Addictions, Teens, and Technology

Half-Baked Parenting Advice, Part Two

I opened my last column on this topic highlighting the primacy of nature over nurture, and the relief that ought to provide parents in worrying about outcomes for their children. However, there is a huge caveat to that in managing our relationship with technology. Biologists call many aspects of the modern environment evolutionary mismatches. Bryan Caplan is correct that genes significantly influence many outcomes, but they also pose a problem when dealing with environments that deviate substantially from ancestral norms for our design.

The contemporary technological environment is historically unprecedented and entraps our dopamine circuits. And since teenagers, by design, have higher dopamine levels, and thus higher reward-seeking behaviors, they are particularly prone to developing addictions of all kinds, substance and otherwise. Just as it’s wise to wait until age 21 to consume alcohol, when the brain’s reward circuits are more attenuated, similar oversight must be brought to the behavioral addictions of technology.

Silicon Valley, unfortunately, is an industry built on addiction on the consumer side. The first Internet addictions to emerge surrounded gaming and pornography, largely among males, who are more obsessive and prone to addiction generally. But perhaps the greatest surprise of the last ten years is the power of social media algorithms to take content that is not naturally addictive, simple user-generated images and video of a non-pornographic nature, and make them more addictive, in terms of hours spent globally, than more naturally addictive content.

And for the most part, social media addiction is a female phenomenon, the sex less prone historically to compulsive behavior. This seems like a rather big deal. If you had told us in the mid-90s that girls would spend more time looking at pictures and chatting with people on the Internet than boys — something at the time was only done by nerds who ordered modems from the back of computer magazines — we wouldn’t have believed you.

On Male Weakness

It may be most helpful to discuss pornography first as the simpler phenomenon to explain. It simply is part of human design that males are highly motivated to see females. You can judge men for this fundamental aspect of their design, or accept it.

And while it may be tempting to dismiss men as pigs, I suspect that upon some reflection, women would not like to live in a world where men were as indifferent to them physically as they are (relatively) to men. It’s a key reason why women, in effect, run the world and control 80% of the spending — i.e., every working man and woman is, in the end, competing to get a share of the 80 cents on the dollar controlled by female consumers. Men might be stronger physically, but this is more than balanced by their weakness for women¹.

How weak? Quite. Contrary to stereotypes, men are typically more eager to commit in existing matched relationships. Rob Henderson reports that:

Several studies have found that men fall in love faster than women. Nearly twice as many men (27%) compared to women (15%) report that they have fallen in love with their current partner within 4 dates.

Men, on average, are ready for an exclusive “couple” relationship after 2.5 months, compared with 6 months for women. Men are also quicker to reach the point of expecting the relationship to lead to marriage.

Another study found that 88% of people believe that women fall in love in a relationship first.

But when asked about their most recent relationship, men reported falling in love faster.

Who says “I love you” first?

19% of women in relationships reported that they said “I love you” first.

64% of men in relationships reported that they said “I love you” first.

One reason for the gap in stereotypes versus reality might be due to the fact that high-status men are less likely to say I love you first and are less interested in romantic entanglements.

Related to this, St. Paul makes a revealing comment in his first epistle to Timothy when he states under inspiration that, unlike Eve, “Adam was not deceived” in our parents’ first transgression. Adam ate of the fruit fully aware of the consequences. Milton, in Paradise Lost, speculates, and I concur, that the immediate cause of Adam’s sin was fear of losing Eve, who would have been, in her perfection, the most beautiful woman ever created. Milton’s Adam declares his devotion to Eve, after she has eaten but he has not yet, in contemplating his knowing rebellion:

O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be formd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
…

Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn'd,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

…

However I with thee have fixt my Lot,
Certain to undergoe like doom, if Death
Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our State cannot be severd, we are one,
One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self.

Such is the cause of all the misery in the world, but you can’t say it isn’t romantic! There are likely some ladies reading this who are thinking, “I wonder if my man loves me that much.”

If Eve’s beauty and charm, and Adam’s design to desire her, overcame his perfection to choose death with her over life with God, what hope of resistance have his fallen sons to resist an exponentially more tempting world? Only that which is enforced by human society’s hard-won ascent from the mire of original sin.

And when the fallen male sex drive is properly socialized in the most advanced, Christian, monogamous cultures, it can again approach the virtuous and beautiful, perhaps best illustrated by what may be the most romantic dialogue ever published, in Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Darcy declares to Elizabeth that “you have bewitched me body and soul” and because of that, he has moved heaven and earth, including defying his relatives, for them to be together. That word “bewitched” implies he has lost control of himself in his desire for her, but luckily for them, that desire finds a route to be consummated through marriage.

Much of the drama of the book is how this desire must be channeled and processed to happen properly, and for both parties to come to a right understanding. But at bottom, Darcy’s desire is irrational, though corralled by his impressive self-control and sense of propriety.

However, this beautiful depiction of passion under control for useful social ends inevitably begins as irrational and undirected. While normal boys can be attracted to girls from the earliest ages, the sexual urgency of this begins at puberty, around age 13. Sex hormones and some mysterious developmental process wind back the clock of his impulsiveness to around 8 years old, while his body begins producing up to 100 million gametes a day and testosterone production expands 30-fold.

There’s an old quote, probably apocryphal, from Socrates, or maybe Sophocles, that a young man’s libido is akin to being chained to a lunatic². Involuntary sexual thoughts come a mile a minute, to the point of being an annoying distraction. And this can’t be solved by the girls wearing longer shorts, because the system is self-tuning to the stimuli available!

Every part of an attractive woman is inherently interesting at these ages, because every part of a woman is prettier, better-formed, more symmetrical, and elegant than the corresponding part of a man³. Any woman given a raw feed into 13-year-old Fitzwilliam Darcy’s imagination would be grossed out, even if all he’s seeing are necks and ankles. One does wonder what to make of the classical statuary at Pemberley!

What has its proper end in mature, directed male sexuality, e.g., the 20+ year married couple where the husband still can’t keep his hands off his wife and regularly grosses out the teenagers, begins as an immature instinct that is natural, God-ordained, and, because involuntary, mostly outside the moral realm.

Perils of Purity Culture

This is part of the reason why purity culture is wrong. Expecting sexuality to stay dormant for 10, maybe 20 years, until a young man is economically able to support a family, and then, just-in-time, happens to pair bond with the one woman he will marry, is not realistic. And it’s just a difference of degree for women.

I didn’t grow up with sisters, so I enjoyed getting to know a few girls in high school in the 90s who became platonic friends. I noticed several interesting but contradictory ideas they seemed to hold (and pointing out these contradictions could be quite entertaining to my teenage self if I could get them just a little angry). On the one hand, they were judgmental of male sexuality being visually promiscuous, even as many of them wore the skin-tight bodysuits and near-zero inseam denim shorts in fashion at the time. In a strange, delusional tragedy of the commons, while they reserved the right to provoke visually, they insisted their boyfriends, or their future husbands, should have eyes only for them⁴.

At the same time, there were a few men, notably Brad Pitt and George Clooney of E.R. fame, whom they would openly, dare I say, lust over, stating their desire to “have his baby” given the opportunity. This was confusing to my 16-year-old self. First, why were they so interested in old guys, in their 30s? Clooney famously even had prematurely gray hair! Second, these same young women were clear on several occasions of their intention not to have anyone’s baby until well after being established in their ambitious careers. Even as they expressed mostly indifference towards their male classmates, their convictions were as flexible as the boys depending on the circumstances, which surprised me, as I was very early in my continuing education program concerning the fairer sex.

But these tendencies among the girls are part of the core fantasy of every romance novel — the high-status movie star, billionaire, or even better, secret billionaire vampire who can have almost any woman he wants, yet his sexuality is, by fate, only precisely tuned to respond to the heroine. It’s a fantasy every bit as unrealistic as male ones of infinite sexual variety and availability.

By contrast, my male friends and I probably thought at least a third of the girls at our high school were attractive, and probably 10% were “hot” by our standards. The guys were simply more realistic and fair. In reality, these girls were as lustful as boys, just way pickier.

Purity culture, arguably, was an attempt to Christianize an unrealistic, romance novel model of pair bonding by placing Pharisaical boundaries around sexuality. Instead of dealing in obvious truths, like “it’s good to avoid venereal disease, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and sexual relations with people who will become old flames permanently recorded by biochemical attachments in your psyche and undermine your future marriage,” it turned into a performative, impossible standard.

And when teenagers perceive an impossible standard, they’re likely to just ignore or fake it. It’s possible to avoid venereal disease, sexual relations before marriage, and be faithful within marriage. It is not possible for anyone, least of all teenage boys, to be “pure,” only feeling desire for an eventual lifelong partner, like a duckling imprinting on the first caregiver it sees after hatching.

For this to be remotely possible, we’d need sexual maturity to occur ten years after full adult rationality is achieved, not ten years antecedent to it. Why are we designed this way?

Sexually Overclocked by Design

My best guess is a runaway feedforward loop related to our giant brains’ capacity to reason. Our huge brains mean that humans, compared to animals, a) can rationally plan to manipulate our behavior and environment to maximize hedonic rewards and minimize associated costs, and b) have infants that require years more care than any other creature, their giant heads making them immobile, clumsy, and fragile.

Having children is signing up for a decade plus of voluntary slavery, and so historically mankind often found ways to extract the juice of sexual pleasure without the pulp of reproduction (Caesar Augustus, for example, was disgusted by the Roman elite’s decadence of sex without reproduction). To force humans to reproduce anyway without making us dumber, the drive of at least one of the sexes had to be overclocked beyond the capacity of our substantial reason to contain it (and peak in intensity before brains fully develop), but not enough to completely collapse civilization, hence men. You could say God, of necessity to sustain the race, loves babies more than sexual purity.

Our designer also made other curious choices. 99.9% of mammals, including dogs and cats, go into heat and only mate when the female is ovulating, which is made obvious by physical signs. Humans, however, feature concealed ovulation, a rare trait we share with only a few other species (5 out of 6,704 extant mammals, or 0.07%), which ensured humans would have a maximal amount of sex and thus, sexual thoughts, relative to that strictly needed for reproduction.

This revelation from the Book of Nature contradicts early Christian overreaction to Roman laxity in casting sex as a necessary venial evil contrary to and corrupting of our essential rational spirit. Our design implies our essence to be both maximally rational and maximally sexual compared to animals. Dr. James Dobson, his empirical training as a psychologist making him more reasonable than most, did his best to offer a more measured perspective, while purity culture doubled down on its rebellion against nature.

‘90s Problems

Unfortunately, these were “‘90s problems,” and this whole debate became moot with the advent of Internet pornography. The ‘90s parents who found a pilfered Playboy or two featuring R-rated content more tame than the latest streaming trash on Netflix were dealing with a minor problem unlikely to have permanent consequences, and even if a few mothers were shocked to find their sweet little boys were like the rest of the dirty men out there, not a few fathers were secretly pleased to by an admission against interest that their sons were, indeed, like the rest instead of light in the loafers.

Internet pornography, by contrast, is a paradigm shift in quantity, variety, convenience, and habituation that is a major problem, in that it theoretically represents an extinction-level threat, but not in the way many expect. The naive interpretation is that such a stimulus would increase interest in sex and turn its users into aggressive criminals. In reality, like so many modern dopamine traps, it has been accompanied by a dimming and deadening of users’ sexual responsiveness to real-life stimuli, similar to the hearing loss experienced by firemen and pilots overexposed to decibels exceeding OSHA limits. The causation, however, is complex and non-obvious, to be discussed momentarily.

Nevertheless, our pornified society has an epidemic not of rape, but rather of functional sexlessness among young people. The great bugaboo of the ‘90s purity movement, teenage pregnancy, has declined precipitously alongside other former teenage passions, like getting a driver’s license. The idea that teenagers might overcome their Internet-induced social anxiety and sexual overstimulation and get together IRL, with their imperfect, unfiltered, unaltered bodies, put away their phones, and make a baby seems almost preposterous!

Avoiding Shame

In talking to young men about this, it seems important to sidestep guilt and shame. I recommend an appeal to self-interest: “There’s nothing wrong with liking the way girls look and being attracted to them, in fact, that’s how you’re supposed to feel. The problem with porn is that it’s addictive, and I don’t want you to be a loser who can’t talk to girls and have your brain so burned out that you can’t have a real-life sexual relationship with a woman as an adult.” The rhetorical emphasis is that porn is for cheaters and losers, not that their natural desires are bad.

It’s cheating because pornography, as a supernormal stimulus, provides young men with a form of sexual access to highly physically attractive women. Not only are the women themselves a form of supernormal stimulus (i.e., often more attractive than the young man could naturally attract), but the ease of access removes motivation from the young man who indulges in the vice. A man’s drive to seek an attractive woman, all other things being equal, is good and righteous, and should manifest itself in efforts to make himself as maximally attractive as possible.

And if he’s successful, he gets one woman. Porn provides an unlimited supply of attractive women, with zero effort, something that, morality aside, isn’t even achievable in real life, given real-life polygamists, whether the cast of Sister Wives or the extensively pierced, neck-beard, blue-haired, Reddit crowd into polyamory, aren’t exactly outlier examples of human beauty. And this still understates the issue, as habituation to porn in some users drives further novelty-seeking down rabbit holes entirely unrelated to normal reproductive sex, checking every box and then some from a mid-century abnormal psychology textbook.

So the main case isn’t shame and guilt for natural desire, but enlightened self-interest and self-respect. The appropriate substitution for fake goods is real ones, in a young man being attracted to pretty girls in real life, being confident enough to talk to them, and accomplished enough to attract them, without feeling guilty about it!

The Guilt Merchants

And if you’re raising your kids in the church, there can be a lot of counterproductive guilt messages. Christians are generally suckers for pietist guilt merchants, who are often odd ducks, if not predatory charlatans, like the strangely single, childless Bill Gothard, who was, incredibly, a parenting authority in the more gullible parts of the homeschool movement, as I covered in my essay on the Duggars.

As mentioned previously, early Christianity overshot the Bible in its sexual ethics, even seeing marital sex as at best a necessary evil, a legacy that continues to foment errors in the church. Church father Origen reportedly castrated himself in a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.

Even latter-day pietists like Dietrich Bonhoeffer want to have it both ways, who in Costly Grace excoriates any definite reasoning being applied to Christ’s rhetorical overstatement, common in the Biblical genre of wisdom literature to which this passage belongs, when it comes to lust, saying illogically we are called to take His words literally and non-literally at the same time. Bonhoeffer wants every normal red-blooded man to not castrate himself, but also feel bad about not castrating himself.

Applying this hermeneutic, referencing an earlier part of the Sermon, we should feel as guilty as a murderer when we call someone a fool, yet pietists always seem to zero in on sex above all (or money, if reaching for your wallet) when it comes to preaching smuggled self-righteousness⁵. Strangely, they never seem to apply this to their own schtick, in that calling other believers fake Christians (or usually, implying it given their typical unmanly rhetoric) for their lack of hyper-moralizing rigor is a libel worse than calling someone a fool. So how did this zeal to resist even thoughts about women manifest in Bonhoeffer’s life?

Bonhoeffer, it turns out, lived with a dude: “They spent much of the next eight years living and traveling together, kept joint bank and household accounts, sent joint Christmas cards and gifts, and, in their frequent times in Berlin, shared a bedroom in the Bonhoeffer family home.” Tell me, normal men, have you ever considered opening a joint personal bank account with a close male friend? Doesn’t that seem like totally normal behavior?

To be clear, there is no evidence Bonhoeffer was anything but celibate⁶ — though it does seem like there’s a double standard, in that no one would buy claims of celibacy from an unmarried man and woman who shared a bedroom, bank account, and gave Christmas gifts as a couple — but many seem to think he struggled with same-sex attraction. Such a condition would tempt a person to want to relativize all non-marital sexual desire as equally bad and construct an alternative status system based on self-denial.

Sometimes I wonder how many hardcore pietists are like this, damaged goods wanting company in misery, and theology, as a non-falsifiable field of study compared to say chemistry or physics, tends to attract BS artists who deal in vibes over logical arguments. Like teenagers cutting themselves with a razor blade for the endogenous opioids, pietists like to feel bad so they can feel good by setting up impossible moral traps, and by implication, make themselves look better than others.

Related to this is the strange case of Joshua Harris, the OG Pharisee of 90s purity culture, who tried to make a whole generation of Christian young men feel guilty about kissing their girlfriends in his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. In 2019, he announced he was no longer a Christian, divorced his pretty wife with whom he had three children, and promptly marched in a Pride parade. I never bought what Harris was selling in the 90s⁷, but I knew a lot of young people who did, struggling over his grievous legalistic burdens. Maybe a guy who was likely more interested in the wedding flower selections than the honeymoon shouldn’t advise on what’s pure and what’s not?

Young women should probably know that, in a relationship, a young man who seems to have supernatural self-control, who seems so spiritual that he doesn’t struggle with controlling what should be a very strong attraction to his girl, the Bayesian priors⁸ should send up some alarm bells about a possible closet case or a porn addict for whom real-life female company is no longer sufficiently exciting and motivational.

You don’t want to marry a porn addict, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a Joshua Harris!

Inversion of Harm Between the Sexes

Porn, however, seems now to be the smaller part of the problem. As I mentioned in the introduction, we are in a strange time when women are spending as much time on the Internet as men, and much of men’s time is spent gaming, which is more solitary than social. That’s an entirely separate problem parents must manage.

But spending too much social time online is now seen as stereotypically effeminate, as Gen Z women have informed me that one of the things they find attractive in a man is a relative lack of investment in social media. A “green flag” is a neglected Instagram profile updated three years ago in high school. The simps who post, like, and comment on everything are seen as either insecure, desperate, or “zesty,” their clever term for effeminate men⁹.

Just as boys with raging hormones and 8-year-old levels of self-control cannot be reasonably expected to self-manage the temptations of porn¹⁰, nor can girls with their own related to social media. Jordan Peterson gives a lecture explaining the personality changes concomitant with female puberty, which drives an increase, from childhood baseline, in traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and anxiety.

Peterson focuses on puberty preparing girls for their most important biological role as mothers, and in this, the most vulnerable period of early infancy, citing the mother-infant dyad as the critical design bottleneck for which female psychology is optimized. Getting along with the group and avoiding direct conflict is extremely important given the vulnerability of infants. Just as porn and video games hijack male drives for sex and accomplishment, social media exploits female drives for maintaining good relations with their group and ensuring social stability.

However, the relative threat between the two is often misunderstood. While pornography is always morally wrong, and social media is only wrong in excess, the data suggests that social media does more harm and is a major root cause of dysfunction, whereas porn is most often a symptom of dysfunction.

Causes of Current Teen Dysfunction

I took the opportunity when writing this column to use OpenAI’s o3 model to dig into the literature on these topics. A common claim is that pornography is causing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction during partnered sex in young men, something that should never happen physiologically. And indeed, rates of this have at least doubled since the pre-Internet world.

In assigning causation, however, except for porn addiction (daily or near daily use), which only afflicts 8-11% of men, the effect of porn use on ED almost disappears once accounting for confounders:

The true estimated root causes are several, with the largest being depression/anxiety (31%), cannabis use (21%), SSRI side effects (13%), obesity (11%), sleep deprivation (10%), testosterone decline (10%), and compulsive porn use (4%). The direction of causation seems to be that depressed and anxious men are more likely to use porn, and the former is the common cause of both ED in normal sex and porn consumption.

So the major cause explaining almost half the effect is depression, anxiety, and side effects of treatments for the same. If we add in sleep deprivation, we get to nearly 60% of the effect. And what does the literature say about the root causes of increased depression and anxiety in teens?

This has been extensively studied, and it’s no longer even significantly controversial to state that it’s social media and compulsive technology use in general, which also drive additional harms with sleep deprivation:

Looking at this chart, something like 65% of the mental health challenges faced by young people today are downstream of technology, specifically smartphone use. And it’s not just correlation:

This is not to discount the porn problem, and indeed early exposure, like early alcohol drinking, is more likely to lead to compulsive use later.

But like the purity movement, religious people can get tripped up by over-emphasizing clear moral categories over things that are only wrong in excess. Obesity, for example, is extremely prevalent in our society, to the point where the US government spends $200 billion per year on kidney dialysis alone, mostly for preventable cases of diabetes in old, fat people.

This is a major source of harm and the leading cause of preventable deaths and medical spending, but gluttony is rarely a sermon topic or subject to accountability groups or monitoring software to prevent its spread as a social contagion. The typical evangelical church will serve donuts on a Sunday morning while strangely only using the Yankee legalist Welch’s grape juice for communion, despite overweight/obesity (74% of Americans) being a much more common vice than alcoholism (10%)!

Perils of Social Media

And in the online context, many parents, even if proactive in protecting their sons from porn, will underestimate the harms of their daughters spending 2+ hours a day on social media. The data demonstrate that social media is worse than porn in terms of harms:

• Social media is more addictive than porn because it features intermittent reinforcement, like a slot machine. Sometimes hours of “boring,” compulsive scrolling pass before the user discovers some new video, influencer, or meme. It’s counterintuitive, but psychological science has firmly established that intermittent reinforcement is the most addictive form of reward. Porn, by contrast, features constant reinforcement and, in men, a refractory period inhibiting further interest for a time.

• Porn is fake, fantastical, and everyone knows it, but social media is fake while seeming real. The constant curated feed from friends and influencers breeds discontentment with one’s own social life, appearance, and status. Few porn users realistically expect it to mirror real life, but many social media users become dissatisfied with their real lives after viewing the luxury experiences of influencers whose lifestyles seem ubiquitous and achievable despite requiring stratospheric incomes, not to mention the curation element that conveniently edits out life’s more mundane or unpleasant realities.

• By way of example, imagine a 40-something mommy vlogger. She looks 30 and is well-maintained in an impossibly youthful figure which she attributes to her whole foods, anti-inflammatory diet, when in reality she also spends $500 per month with her top-end Dallas dermatologist, $400 per month on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, $1,000 per month on personal trainers, and $700 per month on an undisclosed weekly Zepbound maintenance injection. I’m not judging this, but rather the deceptions, as these interventions will undoubtedly accrue to her good, increase happiness, and expand her useful, productive life, as there’s no better temporal investment than health, beauty, and wellness. But she just posted to her 50,000 followers about taking her family, including her perfectly behaved, photogenic children, to Bali, which she attributes to great “deals” she found online and shares with her audience. In reality, the vacation still cost $40,000, and her pay-to-play lifestyle is supported not by granola health practices and smart frugality but by her fee-skimming, finance-bro husband, who makes $500,000 per year before incentives. This is just as unrealistic an image for a frazzled, average middle-class mom as anything in porn, but the former seems real and breeds more salient discontentment with her workaday life, while the latter is, except for the exceptionally delusional, rightly seen as total fantasy once the cloud of lust passes.

• While porn is usually self-medication for depression and not causal for depression except for compulsive users, social media shows a dose-response relationship for inducing depression, particularly in women and girls, on a per-minute basis, even at levels of use below levels indicating clinical addiction.

• Social media users spend more time on social media than porn users do with porn, exacerbating secondary effects on sleep quality, which further increases depression, anxiety, and ill health. Because of this absolute difference in time spent, social media also more significantly displaces adaptive behaviors like face-to-face time with friends and exercise.

• Because porn is still considered shameful, users must hide and limit their use. Social media use is deemed acceptable, and thus, compulsive behaviors are engaged in more frequently, more strongly reinforcing problematic patterns. 90% of teens check social media hourly.

As parents, we have a clear directive to both morally guide our children and protect them from harm. Luckily, this is not a dilemma, as the solution for both problems is the same: lock down the infernal phones.

Controlling Access to Technology

Just as sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, it can also be indistinguishable from compulsion, exiting the moral realm and becoming more like a natural evil or infectious disease. In short, technology hijacks biology and overrides natural limits or formerly achievable efforts at self-control. Since self-control is already attenuated in teenagers, they are most vulnerable.

This technological exploitation of natural drives is beyond the reasonable capacity of teenagers to control. The minute a parent provides any Internet access or hands a child a phone, it is the parent’s moral responsibility alone to control the use of that device.

Thanks to decades of bad laws and court precedents, there’s an entire column I could write about how the technological dystopia we now live in is a matter of collective choices we tolerate as a society. The shadowy fellow who owns Pornhub and the creep Mark Zuckerberg — who called his first users “dumb f***s” — are statutorily protected by literal Acts of Congress and cowardly and/or lowlife federal judges in seeking to render your children’s most precious drives into slightly higher CPM rates for their advertisers.

Unfortunately, I think the only long-term realistic solutions to these problems are legal restrictions. Digital fentanyl must be suppressed, and if not possible to ban, at least made as inconvenient to access as offline equivalents. The needs of the “least among us,” including adults with low baseline self-control, must guide policy.

It’s fair to say that one must assume a) that Silicon Valley is incentivized to maximize user engagement without regard to harm and b), as parents, for now, “you’re on your own, kid,” to try to protect your children. All of the systems involved are complicated, buggy, and imperfect.

The first and most robust defense is to delay. Keep them off screens and the Internet as long as possible. Get them a dumb phone if they need a phone. Try to integrate into a peer community where parents are practicing some self-control in delaying access to devices. Maybe start a “landline pod” like these clever parents.

The second defense is inconvenience. Welcome 90s anachronisms into your home! Maybe the first device they can access is a desktop computer in a public location. Few know this, but with a Mac, kids can have an iCloud email and iMessage account without a dedicated device or monthly fees, with a separate user account. They can “text” friends from the desktop, but the inconvenience factor reduces the addictive potential. The 24” iMac is an incredible value for this application. Even more conveniently inconvenient, a Mac, unlike a phone or tablet, allows multiple children to share the same device and forces them to take turns, further reducing the salience of notifications otherwise seen on a personal device. Likewise, an iPad’s ungainly size and lack of portability are features, not bugs, if it delays a phone.

The third defense is reducing access and features. With either a phone or iPad, take the time to set up Screen Time (or equivalent in Android) and go through every screen setting up every possible restriction. Turn off the web browser to break most of the broader Internet. Turn off lock screen notifications for almost everything to reduce compulsive checking behavior. And if they must have a phone, delay social media. And when social media is granted, take the time — again, it’s a hassle on purpose as these companies want to make it maximally painful to the parent — to restrict use, for example, with Instagram teen account controls. The data seems to indicate that most harms are avoided if total screen time is limited to about two hours per day and social media to less than one hour.

One creative strategy for adults and children is to restrict social media use to a desktop computer only. A larger screen and a web browser seem to reduce the addictiveness of the feed, allowing quick skimming of content more efficiently, and accessing only via a computer eliminates notifications from the apps.

The fourth defense is content filtering. Three levels are best, the first of which is on-device under parental controls. The second is setting up content-blocking DNS on the home wifi. The third is an installed VPN, like Canopy or Bark, for mobile networks. Again, this takes work and effort. I’m fairly tech-savvy, and I found the process of setting this all up needlessly complicated. Given the importance of this, if you’re not tech-savvy, hire a nerd to help you; it’s that important!

Fifth, all of the previous safeguards must be regularly checked on the teen’s device. Both Screen Time and, especially, Instagram parental controls are buggy, the latter likely on purpose, with the hope that a parent will just give up and allow unlimited access.

The harms are so obvious now that many public schools are entirely removing phones from campus. Ironically, this is creating a type of child, too common among homeschoolers, that is well-supervised in real life, but almost entirely unsupervised online. For homeschool parents not on the ball who give kids early access to the Internet all day, I predict some public school students may end up having better outcomes from being protected from their phones during at least the normal school day, as the greater harms are online. Whether it’s homeschooling or modesty culture, parents have to be careful about fighting the last war and overly focusing on ‘90s problems. You’d rather a son be distracted by some girl’s yoga pants in real life than catechized by fetishists on Reddit.

The most effective parents are those who can keep tech to a minimum in their teenagers’ lives. I’d suggest delaying iPads to 12, phones to 14, Instagram to 16, mobile web browsers to 17, and TikTok and Snapchat to over the parent’s dead body. Some parents can do even better than this, and the more delay, the less convenience, the better. Especially hardcore parents might consider a Gabb phone, which, out of the box, looks like a normal phone but doesn’t display images from any source, has no apps, no web browser, and only supports maps, texting, and calls.

One hope, and there’s some evidence of this emerging, is that restricting device use will be seen as high-class behavior. There are already social norms that code giving your toddler a tablet as trashy, akin to putting Coca-Cola in their sippy cup, and granola offline childhoods as what smart, educated parents do. If these norms can be extended to delaying tech use in the teen years, so much the better.

Bind the Phone, Free the Teen

Your teens desperately want boundaries in this area, at least when they talk privately to opinion surveyors. Nearly half of young people wish the Internet had never been invented it produces so much misery in their lives. 64% of young men and 72% of young women want Internet pornography restricted by law. A recent pop song expressed a yearning for the pre-Internet world:

Sometimes I think about the 90s
I know that everyone romanticized it
But you could sign me up
For a world without the internet
Hate how easy they can find me
Just by looking up my mom's address
I think about the 90s
When I was not a problem yet

No parents of any generation have dealt with a revolution in communications technology as radical as ours. The best practices may be “half-baked,” but given the early sociological data, I don’t think anyone will regret being more restrictive. They have their entire adult lives to meld with the electronic collective; preserve the precious offline years as long as you can.

1. Chris Rock has a bit on housewives where he declares, “Only suckas work. Smart people get other people to work for them.” As a rent-seeking investor seeking to free myself from the necessity of trading labor for money to maintain the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed, I agree! In this sense, feminism might be seen as an error that misidentifies the instrument (work outside the home) for the end (consumption and use of resources).

2. An older man once told me that turning 40 is like dismounting from a crazy bronco, and to mix the metaphor, as the lunatic begins to calm down and take the occasional vacation day.

3. This is the great crime of the homosexuals, for despite all their fussiness about aesthetics, they are heretics concerning the most obvious aesthetic fact in the universe!

4. Even this concession was subject to strict conditions. I remember one time, they dragged me, 16 years old, no doubt my face beet red, for my first visit to a Victoria’s Secret store, which at this time sold a greater variety of garments, and the group of them declaring to each other that the only thing they would ever wear for their husband was a colonial-looking nightgown, and if he wanted anything else he must be some kind of pervert.

5. The point of the Sermon of the Mount is not to double down on self-righteousness by cutting off parts of the body, or to declare that sexual thoughts or calling names are strictly the same as adultery or murder, but rather to demonstrate the futility of self-righteousness relative to the holiness of God and its impossible demands given our fallen nature, pointing to our need for divine grace, even for those with sufficient self-control to strictly follow the first nine commandments. The sermon is more or less an exposition of tenth commandment violations.

6. The beatification of Bonhoeffer is a practical example of the dangers of the “post-war consensus,” in that he would be a historical curiosity but for the politically-motivated elevation of the WWII period as the new moral center of history. His overindexed moral authority was part of the thin end of the wedge in my denomination’s “Revoice” movement, where certain progressives tried to argue that, like the sainted Bonhoeffer, same-sex attracted individuals could live together as “spiritual friends,” with joint finances and even adopting children together, as long as they and everyone around them pretended they were celibate, a ridiculous proposal no responsible father would endorse from a daughter seeking to cohabitate with a boyfriend. Conventional conservatives seeking to rebut the example of Bonhoeffer then contorted themselves into culturally relativistic arguments about how his behavior was somehow normal for German men of the time, as if citing the social mores of Weimar Germany is a credible defense!

7. The State of Louisiana’s “abstinence-based” sex education did the trick for me, not Harris’ guilt-mongering. When my 10th-grade biology teacher put up explicit photos of incurable herpes and genital warts infections on the overhead projector, the latter also subject to growing in the throat with certain types of sexual contact, I was sufficiently convinced of the value of being sexually continent.

8. Martin Luther estimated a baseline rate of true gifts of celibacy at less than one in one thousand, whereas the modern incidence of homosexuality is around 2%. Thus, for a man who seems physically indifferent to women, the naive odds are at best (0.02)/(0.001) = 20 to 1 for the latter over the former, especially if he seems, as the Gen Z girls say, a little “zesty” in other areas (see next footnote).

9. Zesty: adjective, not a fruit, but emitting the essence of one.

10. To be fair, something like 30% of porn users today are women. Again, the algorithms can often make that which is not naturally addictive, i.e., females normally aren’t as visually oriented in their attraction, into something addictive.