I think most parents would like to believe that we understand our kids. That we “get” them and recognize the forces shaping their lives. They may think we don’t, as lots of rolled eyes would sarcastically imply. But—speaking for me as a dad, at least—I like to believe I’m not as clueless as my three teens may sometimes think I am.
But sometimes I have a moment of realization that things really are different. That maybe, in some key ways, I really don’t understand their world as much as I’d like to believe.
I had one of those interactions with my 14-year-old daughter recently. She was, I thought, video chatting with a friend. After all, she was watching her friend on a screen, then talking.
“Who are you talking to?” I asked casually as I walked past her in the kitchen.
“Oh, nobody.”
“Aren’t you FaceTiming one of your friends,” I asked, genuinely confused at what I was seeing and hearing.
“No,” she said. “She sends a video to me, and then I send one back to her.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to just have a conversation?” I suggested, even more perplexed than before.
“Well,” my daughter said, “sometimes it’s just a lot to talk to someone. There’s that pressure to know what to say right on the spot. It’s just easier to do it this way. You can think through what you want to say.”
“Really?” I asked. “But this is one of your good friends? Is it really that hard?”
What came next was a hard eyeroll, followed by a dismissive, “Dad, you just don’t understand.”
I couldn’t help but think of that interaction when I came across an article in The Atlantic earlier this year titled “The Anti-Social Century,” by Derek Thompson. The subtitle to the article adds: “Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics and even our relationship to reality.” And the article itself is a fascinating—not to mention concerning—dive into exactly how our relationship to reality, and to each other, is indeed changing.
The irony of the technological revolution that’s taken place in the last 30 years or so is how its promise to more easily connect people—via email, then text, then social media and face-to-face video apps—has yielded an unintended consequence: increasing social isolation.
Author Robert Putnam chronicled what we might call version 1.0 of this social phenomenon in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, which used diminishing interest in bowling leagues as a metaphor for social drift into isolation. The subsequent rise of social media and ubiquitous smartphone usage, both amplified further by COVID, has proven to be a potent accelerant for this trend.
Thompson unpacks what this new reality looks like in his article through a variety of fascinating statistics and anecdotes.
Take, for example, the explosion of people ordering restaurant food … to eat at home (thanks in part to the concurrent arrival of apps like GrubHub and DoorDash). In 2023, a whopping 74% of all restaurant traffic in the United States was from “off premises” (read: take-out) customers, a number that’s risen 61% since COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association. Meanwhile, the number of people who have dinner or drinks with friends has dropped 30% in the last two decades, while people eating alone at restaurants has increased 29% in just the last two years.
Increasingly, we want to be alone. With the possible exception of the family members we live with, we’re less and less interested in connecting face-to-face with other people. We’d rather stay at home and watch TV or engage with our multitudinous screens. Thompson reports that men spent seven hours watching TV for every hour they spend with someone outside their home.
But these days, TVs are hardly the clear and present danger to relationships that some social scientists began to recognize in the 1970s and ‘80s. That award, of course, goes to our phone screens. Thompson writes:
“Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30% of their waking life.”
And those habits are spilling over into measurable and meaningful ways, making today’s teens more isolated from one another than ever before. Thompson again:
“Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.”
We’ve published plenty of articles, blogs and reviews at Plugged In chronicling the impact of screens. So it’s not like that’s a new discovery or concern. But when I read an article like this one—and Thompson details our isolation with many other stats, trends and observations—it reinforces my sense of just how radically technology has impacted how we live, including these core social dynamics.
And while it’s easy to pick on “the kids” as the ones who are affected by these trends, the reality is that these trends affect adults and parents, too.
So what do we do? How do we respond?
It’s tempting to clutch our proverbial pearls in moral panic. Or to lament that it’s not like “the good old days,” whether we’re talking about the ‘90s, the ‘80s or the years before those. But that kind of response doesn’t yield very much.
After reading this article, my personal takeaway—and one that I want to help my kids with as well—is pretty simple: We need relationships, and we need to be with each other face to face, living life, doing things together. In fact, that need isn’t just an optional nicety; it’s hard-wired into the fact that we are created in God’s image as relational beings. We’re built to connect with Him and to experience meaningful relationships with each other, too.
Short of an apocalyptic event—or, for that matter, Jesus’ promised return—these screen-based trends aren’t going anywhere. In fact, the next generation of tech connections promises to wire our lives into a digital reality even more thoroughly, if that’s possible. Our challenge, it seems, is to keep working on our relationships with others—and encouraging our kids to do so with their friends—even as the world withdraws. I’m reminded of the author of Hebrews’ admonition:
“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25, ESV).
