Millennials Melted Their Brains With Screens. Their Kids Want None of It

A few months ago, while trying to juggle the intricacies of my 10-year-old daughter Alice’s after-school schedule, my wife and I bought her a cellphone. The purchase felt fraught, like the 21st century equivalent of sticking a pack of Marlboro Reds in her backpack.

As a tech reporter, I’ve spent years covering the harms caused by the relentless push for growth at Silicon Valley’s biggest companies—a push some researchers have linked to higher rates of eating disorders, depression and even suicide among teenagers. I’ve watched testimony from company whistleblowers such as former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, who said executives had ignored their own internal research showing the site was “generating self-harm and self-hate” among girls not much older than Alice is now. And I’ve seen even some of the most bullish tech pioneers turn into critics when they became parents. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” the investor Sean Parker famously said in 2017 of the social network he helped Mark Zuckerberg start more than a decade earlier. I don’t know the answer to Parker’s question, and I have no interest in running the experiment on my children either.