Book Review: Smartphone Nation by Dr. Kaitlyn Regehr

Parenting has always been difficult. As times have changed, so has parenting and the challenges it presents. These days, among the chief concerns for parents is technology and their children’s relationship to it.

This is the complex topic Dr. Kaitlyn Regher seeks to simplify in her recent book, *Smartphone Nation: Why We’re All Addicted to Screens and What You Can Do About It*. Her book combines academic research with practical solutions for modern parents.

The book starts by unpacking our societal relationship with technology and screens over the past few decades. Every generation has had to grapple with new innovations, from the automobile to cable television. But the internet and mobile devices have pushed our technological dependence to new and frightening levels.

We are the products, not the customers

Some of the perspectives Dr. Regher presents in the book aren’t new to me (as a digital marketer) but may be revelatory for some parents, and it's a helpful reminder for us all.

Namely, that social media platforms like Facebook aren’t themselves products but platforms for advertisers to use us as products. These apps have been designed to be as addictive as possible and push content on us, engineered to captivate our attention to our own detriment.

This is harmful for all humans, but especially for children whose brains are still being formed. It’s not difficult to see the negative impacts these profiles have on the next generation and the unique challenges they present to parents.

Owning your digital diet

Dr. Regher presents this concept in a helpful way by comparing digital consumption to our food consumption. We care about what our kids eat, and we should be equally as concerned about what they digitally “eat”. Most food products are highly regulated by the government because we want our citizens to be healthy. Which is why it’s alarming that Big Technology platforms are so woefully unregulated.

This doesn’t mean we can’t be on social media or that our kids can’t have devices. In fact, as Dr. Regher points out, these devices are often vital to keeping them connected to us. We need to call our kids, or track their location, or allow them to do school work on screens. So simply removing technology or limiting screen time alone isn’t enough.

Screentime is not created equal

The point is that not all screentime is created equally. In the book, Dr. Regher presents a hierarchy of different types of screentime, very similar to the infamous food pyramid.

Essentially, actively educational games are the best way for kids to spend time on devices, while passively watching or scrolling is by far the least valuable.

This isn’t just helpful advice to foist onto our kids; it’s essential for us to hear and apply, too. Because the best way for our kids to adopt a healthy relationship with technology is for us to model it for them.

Establishing and enforcing clear and consistent boundaries for our entire family is the best way for all of us to succeed in the future. And we can’t expect our kids to follow these rules if we aren’t willing to abide by them, too.

There is no shortage of ideas for how to start implementing this. Dr. Regher shares a few ideas in the book: such as taking a weekly digital sabbath or monitoring your most used apps on your phone. I will admit that I was hoping for a few more practical strategies for how to implement within my own family.

Practical advice and sustainable solutions

It’s also understandable that most of the focus of the book (and others like it) are on teens and technology. After all, kids between the ages of 13 and 18 are some of the most visible users of new technology.

But how does this cascade down to younger children (like my own), even as young as elementary school? They’re not as directly impacted by some of these changes yet, but they certainly will be, and knowing how to prepare them for managing screens safely is vital.

Overall, I appreciated Smartphone Nation as a resource for parents navigating the tricky, ever-evolving world of technology. It presents a number of important concepts with data and understanding.

The book shares a few resources and techniques, and while I would’ve liked more, I can also appreciate the difficulty of specifics that can quickly date a book as technology changes.

The book was also short and to the point. It took me only a few days to read it: likely because I read it on an ebook reader, rather than a highly distracting mobile phone.

Hopefully helpful advice

In exchange for this review, I received a free digital copy of the book from Netgallery. Because this was an advanced, unedited version, some of the book’s writing and stories were a bit unpolished. I’m sure those small details will be cleaned up as the book goes to publication.

I can just hope that I can use some of the helpful advice from the book to become a more prepared parent for my own kids. Because by the time they become pre-teens, everything we know about technology will have completely changed again.