going to replace that smartphone with a brick phone without internet access, she sat at the kitchen table with tears streaming down her face. It was going to be incredibly embarrassing to be a middle schooler without a smartphone.

I would argue that the key question for parents, pastors, teachers and counselors is this: “What was the crucial source of those tears?”