Over Thanksgiving, I was forced to entertain my younger cousin, as I always did when our parents sipped post-feast wine and spat about politics on the other side of the room. Not knowing what to do, I asked her “What are your hobbies?” She pondered for a second before responding: “I like Instagram reels.”

My cousin, sadly, is in the majority of Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids who can’t imagine a life without the constant stimulation of technology. You can see the effects of this addiction everywhere from the classroom to the lunch table. Kids are struggling to go through a school day without checking their phones. This addiction has become overly normalized in the last few years, with Instagram influencers creating metacommentary about how we waste our lives scrolling even as they promote the lifestyle.

The biggest issue is that we know phone addiction is a problem and yet we refuse to combat the root of the issue. The legislature banning phones in schools has only treated one symptom, leaving the major problem: the rise of gentle parenting.

The rise of gentle parenting among Gen X and Millennial parents has decreased children’s resilience and therefore made them more susceptible to the phone addiction epidemic. Gentle parenting is a concept define by psychologist Dr. Cara Goodwin, Ph.D. as parenting by “respecting the child, taking the child’s perspective into account, [and] empathizing with […] your child”

The perspective, in theory, would be extremely helpful as it emphasizes respect and meeting a child at their level, but in practice, it rarely works. This rise in gentle parenting has only led to the decline in parents saying “no.” If their child wants chocolate, they get chocolate. If their child wants a puppy, they get a puppy.

As someone who has been a camp counselor multiple times, I know what kids do if you don’t say “no.” They are vicious. They will run all over you like wild animals.

Building a parenting technique on the idea of treating children as your peers would never work because they aren’t peers; They’re toddlers.

Gentle parenting does not take into account the underdeveloped frontal lobe of toddlers, especially their brains’ underdeveloped reward system. When given something like a screen, their brain will release dopamine insisting that they continue that activity. Children have no perception of the harms of this excessive dopamine, so they continue to scroll. As their bodies produce less and less dopamine because of said scrolling, they become addicted without the cognitive skills to escape.

Now, I don’t blame these parents for attempting this technique. The point of gentle parenting was not to harm children, but to save them from the authoritarian parenting styles exhibited on Gen X and Millennial kids by their parents. In an effort to remedy past grievances, parents have made mistakes of their own. Of course they have. There is no right way to parent and there never will be. Every parent is trying their best, but not every parent knows what that “best” should look like.

Science has not caught up with the exponential growth of technology in the last few decades enough to study the long-term effects of phone addiction in childhood, but we are seeing the repercussions now with shortened attention spans, behavioral issues in adolescents and distorted perceptions of reality. We cannot change the past, but there is always a future.

For parents: gentle parenting and authoritarian parenting are two wildly different ends of the parenting spectrum, but there are styles that fall closer to the middle. According to the Mayo Clinic, there are four different parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive and neglectful. Authoritarian parenting is the harmful abuse that many gentle parents received as children. Permissive parenting is gentle parenting. Neglectful parenting is just how it sounds and equally as harmful as the other two. Then as a sweet middle ground: authoritative.

Authoritative parenting involves having attainable expectations for your children, allowing them to fail and forcing them to learn from said mistakes. It also involves setting clear boundaries for your children and teaching them the consequences to their actions.

This parenting style will both make children more resilient to failure and more resistant to the call of screen addiction as it includes rules such as screen time limits and positive reinforcement to maintain a healthy balance of virtual and external realities.

For kids and teens who are already addicted: there is a way out and the faster you find it, the better. According to the article “Mobile phones: The effect of its presence on learning and memory” by Clarissa Theodora Tanil and Min Hooi Yong, “the presence of a smartphone and high phone conscious thought affects one’s memory learning and recall, indicating the negative effect of a smartphone proximity to our learning and memory.” Essentially, just having a phone nearby affects one’s learning the more that we scroll or check each notification we see, the less we will learn.

Screen time also increases the rates of anxiety and depression. In a survey by the CDC detailing screen usage from July 2021- December 2023, roughly 50% of teenagers age 12-17 reported 4 or more hours of screen time per day and nearly 1 in 4 of those teenagers reported feelings of depression and anxiety in the last two weeks compared to another survey conducted from 2021-2023 where 1 in 5 teenagers reported symptoms of anxiety in the past two weeks.

To put that into reference, there were roughly 26 million children age 12-17 in America in 2023. That would mean 6.5 million of those with more than four hours of screen time reported being anxious versus 5.2 million on average. 1.3 million more children reported anxiety just because of increased screen time.

I know many people who struggle with phone addiction. I, personally, have had my fair share of hours in bed doomscrolling until I feel like I’m going to throw up. I know the dopamine feels nice, but scrolling will only make us feel worse in the long term.

There is no easy way to solve phone addiction. Like any other addiction, it takes time, dedication and the desire to quit.

So start off simple. Get a coloring book from the store and every time you reach for your phone, reach for the book instead. Get some of those Wobbles crochet kits. You could even watch TV. You don’t need to change your life all at once. The only way to beat an addiction is to prove to yourself how much better you are without it. Just one step away from your phone could mean everything.