The Anxious Generation: How Under Protection in the Virtual World Fuels Anxiety

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Hello friends! On today's podcast, we are going to explore the second major factor contributing to the rising epidemic of anxiety and mental illness in children, teens, and young adults. That's what we're diving deep into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview.

I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled that you've joined me today.

You may have noticed that in the intro I said we are going to look at the second major factor contributing to this rise in anxiety and mental illness. That's because in our previous podcast, we explored the first main cause: overprotection in the real world. If you have not yet checked out that podcast, I highly recommend you listen to that episode first.

Everything we're talking about today—and everything we discussed in the previous podcast—comes from the book The Anxious Generation, which I highly recommend you check out if you haven't done so yet.

From Play-Based to Phone-Based Childhood

The second major factor contributing to this rising epidemic of anxiety and mental illness in children, teens, and young adults is under protection in the virtual world. Last time we talked about overprotection in the real world. Now we're going to talk about under protection in the virtual world.

The author explains this as moving from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. So that's how I'm going to refer to this second problem: the phone-based childhood.

Most children today are spending more time interacting in the virtual world than they are in the real world. Now you may be thinking, "Well, that's not true of my kids." If that is the case—that your kids are spending most of their time in the real world—that is excellent, and I'm so grateful that you are doing that.

However, it's still so important for us to recognize what is happening with most children because even if our children are not spending most of their time in the virtual world, the majority of their peers are.

On top of this, we adults often find ourselves distracted when we are with our children by the constant dinging of our phones. So even if our children are mostly in the real world and not in the virtual world, the virtual world is still highly impacting them because it's impacting their peers and it's impacting us as adults and where our attention is going for most of the time that we are with our children.

Four Major Harms of a Phone-Based Childhood

In The Anxious Generation, the author outlined four major harms that stem from a phone-based childhood. Again, even if your children are not engaged in a primarily phone-based childhood, it's really important that you understand these harms because your children are still going to be spending a lot of their time with other children and adults who are involved in this world.

1. Social Deprivation

The first main harm of a phone-based childhood is social deprivation. Children are designed to need large quantities of time each day to play with one another face-to-face. This is needed for healthy social development, and it cannot be replaced by screen-based interactions.

We saw this very clearly during the COVID pandemic of 2020. Even when our children were allowed to FaceTime with others and were doing virtual school, those interactions were nowhere near the quality of in-person interactions.

When children are in person with one another, they're learning vital social skills during unmonitored free play. They're learning skills such as verbal communication, reading body language, and basic conflict resolution. But when our children are together and they're playing, they're learning these basic skills.

For older children who are of an age where they can have a social media account, even if our children do not use social media—even if we haven't allowed them to have a phone or social media apps—the prevalence of social media still affects them. It causes their peers to make less eye contact, causes their peers to laugh less, and causes their peers to talk with one another less frequently.

I noticed this several years ago at a youth event with mostly junior high students but some high school students. At this event, most of the students were on their phones. It was quiet—it wasn't super chaotic like youth events I'd been to in the past—but I thought, "No one is interacting with one another."

In a phone-based childhood, even if our children are not engaged with screens, they're constantly being ignored by those who are.

There are two different quotes from the book that I want to read because they spoke specifically to this issue:

"It is painful to be ignored at any age. Just imagine being a teen, trying to develop a sense of who you are and where you fit, while everyone around you tells you indirectly, 'You're not as important as the people on my phone.'"

I know we have all experienced this. It drives me nuts when I am with people and they're constantly checking the dings on their phone. Even though I know they might have important things to do, I'm thinking, "I'm only asking for a half hour or maybe an hour of your time." With every ding, I feel like, "Oh, I'm not the priority here." Just imagine for children and teens who are growing up and they're constantly being indirectly told, "You're not as important as this message, or you're not as important as this thing I'm looking at."

The second quote says:

"A 2014 survey of children ages six through 12 found that 62% of children reported that their parents were often distracted when the child tried to talk with them."

This is something we need to think about: when we're with our children, what does our relationship with our phone look like? If we're constantly distracted by our phone, we're sending our children a very clear but subtle message that what's on our phone is more important than them.

I know that there are situations where we do need to answer the phone or respond to a really urgent text. However, those situations are in the minority. I have a friend who whenever I text her, I know there's a good chance she's never going to get back to me, and if she does get back to me, it might not be for two or three days. While this isn't my favorite thing, I know the reason why this happens: she has multiple young children and she is fully engaged with them. At this point in her life, engaging with her children is more important than answering a text from me.

2. Sleep Deprivation

The second main harm is sleep deprivation. When I was working as a teacher and would talk with parents during parent-teacher conferences, many parents assumed that if their child was getting eight hours of sleep a night, that was enough. That is not true.

Our children need a minimum—a minimum—of nine hours of sleep per night, with 10 to 12 hours being ideal. Our children need much more sleep than we need because they are in the stages of growing and developing.

The light that is emitted from screens sends signals to the brain telling the brain that it is daytime. So even if we don't allow our children to have phones or tablets, even if they're just watching television, all of those screens are sending light that is telling our kids that it's daytime.

If they're engaging with a screen after dusk, once dusk sets in, our bodies are naturally starting to wind down—that's how God has designed it. But if they're watching screens, their bodies are receiving the message that it's daytime, which is really causing problems with sleep.

Also, studies have found that children who are allowed to have phones or tablets in their rooms are often on such devices long after their parents think they are asleep. Children who are growing up in this time of a phone-based childhood are having huge amounts of sleep deprivation.

3. Attention Fragmentation

The third main harm of a phone-based childhood is attention fragmentation—meaning that attention is never focused solely in one direction because media is constantly vying for our kids' attention.

Research has found that fast-paced media leads to easy dopamine hits in the brain, which eventually leads to addiction and a very short attention span. If you look at most media that's created for children, it has fast-paced action and switches really quickly between scenes and has a lot of bright colors that are flashing on the screen.

Think about typical media for children nowadays versus Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers spoke very slowly, very kindly, very quietly. He was commanding attention through the way he spoke, and he was always looking directly into the camera, making eye contact with the child. This is vastly different than children's shows that are created today, which just lead to these easy dopamine hits, addiction, and short attention spans.

The author outlined several problems that increase when children and teens get smartphones or tablets that allow for notifications. I'm going to read several quotes from the book about this:

"When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people's phones from the top social and communication apps amount to 192 alerts per day. The average teen who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes."

So some child or teen with a smartphone every five minutes is getting a ding on that phone.

The book goes on and says:

"Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in the confused, dazed, and scatterbrained state."

We cannot multitask. There is no such thing as multitasking. What it is called is actually task switching—your brain has to switch back and forth between attention between two or more different items. If we are allowing our children to constantly be distracted, we're leading them to be in a confused, dazed, and scatterbrained state.

The book goes on and says:

"No matter how hard it is for adults to stay committed to one mental road, it is even harder for children and adolescents who have an immature frontal cortex and therefore limited ability to say no to off-ramps."

As hard as it is for us as adults to stay focused on one thing at a time, for our children, it is many times harder because the frontal cortex in their brain is not fully developed, and so it's going to be much more susceptible to going off these off-ramps every time something dings.

Then the final quote I'm going to read here says:

"This never-ending stream of interruptions and constant fragmentation of attention takes a toll on an adolescent's ability to think and may leave permanent marks in their rapidly reconfiguring brains."

A phone-based childhood is likely to interfere with the development of executive function in the brain. Think of executive function like an executive of a company—an executive has eyes and ears all over and makes sure that everything stays organized and on task. The executive function in the brain is the ability to regulate emotions, to regulate tasks that are going on, to stay organized, and to keep information organized and at the front of their minds.

If we are having our kids in front of phones or screens for a large amount of time, it's actually rewiring how their brains are developing.

4. Addiction

The fourth main problem of a phone-based childhood is addiction. The book outlines how social media and other apps are purposely designed to be addictive through a four-step process. There are four steps that app developers go through to make sure that people get hooked on their product:

Step 1: External Trigger - A notification, a ding, something that flies across the screen.

Step 2: Action - It calls you to action, to check something, to do something, and this action is always something that has been previously rewarded, like you get a little like on your phone, or you get a prize from a game, or you get some more coins or an extra life in a game.

Step 3: Variable Reward - Sometimes it will reward you and sometimes it won't. If you think about your social media apps—whether it's Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or something else—sometimes you go on and it has notifications, sometimes you go on and there are no notifications. It keeps you hooked because sometimes you get that reward, sometimes you don't get that reward. Similar with gaming and other apps that our kids are on: sometimes it lets them get a reward, sometimes it withholds that reward so that they keep coming back.

Step 4: Investment - Putting a part of yourself in the app, whether it's encouraging you to post something or to comment somewhere, whether it's encouraging a child to create an avatar or be involved in a different part of a game.

This four-step process is a loop that after there is that investment, it goes back to giving you an external trigger, then an action, then a variable reward, and then investment, and goes back to external trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.

The book says:

"Like people with a heroin and cocaine addiction, those addicted to digital activities found that nothing feels good anymore when they were not doing their preferred activity. The reason is that the brain adapts to long periods of elevated dopamine by changing itself in a variety of ways to maintain homeostasis."

When our kids are on apps that have this four-step process, their brains are being flooded with dopamine. Their brains can't handle that amount of dopamine, so some of their dopamine receptors get pruned away. Therefore, that same flood of dopamine won't give them the same high that they got before—they need more.

Regular activities that should usually be pleasurable—such as good food or a strong workout, or different things like (once you get married) sex—things that should normally give a dopamine reward, you can't even feel anymore because your brain has been rewired.

Two more quotes I'm going to read from this book:

"The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation."

And the final quote:

"Millennial adolescence in the 1990s and early 2000s had access to all kinds of addictive activities on their home computers, and some of them did get addicted. But they couldn't take their computers with them everywhere they went. After the great rewiring of childhood, the next generation of adolescents could and did."

Now our phones go with us everywhere. We might bring a tablet for our children with us. Our children need much more boundaries around the time that they're allowed to be on a tablet or a phone or interacting with a screen.

How These Harms Align with Biblical Worldview

Now let's look at how these four harms caused by a phone-based childhood align with the biblical worldview.

Social Deprivation makes sense as a major harm because God has designed us in His image, and we know that God is relational in and of Himself. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have always been in perfect loving communion with one another. As God's image bearers, we have been designed to need relationships—that is how God designed us as His image bearers.

When we allow our children to be relationally starved, when we allow them to interact with screens more often than they're interacting with people (or even just on an equal level), we are working against God's design. We are allowing our children to be starved of an essential part of what it means to bear God's image.

Sleep Deprivation makes sense as a major harm from a biblical worldview because God designed us to need rest. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God modeled for us that we need rest—God rested from the work of His creation. Now, God is infinite and has no limits, so God did not rest because He was tired, but He rested to establish this pattern for us.

When we do not set up patterns for our children to get sufficient rest, we are allowing them to try to take on attributes that only God possesses. Only God is infinite. Only God has no limits. Only God is self-sufficient. Only God needs nothing outside of Himself. When we do not establish healthy sleep patterns for our children, we are allowing them to try to take on this attribute of God that they do not possess.

Attention Fragmentation makes sense as a major issue from a biblical worldview because God has designed us to exercise dominion over creation, and we are to fulfill this calling that He has given us. But when our attention is fragmented, no one and nothing gets our best. With attention fragmentation, we are not able to do our best or give our best or give our all to anyone or anything.

When we set our children on the trajectory for consistently having fragmented attention, we are hindering them from being able to fulfill their God-given calling.

Addiction makes sense as a major problem from a biblical worldview because God designed us for Himself and for His glory, and anything that we become addicted to has become master over us. When we are addicted to something, we are not giving our all to God. We are being mastered by something other than Him, and we are not able to work for God's glory when we are being mastered by something other than God.

If we allow our children to become addicted to any form of technology, we are allowing them to become enslaved.

Hope and Solutions Ahead

I hope you've been able to see as we've gone through these four main issues—social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction—that if we allow our children to fall into this trap of having a phone-based childhood, we are actually working against God's design for them.

The good news is that there is hope. There is always hope because of what Jesus has done for us. In the next episode, we are going to look at the solution to the two problems that I have highlighted both in the last podcast episode and in this episode: our children being overprotected in the real world and underprotected in the virtual world.

If you'd like to find out more about these solutions, make sure you tune into our next episode. To make sure that you do that, please be sure to hit the like or subscribe button so that you do not miss the next episode that comes out.

Take Action to Protect Your Children

The challenges we've discussed today—social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction—are real threats to our children's development and their ability to fulfill God's calling on their lives. But you don't have to navigate these challenges alone.

If you're concerned about protecting your children from the harms of a phone-based childhood while equipping them with a strong biblical worldview, I encourage you to join our email community. You'll receive practical insights, biblical wisdom, and updates on our latest resources to help you guide your children through our digital age with confidence.

Additionally, if you're looking for comprehensive curriculum that addresses these very issues while building critical thinking skills rooted in Scripture, explore Foundation Worldview's curriculum. Our materials are specifically designed to help children ages 4-15 learn to carefully evaluate ideas they encounter and understand truth through a biblical lens.

Don't let your children fall victim to the phone-based childhood epidemic. Take proactive steps today to protect their minds, hearts, and futures.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that question by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast.

As we leave our time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children that God has placed in your care find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son.