My last four posts were written with my scientist hat on. Now that I have finished writing them and taken stock, I can put my artist hat back on. One of the things I love about being a writer is that I get to think more broadly about societal discourse, about the current human condition. Like all good writing, this shift required me to sit with my fears and look at them head-on. Because as I wrote in Part I, I agree with a lot of what Haidt says.
So I asked myself, why do I fear this? What is this really about? What bothers me most when I see my daughter on the phone is that she seems obsessed with beauty, hairstyles and makeup. It makes me feel like she's shallow, only concerned about her looks—even though I know she's an intelligent young woman who cares deeply about a lot of other things. What bothers me most when I see my son on the phone is that he tends to repeat things that I hear as toxic masculinity—even though I know he's a sensitive young man who would never in a million years hurt a fly (he names spiders so that I won't kill them).
I think this is really about my fear that they grow up with different values. That they grow to be adults I disagree with, perhaps even adults that I don't like. For me, at least, the real fear is losing control over them.
Of course, this control is an illusion. I've never been able to determine what these people I've been entrusted with would like or dislike. Early on, I realised that this is what makes parenting a learning process: we are in charge of someone's well-being, but we cannot control who that person is. All we can do is listen and try to figure out how to help them navigate this thing called life.
This anxiety isn't new. Every generation of parents has worried about losing control of their children's moral and social development. In the 1950s, it was rock and roll. In the 1980s, it was MTV. Today, it's TikTok and Instagram. What's different now isn't the fear itself but how immediate and visible the process has become.
My values evolved from my parents' values, but by the time I had an independent view of world events, I was already in university, living outside the house—an adult. Now, our children have a political worldview that comes not just from us but from everything they watch on YouTube. And that's terrifying – not because phones are inherently harmful, but because they make visible a process that has always been somewhat hidden: our children becoming their own people.
Perhaps what we're really talking about when we talk about phones isn't the technology at all—it's our struggle to accept that our children will inevitably grow into people who might see the world differently than we do. Phones haven't created this reality; they've just made it more visible, more immediate, and harder to ignore.
This doesn't mean we should not think critically about technology's role in our children's lives. But it does suggest that when the debate fixates on screen time or social media use, we might be displacing larger, more difficult conversations: How do we guide our children while allowing them to become their own people? How do we help them navigate a world that's fundamentally different from the one we grew up in? How do we manage our own anxieties about their development without projecting those fears onto their technology use?
Because that's what this conversation is really about. Not phones, not screen time, not even social media. It's about the age-old challenge of watching our children grow into themselves, with all the joy and terror that process entails. The phones are just making visible what was always there: that terrifying, beautiful moment when we realise our children are becoming their own people, with their own values and perspectives, whether we're ready for it or not.
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