Smartphones, Therapists, and Your Kids: A Review Essay

Editor’s Note: The following review appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Eikon.

Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2024.

Abigail Shrier. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. New York, NY: Sentinel, 2024.

Parenting has never been easy. Parenting Christianly — that is, for the glory of God and the salvation of our children’s souls — is impossible.

Impossible, that is, by human power or ingenuity. Our goal is too glorious and supernatural for “expert tips.” Imagine “Ten Steps to Regenerate Your Kids” and you’ll see the problem. And yet our task as Christian dads and moms is not impossible because we are not left to our own strength, but instead have the good news of the gospel, in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the sufficient and authoritative Scriptures, in the midst of the local church. Supplied with these resources, we parent in faith as we pass on the faith once delivered to the coming generations.

And yet, parenting is still hard. But the reasons for its difficulty vary from age to age. The perennial struggles of the human soul, and the maturation of those young souls to responsible adults, modulates in time to the melody of each generation’s riff on the old, old song. Cultural pathologies create parenting challenges. And it’s the challenges we’re most immersed in that can be the most challenging to spot. Omnipresence renders problems nearly invisible.

That’s where Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier’s works serve us. In their books Anxious Generation and Bad Therapy, they give us new eyes to see contemporary parenting problems that are easy to miss because they are everywhere. What are those problems? Technology and therapy. So what does parenting amid smartphones and trauma therapists require from us as Christian parents?

In this article, I have two goals: I want to provide an overview of the analysis Haidt and Shrier make of our current parenting moment, and then I want to provide a Christian lens through which to view their work. There’s a paradox here: Haidt and Shrier are very good at diagnosing a problem, better than most Christian parents. But their diagnosis of the problems are mostly partial and incomplete, and (in one specific case) harmful. We need a thoughtful engagement with their work on explicitly Christian presuppositions.

Growing Up on Mars: Haidt’s Argument

Haidt begins Anxious Generation with a brilliant thought experiment. Imagine a billionaire investor asking parents to sign their kids up for an innovative venture: growing up on Mars. Your kids will have fantastic new opportunities and be on the cutting edge of a new kind of adolescence, you’re told.

“What are the risks?” you ask.

“We haven’t explored those,” the designer responds.

“Has this been done before?” you continue, growing more concerned.

“No, never,” comes the reply. “What could go wrong?”

No responsible parent would enroll their kids in such a project. And then Haidt springs the trap: what if allowing our kids to pass through adolescence with a smartphone in their pockets was the same kind of untested experiment?

By the time he is done summarizing the sociological and psychological literature, the argument is convincing: smartphones are indeed a new kind of experiment in development. Haidt isn’t a luddite, and he’s not narrowly obsessed with iPhones. It’s the unique combination of ubiquitous internet access, selfie-capable camera devices, and social media that makes the smartphone a potent symbol of a new kind of growing up. And ironically, Haidt maintains, we’ve managed to weave this new digital access into an era of parenting that also minimizes real-world, material engagement and experiences. Phones are “experience blockers” that distract users from the real world around them. In his memorable line, we “overprotect in the real world and under-protect in the digital world.” In other words, we need a little less screen time and a few more skinned knees.

Haidt’s book consists of four parts: an analysis of the mental health of teens in the Western world (Part One, which shows a universal decline in mental health that parallels the development of the smartphone); an exploration of why such digital technology is especially harmful for child development (Part Two, which discusses experience-blocking and the over-under-protecting idea); a third part examining four specific harms (social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction); and finally, a concluding section on concrete proposals for action. These consist of both policy proposals (ban phones in schools, etc.) and suggestions for individual families (delay smartphone and social media use, prioritize in person experiences). Here the Christian analysis temporarily tracks with and then greatly departs from Haidt’s suggestions. But, in broad strokes, his diagnosis is spot on: digital life, swallowed uncritically and unreflectively, is harmful for our kids.

The Tyranny of Therapy: Shrier’s Argument

Investigative journalist Abigail Shrier already deserved our gratitude for her work on the transgender contagion among teenage girls, Irreversible Damage.^[1] In Bad Therapy she faces another social problem affecting children: the rise of “bad therapy,” or a trauma-based, therapeutic mindset that harms rather than helps. Her book is structured around three parts: Part I, “Healers Can Harm;” Part II, “Therapy Goes Airborne;” and Part III, “Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong with Our Kids.” With a little imagination, the basic argument can be deduced from that outline. Part I documents the “iatrogenic” (a technical term from medicine referring to an intervention intended to help that actually harms) effects of counseling in certain circumstances and for certain people. Part II especially deserves Christian parents’ attention, because here Shrier explains how therapy has gone from an isolated phenomenon encountered only in specific cases to a society-wide assumption about what children need. In other words, you’re harming your kids if they don’t have a therapist.

But these ideas are, in effect, an alternative catechism instructing our kids in matters of basic human identity and need: You’re a victim. Your emotions always need to be explored. Life is traumatic. You can’t cope without medication or an expert. And, by the continual probing of “have you ever thought of harming yourself?,” suicide is normalized.

In Part III, Shrier gives common sense suggestions for why “normal” struggles are a part of normal life, and floats the countercultural idea that maybe our kids will be fine even if they’re occasionally bullied or sad or depressed (I put “normal” in scare quotes because there’s a vital Christian question to be explored here: who defines “normal”? Can “normal” human experience ever be defined without reference to our Creator? More on that in a moment…).

Shrier isn’t writing from a Christian worldview, but in the end her “solutions” are useful because they’re not all that specific: don’t panic if your kids struggle. Don’t try to spare them all hardship. Don’t think there’s a technique or therapy out there that makes perfect parents who turn out perfect kids. There’s no gospel in those recommendations, but then they’re also not aiming to solve the problems of parenting for all time. In the end, Shrier simply leaves us where previous generations ended up instinctively (more precisely: by God’s common grace): parenting is hard. Kids have to grow up. And (if we don’t interfere with therapies whose goal is to take away all hardship)…they usually do.

How Then Shall We Parent?

So what should Christian parents make of all this? At the most basic level, Haidt and Shrier help us see two influences on our kids with new eyes: smart phones and therapists. That insight alone is a gift. I’ve heard Christian parents describe struggles with their kids — disrespect, depression, laziness, anxiety — and then, in passing, describe life-consuming screen time patterns as though these were unrelated issues. As pastors, ask these questions in counseling: what is your child’s screentime like? As parents, consider: do teens need a smartphone? What does it look like to rightly protect our kids in the digital world? It’s especially worth pondering how we can create more real-world experiences for our kids. As Christians with a belief in the goodness of God’s material creation, we have a theological rationale for helping our kids build, make, play, sweat, explore, and encounter a realm that can’t be entered through a screen. “Taste and see that he is good” doesn’t take place in virtual reality.

The same awareness of the problem is necessary for the constant catechizing, counseling voices speaking to our kids: do we know how many influencers are pursuing our kids — especially those claiming the label of “professional” or “expert”? What are they saying? What model of human identity and purpose lies behind their advice? Shrier is especially helpful for reminding parents of a basic insight of the Christian doctrine of the family: Mom and Dad, you are the experts on your kids — not someone with a degree and a resume of professional qualifications. It’s God who gives us our kids to raise for his glory and their eternal good — and it is God who will hold us (not their therapists) accountable for how we pursue that glorious task. Don’t buy the lie that only “experts” can tell you what your kids need. Trusting God’s providence, trusting the sufficiency of Scripture, and pursuing the blessing of local church involvement — we can raise our kids for the glory of God.

But that last phrase — “for the glory of God” — can’t be a throwaway line, and has to affect the way we evaluate even good advice like Haidt and Shrier. They can’t become the “experts” to whom we outsource parenting wisdom, either. Their insights also need to be interpreted through a Christian lens. Let me suggest a weakness in both of their arguments that ultimately cannot be answered without God and Scripture.

Jonathan Haidt is an atheist and evolutionary psychologist. In his chapter on “spiritual elevation and degradation,” he says this:

Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?” Secular people can think of their own moral exemplar. (I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.) (201)

He goes on to explain that “humans evolved to be religious by being together and moving together” (205). With this explanation, Haidt can interpret all moral judgments as ultimately statements of evolutionary intuition: “In other words, we have an immediate gut feeling about an event, and then we make up a story after the fact to justify our rapid judgment — often a story that paints us in a good light” (211). There are no universal moral laws, only moral preferences that can be evaluated for their usefulness, but not their ultimate truth claims. In this system, the only ultimate sin is making anything ultimate. This comes out perhaps most clearly in an aside as Haidt describes a young man he works with who, after struggling with online pornography and gambling gradually “found ways to moderate his gaming and pornography use” (174). Note the assumption: pornography and gambling are only bad if they become “addictive” — not because of any inherent moral value. Here Haidt’s model is explicitly harmful to Christian discipleship — there is no “moderate” use of pornography or gambling!

In practice, what this means is that Haidt can’t explain what teens, weaned off their digital devices, are actually meant to live for. That chapter on spiritual degradation is God-haunted; Haidt can’t get away from the Romans 1 knowledge that there is something more to human experience than evolution can explain, and he sees clearly that technology in some way hinders our engagement with a spiritual realm. He even says we have a “God-shaped hole” (215). But he can’t admit that the hole is not a generic god-sized hole, but a suppressed knowledge of the one true God. Ironically, his own work tells him why: he has a gut feeling that that God can’t be allowed into his world without requiring repentance and faith, and so he makes up a story after the fact to explain why humans are merely evolutionary byproducts who make moral judgments and need a god, or an encounter with nature, or something…anything but an acknowledgement that we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We should pray that Haidt turns to the God who is there. We should learn from his descriptions of a very real problem. But we are not merely after “moderating digital addictions” — we want our kids to live, not for or through their devices, but for God and in his world.

That observation points to the weakness in Shrier’s work as well. Throughout her book and the subsequent podcast tour, Shrier repeatedly says that “most” kids don’t need therapy, that some struggle is “normal,” but that certain people (kids and parents) really do need therapy. We could turn that insight around and express the problem this way: according to Shrier, most kids don’t need therapy…unless they do need therapy. It’s normal to struggle, unless your struggles aren’t normal. The vital Christian question is this: what’s “normal?” Anyone familiar with human beings or their own soul knows that yes, some seasons of struggle are more intense than others, and some people have more struggles than others do. Not all human challenges are equal. But that common-sense observation ignores the more vital question that the entire modern therapeutic project cannot answer: what is a normal, healthy human being? Is it possible to be a well-adjusted, emotionally balanced human being…who rebels against the living God? As the late David Powlison would say, no system of psychological intervention ever has as its goal a worshipper of the triune God — and so, in the end, every system, carried to its logical end, will only create well-adjusted, socially acceptable idolaters. Shrier is uncomfortable with our therapeutic obsession, but she doesn’t have a clear alternative for problems in life. We do. Therapy and trauma and emotional-social adjustment are inadequate categories to define our kids (and our ourselves) because they ignore the living God, and they disciple us to adjust our lives to an absent God. That cannot be our goal as Christian parents.

So here’s my recommendation as we engage both Haidt and Shrier’s work. Learn from the problems they see, because they are real problems. We are naïve if we suppose ourselves immune from such cultural pathologies. Christian discipleship requires engaging screentime and the catechizing effects of a therapeutic world. But don’t outsource the definition and work of parenting to Haidt, Shrier, or any other voice but God’s. The gospel, revealed in Scripture, lived in the community of the local church, experienced by the power of the Holy Spirit in the application of Christ’s work — that is our hope for parenting and our source of all wisdom for life and godliness.

^[1] See Janie B. Cheaney’s review in a previous issue of Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology 3.2 (Fall 2021), 116–119.