Two books about kids and screens
Helen Phillips' Hum and Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation
I usually have two books going: one paper and ink, one audio. Most of the time there’s no thematic relationship between the two. But every now and then a theme announces itself. This happened when I was reading Helen Phillip’s dystopian sci-fi novel, Hum, and listening to Jonathan Haidt’s dystopian nonfiction book, The Anxious Generation.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues a point that I’ve been quietly making in my head for years: that we’ve sold an entire generation of children to the untested, unregulated manufacturers of distraction. For most of human history, children grew up playing with real objects and real people, which Haidt refers to as a “play-based childhood.” But since the advent of smart phones and social media, a critical mass of children—especially in the U.S.—have experienced a “phone-based childhood.” I don’t think I need to explain what this means.
My children are 13 and 16. They both got smartphones at age 13. At the time it felt (especially to my children) like we had waited longer than usual. I was proud of myself for choosing to make them wait until after their bar/bat mitzvah. Now it feels too soon. I haven’t finished listening to The Anxious Generation because the library hold expired. I will probably finish it at some point, but I also feel like I didn’t need to read this book to tell me the same thing that my bones have been screaming since 2007, when I noticed for the first time that everyone was staring at their phones. Of course this is wrong. Most parents I know live with a constant, soul-draining unease. It’s like a slow leak of the soul. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to hand a child over to a screen for hours at a time, and yet, and yet.
Haidt has his critics; you can read more about that here. But his basic argument is so intuitive that it’s hard not to agree with his conclusions even if you are well-versed enough in his methodology to find reasons to quibble. Putting aside the question of whether smartphones are inherently bad, I liked the parts in The Anxious Generation about how parenting changed back when phones had coiling cords and call-waiting. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, especially in Western countries, parents became afraid of letting their children roam outside the house, where they might encounter creepy strangers. “We’ve overprotected our kids in the real world,” Haidt argues, “while underprotecting them in the virtual one, leaving them too much to their own devices, literally and figuratively.”
My husband and I reluctantly bought our children their first iPads in the spring of 2020, when schools shut down. When their devices arrived, my hyper-verbal, curious, needy children, ages 7 and 10, retreated into corners of their room and just stayed there. The silence was eerie. It seemed to me as though they would have stayed there all day and all night, only getting up to ask for a charger. I couldn’t bear it. For years I’d been dying for them to learn how to amuse themselves, but now that I’d gotten my wish I felt like a monster.
The truth is, and I say this with love, very few parents of small children enjoy playing with their kids for more than a few minutes. As a new mother, I used to feel guilty about not wanting to get down on the floor and play pretend games with my children. (Though I did occasionally enjoy the game where Mommy was sick and had to lie down.) In this respect, reading The Anxious Generation actually made me feel less guilty. Listening to Haidt argue that we are overprotecting our children in the real world, I was reminded that over the course of many generations on this planet, parents weren’t expected to play with, or supervise, or spend “quality time” with their offspring nearly as much as we are now. The word parent only became a verb around 50 years ago. A parent was who you were, not what you did; the act of parenting was not something you could outsource to a screen.
In Hum, Helen Phillips captures the terrible ambivalence of being a parent in this digital age. May, the main character, lives in a world that feels just a few notches off from our own. Fires have burnt down May’s childhood home in the mountains. The air quality is bad. May and her family relax in screen-lined cocoons called “wooms.” Her two young children wear “bunnies,” which are like smart watches but cuter. Robots called “hums” perform many of the jobs that real people used to have and provide eerily specific sales pitches, like animatronic pop-up ads. The hums are disconcerting but not scary. Children are drawn to them. You get the sense that they just want to help people, but their programming requires them to sell and surveil.
When May loses her job to AI, she undergoes an experimental surgery that disguises her face from facial recognition software. With her payment, she takes her family on a vacation into a walled-off botanical garden in the middle of the city, which seems to be the only green space left. May insists that the whole family leave their devices behind. But once they are deep in the wilderness, something happens that makes her really wish she could track her children’s locations.
She thought she was being a good mom by forcing her family to experience the natural world without the distraction of a screen. But when her family does exactly what used to happen all the time when children had play-based childhoods do—i.e., the parents enjoying some downtime while the children wander off—May has to put her trust in a hum.
In this podcast, Phillips said she wanted the reader to have a complicated relationship with the hums, just like we have with our phones.
You’re fascinated by it, you’re terrified of it, you think it’s cute and helpful, you find it sinister. All of these things should be part of the relationship that the reader has to the hum and certainly that Mae has to the hum. So I was very excited when I came up with the name “hums” for the robots in the book. [O]n the one hand we think of this low simmering hum of all our digital devices, the simmering hum of the internet. It’s almost this maddening sound that we can never turn off. But on the other hand, humming is a way that we use our bodies to make music, you hum to yourself while you’re doing the dishes, you hum a lullaby, perhaps, to a child as they’re going to sleep. And it’s connected to the sacred sound, Om. So hum contains, for me, all of that duality, and I really wanted that to be present in the character of the hum.
Hum is a novel of ideas. Of course, most novels involve some amount of research, but you don’t usually find the novelist’s research becoming an integral part of the book. Here, Phillips folds quotes and news clips and headlines from real life into the plot, and she calls attention to these bits of reality by including endnotes, so you can see which lines were based on something real.
She described her process in this conversation with Lincoln Michel:
When I am starting a novel, it's usually that I'm anxious about some things, and writing the novel is a way of exploring and processing those anxieties and learning more about them and trying to face them. So, when I was starting to think about this book, I was anxious about climate change, artificial intelligence, and social media, and the future that we are constructing for ourselves, or that is being constructed for us. And so, my first step in that process was reading a lot about those things, reading about climate change. I had a bunch of notes, like 100 pages of little scraps of overheard dialog, or newspaper headlines or images that were in my mind. After I had Magpie-gathered a bunch of things, the next step was to just do a lot of reading. The first months I was working on the book, I was actually just reading a ton.
In another writer’s hands, Hum might have started to feel like a scavenger hunt for facts. If the plot was less compelling, the temptation to flip to the end to see what’s “true” might have become an annoying distraction.1 But Phillips made it work by integrating her little scraps of reality so seamlessly into May’s story. The quilted texture of her writing feels authentic, in the same way that we are all walking around with scraps of information in our heads.
For example, in this passage the hum quotes from “A Vast Experiment: the Climate Crisis from A-Z” by Elizabeth Colbert:
“You feel disoriented, May,” the hum said. “You are unsure how to be in the world as it is now. You know the world is damaged, but you don’t know what that means for the lives of your children. You want to prepare them for the future, but you are scared to picture the future. You are seeking inside yourself the scrappiness, the courage, that will power the rest of your life. Am I right, May?”
She was awash in empathy, uncorked by the benevolent gaze of the hum.
“Would you like to buy the book, May?”
“What book?”
“The book, May, that contains those quotations.”
“They came from a book?”
“Of course, May.”
“I thought they came from you.”
“Do you approve this transaction, May?”
Motherhood is often unpleasant. I didn’t finish The Anxious Generation before the library hold expired; if I’m being honest, I wasn’t listening to it fast enough to finish because it reminded me of the unpleasantness. I recognized in May’s experience the same ambivalence that I feel every day—the bones screaming no, this is not the way anyone should live while the mouth says yes to plastic toys, processed foods, and screens. But I kept reading. I feel less alone in motherhood when I find an author like Phillips who wants to dwell in the ambivalence with me.
Other interesting things
In this piece in The Walrus, Margaret Atwood reads a story by AI written in the style of Margaret Atwood (will someone please follow up on her suggestion to ask a chatbot to write a children’s story in the voice of Anais Nin?)
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, Atwood responds to the revelation that her books are being used to teach AI.
Do you remember recording music off the radio and bringing blank tapes to a friend’s house to pirate her older brother’s Smiths and Violent Femmes? I do. Here is an opinion piece about how to develop taste in a world of algorithms.
Phillips’ work reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin, another author whose fiction was inextricable from ideas. In this Lit Hub essay, Julie Phillips2 (no relation, as far as I know) writes about Le Guin’s political activism. When an interviewer asked Le Guin what she would do to save the world, she answered: “The syntax implies a further clause beginning with if…What would I do to save the world if I were omnipotent? But I am not, so the question is trivial. What would I do to save the world if I were a middle-aged middle-class woman? Write novels and worry.”
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.” — Vladimir Nabokov.
I am a huge fan of Julie Phillips’ book about motherhood and creativity, The Baby on the Fire Escape. I can’t wait for her biography of Le Guin.
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Check out my latest essay in The Manifest Station, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Time.”
To learn more about me and my work, visit my website.
My kiddo doesn't have a phone, but she does have an apple watch and an iPad. All her sixth grade friends have phones. She's the odd one out and she lets us know this hourly.
Back during covid, we enforced iPad screen breaks, and rather than read, she'd go outside and run around with her bouncy ball, basically pacing the yard while dribbling and talking to herself. We worried this wasn't a great sign (reminded me of the panthers at the zoo), but it's transitioned into her playing volleyball and falling in love with it. She's still not much of a reader but she's doing well in school so I'm trying not to sweat it.