Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In recent years, the evidence against smartphones for children and teenagers has only grown.

There's a clear correlation between the use of digital technologies and things like mental illness, anxiety, identity, confusion, loneliness,

and depression. So much so, in fact, that many schools have begun to ban phones. And I would

suggest all of them should. Now, the biggest holdouts, however, according to the heads of schools

and the educators that I talk with, aren't the students. It's the parents,

many of whom are either fearful of not being able to contact their student in an emergency,

or who feel as if the cat's already out of the bag when it comes to smartphones and their homes.

In her new book, The Tech Exit, a practical guide to freeing kids and teens from smartphones,

Claire Morrell, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, demonstrates that it is indeed possible to get back ahead

of smartphones within our homes. Recently, Morrell was a guest on a recent bonus episode of

the Breakpoint podcast with Maria Bear. Here's what she had to say.

The brain research really shows that even a small amount of time on social media, smartphones,

any type of really interactive screen is highly addictive to the brain.

That the brain actually goes into this dopamine deficit state as soon as they get off.

And so no time limit is ever enough because as soon as they leave the app or leave the screen, their brain does not return to a normal baseline. It actually

dips below baseline to create this craving for you to repeat that behavior and do it again.

And so the brain imaging studies of heavy users of social media resemble those of those who have been

addicted to highly addictive drugs. And so the structural changes happening at the brain level are the

same. And then another kind of convincing piece of research was a doctor named Victoria

Dunkley was seeing kids coming into her practice with kind of what you were describing,

...