We’ve all seen it. Babes in strollers, toddlers in high-chairs, kindergarteners at their school desks, all with smartphones or tablets propped in front of their faces. By middle and high school, things are even worse. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, average screen time hits nine hours a day between the ages of 11 and 14 before dropping to 7.5 hours a day for 15-to-18-year-olds. Recommended daily screen time is just two hours.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: take away the smart devices and give kids cigarettes instead. They’d be better off smoking a pack a day.
Now, obviously cigarettes are bad for children. No one’s disputing that. But are they worse than iPhones? Not even close, I’d argue.
Take the worst case scenario: the kid becomes a lifelong smoker, goes broke buying Marlboros, gets throat cancer and ends his days in excruciating pain while he puffs on coffin nails through a hole in his trachea. At least he lived while he was alive. Our teen smoker saw great works of art, beautiful sunsets, unforgettable concerts and brutal schoolyard brawls with his own two eyes, not through his smartphone camera.
What good’s an extra five years of life when you spend a solid decade staring at a little lit-up rectangle?
Cigarettes might kill eventually, but smartphones will do a lot worse, and they’ll do it fast.
For one thing, they can cause Tourette’s. During the pandemic, teen girls discovered TikTok influencers with the rare syndrome, and suddenly they were twitching and stammering too. Psychology Today, which documented the surge in Tourette’s-like symptoms, also noted a rise in self-diagnoses of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Would you rather catch Little Janie smoking a dart, or walk in on her speaking two octaves lower and insisting she’s a 43-year-old pipefitter named Frank?
The phone also might turn your kid trans. “The messages these kids pick up [from trans influencers] when they’re online is, ‘We’re the only people who understand you. Your people, your parents, don’t really understand you,'” gender dysphoria expert Susan Bradley told author Abigail Shrier. By the time you find out, it’ll be too late. (RELATED: ‘Wasn’t A Boy’: Mother Testifies That Child Was Sex Trafficked After State Removed Her From Home Over ‘Misgendering’)
Freud said smoking was a sign of oral fixation, but I’ll take that over autogynephilia any day.
Numberless teen girls use gofundme to pay for breast removal surgery.
A group of parents started a gofundme for billboards to raise awareness of the social contagion facing teen girls. *That* was shut down.
If you’re not alarmed by tech censorship, you’re not paying attention https://t.co/61sA29YmXj
— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) October 29, 2020
These devices make kids fat too. An American College of Cardiology study found that five or more hours of smartphone use per day increases the risk of obesity by 43 percent. And being fat is worse for you than smoking. In the 1950s, 45 percent of American adults smoked and only 10 percent were obese. By 2020, just 12.5 percent of U.S. adults smoked and over a third were obese. I don’t need to prove causation to prove my point: living fast and loose with a Lucky tucked in your lip can be a better recipe for health than lying on your futon letting ASMR videos massage your rapidly atrophying prefrontal cortex. (RELATED: Why Hasn’t Dr. Fauci Told Americans To Stop Being So G*****n Fat?)
And if all this weren’t enough, giving your kid a smartphone might just kill her. Maybe that death will be accidental. In 2022, a family filed a lawsuit against TikTok after the app’s algorithm targeted their 10-year-old daughter with videos about the so-called “Blackout Challenge.” She died choking herself with a purse strap.
Terrifying chart from @FreeBeacon. What are smartphones doing to our kids? https://t.co/BWJwIRSAB7 pic.twitter.com/XK7cdVy2P2
— Grayson Quay ⚓️ (@hemingquay) February 9, 2023
Or maybe it won’t be an accident. Teen suicide jumped 31 percent between 2010 and 2015, the exact period when Apples and Androids appeared in the hands of every middle- and high-school student. According to author and researcher Jean Twenge, “teens who spent five or more hours a day online were 71% more likely than those who spent less than an hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor (depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan or attempting suicide).”
It’s time to take Junior’s iPhone, walk him down to the local 7-Eleven and buy him his first pack of American Spirits (the yellow ones are the best). He’ll be happier, healthier and safer from twisted social contagions. And most importantly, he’ll look cool as hell.
Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.