One of the most interesting political alliances over the past few years has manifested in the Make American Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, a former Democratic candidate for President, has found a multitude of friends across the political aisle and thus landed himself in the Trump Administration.
Under the MAHA umbrella, RFK has successfully advocated for a phasing out of eight artificial food dyes believed to be contributor to America’s “chronic disease epidemic”, has secured pledges from food manufactures to voluntarily remove dyes, and committed to use NIH resources to study the dangers of synthetic food dyes. He has made fast work of an issue that has haunted many a mother over the past few years (including many of my friends and occasionally myself!).
While enthusiasts of Rod Dreher’s 2006 Crunchy Cons may find this cross-partisan, granola-brand political alliance obvious, I believe there is potential for an even stronger alliance to form across the political aisle as it relates to kids and screen time. Saying no to food dyes, due to concerns about kids’ hyperactivity or mood swings, may have built the confidence that many mothers needed to confront an even larger cultural plague—the smartphone.
Screens are a defining cultural issue of our age—either we will slay the anxiety-producing digital poison or it will destroy us from the inside out. A thriving culture will be hard to cultivate if our children continue to grow up with social and intellectual toxins.
Over the past eighteen months, we’ve seen a real surge of outspoken critics blasting the cultural norm of smartphones and tablets for minors. Social media, once billed as how adults and teens connect with friends, is now more likely to garner verbal dislikes rather than praise.
There is a bit of virtue signaling occurring when a fortysomething mother of a teenage daughter declares that not only is she considering deleting her own social media accounts, but she is also prohibiting her daughter from joining Instagram or TikTok. Younger mothers, those who grew up as Facebook was gaining steam, are especially outspoken on their dislike for these platforms. Call them Luddites, they don’t seem to mind. They are too busy having landline phones installed to even notice.
Last month in Washington, D.C. I had the pleasure of attending a seminar hosted by the Center for Responsible Technology and The Heritage Foundation, entitled “Screens & Sickness: Raising Healthy Kids in a Distracted World” featuring Jonathan Haidt and a panel of experts.
Over the course of the afternoon, Haidt presented more than enough evidence on the dangers of a screen-based childhood and why it is absolutely imperative that as a society we hit the brakes on giving minors access to internet-based technology. Not only are children being harmed by the content they are consuming, but as panelist and Senior Policy Analyst with the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family Jennifer Galardi pointed out, there are very real physical harms being experienced by children due to screen time. With a MAHA-inspired bipartisan nomenclature, she remarked, “Everything kind of affects the body and the mind, and the soul. The tech affects all of these things as well.” Galardi remarked how easy it is for people to use a website quiz to diagnose themselves with anxiety or depression and how, thanks to telehealth, young adults can receive a prescription for SSRIs, a commonly prescribed type of antidepressant, without ever stepping foot outdoors. Instead of addressing the underlying issues caused by social media use, we are medicating ourselves at alarmingly high rates. Another point of concern for Galardi was the endemic “chronic stress” and anxiety felt by teenagers today. With an average of five hours a day spent on social media by teenagers, time for other activities gets squeezed out: physical exercise, outdoor play, boredom that fuels creativity. We shouldn’t be surprised that children have an increased risk of obesity today. If the MAHA movement is serious about its mission, they must look beyond food dyes to the dangers of digital poisons.
The prescription for removing digital poison has already been written by child psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Dunckley, author of Reset Your Child’s Brain. She began her career helping teenagers with a whole host of neurological disorders and mental health concerns and quickly discovered that it was almost pointless to treat the medical concerns without first completing a “digital detox.” For some children and adolescents with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, or depression, there may be a role for a prescription, but to truly improve health and behavior outcomes, she recommends a “cold turkey” approach to removing screen time. Speaking alongside Galardi, Dunckley instructed the audience on the mechanics of this method, “For younger children, really, within a few days you start to see a difference within their mood and their behavior. Even for teenagers, within a week or into the second week, unless someone is really, really addicted… almost everyone will start to improve. They are making eye-contact, they are smiling more, their mood is better, kids will come out of their room more, they are more relaxed and nicer to their siblings, they start reading more, their grades can go up pretty dramatically, their reading levels can go up within a couple of months. It is very dramatic, and it improves a lot of things in a lot of different areas.” As screen time increases dopamine to unnaturally high levels, negatively alters the body clock, and increases stress, Dunckley notes that it is no wonder removing access through a digital detox leads to such rapid improvement among youth.
Dunckley isn’t discounting that very real mental health and neurological disorders exist, but the symptoms are made worse by screen time for kids and teens. For minors who do not have an underlying medical concern, the negative effects of such digital poison can, as documented by Haidt, cause a sort of phantom anxiety and depression for an entire generation.
Many parents, myself included, have found through trial and error that removing artificial food dyes from my kids’ diet and internet-connected screen time from their daily routine improves their mood and focus. Yes, parents can continue to go the way of SSRIs and therapy, but if detoxing our children from harmful substances is equally, or even more, effective, isn’t this the prudent response we should be advocating for? If the MAHA movement decides to fight screen time as swiftly as they did artificial food dyes, we may very well see a healthier America in short order.
Image via Wikimedia.
